Kitchen Garden Day 2008 France

About 30 people turned up here on Sunday to celebrate Kitchen Garden day with me.

Kitchen Garden Day is a celebration of local food instigated by Kitchen Gardeners International. It takes place on the fourh Sunday in August and is celebrated all around the world.  I know that year it was celebrated in the USA, Pakistan, UK, Norway, and two states in Australia as well as here in France.

For our celebration, we organised a meal at lunchtime which was held in the garden.   Everyone who came brought some food to share, made either from produce from their garden or from something farmed locally.

On arrival, guests were served with a special KG Day cocktail which had been dreamed up by Michael, the photographer and myself.  I was looking for some connection with the earth and eventually came up with this crystal blue cocktail, which was deliciously lovely!!! but which also represented what our oceans would look like if they and the atmosphere were less polluted.  Continuing with the sea theme. we served aperitifs with farmed smoked salmon.

Here in France people tend to organise their food into distinct course and I have started to think that way myself... So although I broke the dishes down into courses, really it was just a superb buffet.  There was so much good food it's impossible to list it all and I may well have forgotten something.. but it was all very tasty and very beautifully presented.

 

 

One of the things that the Perigord region is famous for is duck.  So for our local starter we had a duck liver mousse served with some homemade multigrain and muesli bread....

Guests arrived from all directions and even the gardener turned up.

The meal continued with barbecued pork for the omnivores amongst us and a delicious mushroom  and aubergine quiche.  The quiche was made by one of our guests and the pork was reared, slaughtered and cured right here in our little community.

I was surprised at the range of ages of people attending with the seniors in their 80's happily joining in the fun with some of those a fraction of their age.  The youngest person in attendance was minus 3 months but seemed to be enjoying the food pretty well!!!!

The meal finished off about 6pm after everyone had eaten some of the delicious range of desserts, brownies, chocolate chip cookies, rhubarb crumble, fruit tart, rhum baba, cherries in juice and of course, all home made....

Thanks to Roger Doiron of Kitchen Gardeners International setting aside this day to give people all round the world the chance to celebrate together and get just a little bit closer to the planet we live on... and to think, I almost forgot my friend Bernard, who provided the wine, Bergerac AOC Rouge 2007 from his vineyard less than ten miles down the road

 

United

I was reading around the world in blogs this morning and I came across Kate's post in South Australia  A Country called Blog .  I read it and thought what a fantastic idea.  In the post she says:

Maybe we should all become a separate, virtual country with our own common sense laws which encourage the growing and cooking of food and the sharing of everything in the spirit of that beautiful song 'Imagine' by John Lennon. Maybe in this way we could instigate some overdue changes to show how a civilisation could be a place of collaboration and harmony, caring and sharing, all with an overarching theme of making the earth and the world a natural and life-enriching place to just be.....wouldn't that be wonderful!

Kate often says things that set my imagination rolling along, laughing and smiling or angry and sad, and this was definitely a laughing and smiling post .  There are so many problems throughout the world, yet here in the community of bloggland, a lot of us seem to be facing in the same direction regardless of national and international boundaries.  I reread the post and then went off in search of Patties piece which Kate had linked to.

Pattie is in Atlanta, Georgia, USA and her blog post   When All the Brokenhearted People Living in the World Agree  was on a similar theme, thinking about ways of that people around the world can connect.   Pattie had also linked to a truly wonderful video which really shows just what is possible if we each put our mind to doing something about it  Play the video on Patties post, I'm not linking to it here, because I want you to go off and read her piece.

Adelaide, South Australia,  Atlanta, Georgia, and here in Bergerac, France, right the way round the planet and we are all finding different ways of connecting with people, but the important thing is, that we are all connecting across the globe, that we are all facing in a similar direction, that we are all trying to find ways of treading lightly on this planet and leaving it a better place than it is right now.

I hope we are successful in spreading the word and that between us we make enough difference for our planet to start to recover.