A Friends' Door

Jientje will like this door! It's in one of her favorite places....Provence. I took this photo in 2005 during my first visit to Goult, a small village in the Luberon. It's the door of a friend's house. His name is Patrick Payet and when I visited here, he ran both a restaurant, Le Tonneau, and a cooking school from this place. You can catch a glimpse of one of the restaurant's tables set up on the terrace. When I returned in 2007, Patrick had closed the restaurant, but continued to run the cooking school. Marie and I spent an afternoon with his cooking school students learning to make some yummy Provencal favorites...madelines, molten chocolate cake, and vegetables stuffed with rice, sausage, roasted red peppers, onions, garlic.

I learned this winter that Patrick has sold this quaint house and moved his cooking school to Roussillon, at least temporarily. While the new place is absolutely beautiful, it isn't the same as this pretty house lying in the shadows of Baron Agoult's castle. There are more stories connected with this stone house on Place de l'ancienne Mairie, but you'll have to buy my book to learn about those! Now that I've said that...I'll have to write it, huh?

Imagine my surprise this summer when, as I paged through a Luberon publication, "Blue Sky Living," I found an ad for another business in Patrick's house! Click here to see what that's all about.

This door no longer opens into my friend's house, but it will always open wonderful memories of times spent here and in Provence for me.