GO:: Granted, reaching today’s featured restaurant requires a little more effort than the usual metro ride. This ferme-auberge*, owned and operated by Gianni from Sardinia, is located atop the Luberon mountain range and can be reached after a breathtaking — both literally and metaphorically — two-hour walk up curvy dust paths. Nothing superhuman though, and this guarantees rosy cheeks when you reach the top, not to mention a lion’s appetite and a euphoric feeling of entitlement and pride. (Cheaters and those who don’t feel up to the exploit can get there by car — much less picturesque of course.)

In one of the farm’s stone buildings is the restaurant room, an impressively large affair with low ceilings and two huge communal tables going all the way across. Other guests are already crowding it, little children running around among the staff (some local, some Sardinian) while they work to set things up for the feast to come.

DRINK:: Pitchers of homemade sangria (a red wine and fruit cocktail) are set out before the meal. You can take your glass to the wooden tables outside and enjoy the view, or take the kids out to look at the brown goats grazing on the little hill in the back. During the meal, a seemingly endless procession of jugs will follow, plenty of red wine and moutain spring water to quench your thirst.

EAT:: The fixed menu is different every day, and the food is passed around in platters among the guests, family-style. For starters we enjoyed a lentil salad, a delicious game terrine and slices of homemade boudin noir (blood sausage), served with fresh country bread.

The main dish followed: racks of lamb à la broche (fire-roasted) brought into the room in clouds of steam and smoke, to be expertly cut and sliced by Gianni and his team. This was served with a dish of stewed potatoes and turnips — a great complement to the flavorful meat, which was rosy and tender in places, wonderfully crispy and smoky in others.

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Head over to NPR‘s website today for my Spring piece, a recipe for Asparagus Confit with Almonds and Rosemary! This is the first occurence of their Kitchen Window column that will be published online every other Wednesday, featuring different guest writers.

Yet another edible souvenir I brought back from my stay in Lourmarin over the Easter week-end: this large jar of thick and gloriously amber-colored honey.

I happen to have somewhat childish tastes in honey, and I am often put off by honeys that taste too much like sap, sharp and woodsy to the point of bitterness. This probably makes me a dilettante honey lover — just like real hardcore coffee lovers are supposed to appreciate strong hardcore coffee — but I think I can live with that.

Luckily, this particular honey is one of the most flowery and mellow I have ever been given to taste. It was produced by my aunt’s beehives and harvested by her, late last summer. She explained to me that since the bees feed on the nectar from different kinds of flowers at different times of the year, each season brings its own blend and shade of honey. But last year she had to skip the end-of-spring harvest, so this honey is a mix of the bees’ spring and summer production, making it a highly polyfloral honey — also called miel mille-fleurs or thousand flower honey. It has the texture I like best, velvety but slightly grainy, like an embroidered drapery, and it is delightfully sweet with no bitter hint, complexly flavored but instantly pleasing to the palate.

In addition to this — which I immediately shared with my neighbors because they like honey so much and I am such a good friend — my Lourmarin bounty also included a few rounds of locally produced goat cheese in various stages of ripeness (they are but a distant memory now, but they were really good friends with the honey) and fresh herbs from the garden: sage, blossoming rosemary, and even a small thyme plant, which travelled happily on the train with me for Maxence to add to our little herb patch.

Le Gibassier is a specialty from Lourmarin, the beautiful village in Provence where I spent Easter in my aunt and uncle’s house. It is a large blond cookie of about a foot in length made with olive oil and shaped like an oval leaf.

It is possibly named after Le Gibas, a nearby summit of the Luberon mountain range, but the confusing thing is that gibassier is also a type of sweet focaccia-like bread baked with olive oil and flavored with orange flower water. This also goes by the name of fougasse or pompe à huile (literally “oil pump”!) and is one of the traditional thirteen Christmas desserts. I have been able to locate recipes for the bread-like Gibassier, but not the cookie: this may warrant a little offline research, as is often the case when you get to such specific and local micro-facts.

What I can tell you though, is how delightfully tasty this biscuit (in the French sense of the term) is. The large amount of olive oil that is obviously involved in the recipe (the paper bag was smooth and shiny within the hour) gives it a very sophisticated flavor and a unique moistness, yet it does not taste greasy at all and is very subtly sweet. The surface shows an unusual scale-like texture and this, combined with the multiple slits that were cut in the dough prior to baking, ensures interesting sensations in every bite and for each of the happy friends you will share it with. Because yes, as you may have guessed (didn’t we recently talk about portion-control?) this is most definitely a break-off-a-chunk-and-share cookie — yet another thing I like about it.

I bought it from Riquier, my aunt and uncle’s favorite boulangerie, where they bought the loaves of bread to feed the twenty-plus family members that they entertained with such natural talent over the week-end, and where I also purchased pignolats, these fabulous crescent-shaped pinenut cookies.

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