Oh what a wonderful feast of a lunch we had yesterday!

Maxence, our friend Baptiste and I drove to Strasbourg for the day, and decided to have lunch at Bürestubel, a small Alsacian inn recommended by the GaultMillau guidebook. It is located in Pfulgriesheim, a village just outside of Strasbourg, in a beautifully renovated farm building. The weather was magnificent and we sat at a table in the cool shade of the semi-covered little courtyard.

We decided to go for the 23-euro menu, a most excellent value, and chose to drink with that a bottle of 2001 Pinot Noir Vieilles Vignes, from the Théo Cattin vineyard. Served cool, it was very pleasantly fresh and light — both in color and taste — and a wonderful complement to the dishes we were about to enjoy.

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At La Pommeraie, the fruit farm where we picked a large amount of blueberries earlier this week, they gave out little leaflets about the different kinds of fruit they grow, giving out instructions on how to keep them, and a few, wonderfully straightforward recipes — tarts and compotes, clafoutis and jams. This is how I learned that in fact, you should let blueberries sit for a couple of days somewhere cool for them to develop their full flavor — who would have thought?

This is my favorite coffee cake recipe, with its super moist cake base and deliciously crunchy top.

The number one priority with our crop of blueberries was a tarte aux myrtilles, and number two was this coffee cake. This is my favorite cake recipe, with its super moist cake base and deliciously crunchy top. The original recipe called for a plain batter with a walnut and cinnamon topping, but I have found it to be very versatile and have made many successful variations, using chocolate chips and candied chestnuts, white chocolate and coconut, apricots, or here, blueberries.

It’s a wonderful cake for anytime of the day, breakfast, brunch, dessert or tea. In fact, I am seriously considering going on a blueberry-coffee-cake diet. Only — how would cheese fit in?

Oh and by the way, does anyone have the recipe to Hobee’s famous and fabulous blueberry coffeecake?

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One of the things I love about driving around the countryside with Maxence is that we share the same enthusiasm for anything that’s hand-painted on a wooden sign and planted onto the side of the road. Admittedly, it is the signs advertising edibles and drinkables that receive the most attention, but we also like to think that we could very well stop and visit that tree-root museum or drop by that special mattress sale.

Following such roadside signs is often an exercise in speed, reflexes and agility, as you are generally offered but the one chance to read the instructions correctly, understand how they match what roads and crossroads you find before you, recalculate your vehicle’s route based on that navigation information, and be prepared to make a sharp turn onto that teeny dirt road, possibly at a higher speed than altogether reasonable — all of this in a matter of seconds.

A couple of days ago, while driving just outside Colmar, one such sign urgently piqued our interest : it was pointing the direction of a fruit farm named La Pommeraie, where you could either buy some of their crop, or pick your own — blueberries in particular.

This sounded like a lot of fun and both of us had always wanted to do such a thing, so we followed the signs and were led to the pick-your-own blueberry fields. No attendant was there, but we read the instructions on a panel, picked up a bucket each, and started working our way through the alleys of blueberry shrubs.

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Saturday was the first day of my vacation, and Maxence and I decided to take a little trip to Asia : all it took was a twenty-minute motorcycle ride to the Parisian Chinatown where I had, for reasons I cannot fathom, never been before.

We sat down at a Vietnamese restaurant for a bo-bun (a delicious salads of noodles and beef with lemongrass, soy sprouts, mint and ground peanuts), then did a little shopping at Tang Frères, a gigantic Asian grocery store — so huge and busy they’ve even built a private railroad track that leads to their warehouse.

There, we marvelled at all those unusual and unknown fruits and vegetables, but since we were leaving just the next day, we couldn’t get too much fresh produce. We did get two big Kent mangoes, sweet and juicy. We adore mangoes, and it seems to be a really good year for them : they are everywhere these days, excellent and very affordable. We also got a few ears of fresh corn, which are nowhere to be found in regular stores : in France, corn is eaten mostly from a can and used in salads, so corn still in its husk is a rarity. Corn on the cob, here we come!

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