Birthday and music party!

Today, the 21st of June, is Mathilde’s big day. I decided to take a big risk by cooking a proper festive dinner in her honor (me in the kitchen = risk). After some deliberation, I ended up with the following birthday menu: a cucumber/tomato/fromage blanc verrine for starters, a filet mignon as a main course, and a strawberry tiramisu to finish off the dinner. Having left the office relatively early, and not having wasted too much time on the shopping (which occasionally happens, supermarkets not being my "natural habitat"), I actually much to my surprise managed to prepare the meal well on schedule.

The meal itself didn’t being very well, however. My verrine was remarkably tasteless, considering the ingredients involved. Everything (apart from maybe the presentation) was a bit of a disaster: the taste, the texture… (I suspect I didn’t put enough spices, and also I left out the chives - teaches me not to take short cuts in the future). Not to be put down by this bad start, I confidently served the main course, a filet mignon with fresh pasta and pesto sauce (fait a la maison, naturellement). That went down a lot better, in fact Mathilde, kind as she is, went so far as to call it “delicious”.

Well encouraged by this success, for the climax of the evening, I pulled out my trump card, the strawberry tiramisu. I had even dared to improvise a bit here – I replaced the normal biscuits with that Belgian delicacy known as speculos. Much to my amazement, the desert was an absolute delight, if I may say so... Well, anyways, I reckon you can’t really go wrong with those ingredients…

Rather happy with my “kitchen performance” (perhaps there is hope for me yet), and having given my birthday pressie to Mathilde (a rather cool, futuristic-looking alarm clock cum LED lighting system – turns out it’s more cool-looking than practical, unfortunately…), we decided to hit town to enjoy La Fête de la Musique.

La Fête de la Musique is a French tradition (which has since spread to other countries), which marks the start of summer. It’s a pretty cool event, with lots of small bands playing in the streets etc. Cagnes-sur-Mer isn’t what one would call the capital of cool, so our expectations weren’t that high. But we were positively surprised by the band playing on la Place de Charles de Gaulle. The young lads did a pretty good job of playing classics from my youth (Deep Purple, Guns n’ Roses and the like) and some French stuff I’d obviously never heard of ;-) Gotta hand it out to these guys, never have I seen Cagnes rock like this… (mind you, that’s not perhaps saying a whole lot!). Having said that, it wasn’t an all night orgy either – the festivities ended at 10 o’clock.