Fantastic Provence with L'Occitane

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Coming soon will be a new series of exclusive travel experiences focusing on the world of L'Occitane and it's partners, perfect for creating your own made to measure tour of La Belle Provence.

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Les Petites Tables, the perfect stop for a healthy Provençale lunch

In mid-July in Provence the heat can be pretty tough. If you’ve ever wondered where everyone is in the afternoon and why all the shutters of the houses are closed, the reason is simple, the heat. Air conditioning is a rare luxury in France and so the technique of opening the windows at night and closing them in the early morning guarantees a cool house for the rest of the day, and it works fine. 

The other dilemma in mid-summer is eating out at lunch time. If you indulge yourself in lavish menus and copious amounts of wine then your afternoon will be spent snoring under one of the many plane trees of Provence. This is a perfectly acceptable option once in a while, but if you want to make the most of your day then light, healthy and easy to digest options are what you are looking for. 

The menus at Les Petites Tables

As it happens I have just finished lunch in one such place, and have no desire to sleep under a tree or on the lovely leather sofa in my office. Today I had lunch at Les Petites Tables at the Eco Musée de L’Olivier in Volx, Haute Provence.

The Façade of the Eco-Musée de L'Olivier in Volx

Inside the Eco-Musée de L'Olivier

The Eco Musée is a fascinating museum on the culture of the Olive tree throughout the ages, and was created by Olivier Baussan who is also the man who created L’Occitane en Provence. Alongside the museum is a shop selling an incredible range of olive oils from across Provence, each one being personally selected by Olivier himself. You can also find produce ranging from locally made terrines to tapenades, flavoured salts, dried Provençale tomatoes, porcini flavoured pasta and even sardines from Port St Louis du Rhone and all of these are made by personal acquaintances of Olivier.

Just some of the wonderful produce in the shop

Soon you will even be able to book a weekend or a holiday through one of the best in the business, and meet some of the olive oil producers, and manufacturers of the countless delights on offer here. (All this coming soon) The travel agent creating the travel experiences with Olivier Baussan is me of course, though I assume you thought it couldn’t be anyone else! 

But back to my lunch… 

Josephine and Virginie hard at work in the tiny kitchen.

This little restaurant is run by Virginie and Josephine, from a tiny kitchen which is in the inside dining area. The principal is simple, each day Virginie creates salads, tarts, soups and cakes. You can choose to have the selection of the day for a mere 10€, which today was a risotto d’épautre (épautre translates as small spelt, a type of wheat, locally grown) a chick pea salad, a cucumber and melon salad, an eggplant caviar with cumin, a chilled courgette and coriander soup and green salad with shallots. 

The selection of the day

That’s quite a selection for such a small price tag and it was utterly delicious, copious without being too much and best of all you know that everything was prepared on the day, using exclusively local produce. Now I can hear some of you are saying to yourselves, that’s a great meal if you’re a vegetarian or a rabbit. You would of course have a point, although rabbits would never go for the eggplant caviar, or the soup. But Virginie and Josephine have the answer, as they also have on offer a wonderful selection of charcuterie, including dried hams, terrines, tapenades and local goats cheese (made by my good friend Thierry Yernaux*) also all locally produced. 

Our two plates, to be shared...

I was eating with a friend and we decided to take one selection of the day and the charcuterie to share, which was the perfect combination. You can also ask to have half and half on a plate as they are both the same price, 10€. For dessert I took a café gourmand, which is an espresso coffee with a selection of small portions of different desserts. It’s what you take to make you feel that you are not over indulging by having dessert and then a coffee, but the reality is you are, and often there is more on the plate of a café gourmand! Now I have several criteria for judging chefs, and one of them is desserts. Based on that, Virginie is a great chef! The selection I had was a slice of apricot tart, with melt in the mouth pastry, an almond and apricot cake, another little cup cake and two slices of a chocolate cake that was so smooth and moist and rich that I’m glad and yet sad that there was not more. 

Le Café Gourmand

The café gourmand was priced at 7€. All in all our meal came to 17€ each and on top of that we half a bottle of chilled rosé wine (necessary in summer) for 5.50€. For the quality and freshness of the produce and the culinary skills that transformed it I think it’s hard to find a better deal in the height of summer in Provence, or anywhere else for that matter. 

The outside eating area

So when you are traveling in La Haute Provence, come and visit the Eco Musée de L’Olivier, browse the shop for some fantastic genuine souvenirs and gifts, and take a seat at Les Petites Tables for lunch, assuring you a delicious break in your day’s discoveries at a very reasonable price, and the possibility to continue on in the afternoon without needing a nap. 

*See our post : Of Goats and Men and Banon Cheese

Lavender, Lakes and Moustiers Ste Marie

Last week I escorted a group for a day trip over the Valensole plateau. It’s a tour that I don’t do often enough with tourists, as the majority want to stay on the western side of Provence in the Luberon valley, and so it remains for me more often a family outing.

So let me try to tempt you…

One of the vast Lavender fields on the Plateau de Valensole

The mention of the Valensole plateau immediately conjures up images of endless lavender fields in summer, and that is indeed what you find there. Although the disease spread by a relative of the cicada* has decimated the lavender in the past years, new fields are being planted, and the surviving ones are still as impressive. The main variety grown up here is Lavandin (Lavandula x hybrida) whose essential oils are used in the manufacture of industrial products; washing powders, air fresheners etc. For fields of True Lavender (Lavandula angustifolia) used in cosmetics and herbal remedies you have to climb above 800 metres to the Plateau de Sault (article coming soon).   But back to Valensole. The other thing you can’t help noticing as you drive across the plateau - aside from coach loads of tourists wading through the rows of lavender, taking photos and picking bouquets of it as a souvenir – are the Almond trees. Once a major cash crop in Provence, cheaper competition brought the production to a near halt, and most of the trees you see now are lone wild ones, or remnants of a bygone age. However in recent years there has been a rise in demand for high quality almond oil especially from L’Occitane en Provence who has been essential in the renaissance of this emblematic tree. 

A wild almond photographed in Haute Provence in May 2012

One of the biggest producers on the plateau is Jean-Pierre Jaubert who is the main supplier for L’Occitane, and wandering around his farm with a handful of delicious almonds (he eats two for my every one!) as he tells you the cycle of his crop and the process of shucking, and shows you the huge cold rooms used for storage to preserve the creamy white almonds (another handful is lifted here to continue our visit) you feel privileged to be with a man who’s passion for his work is contagious. I visited in March when the flowers are blossoming and to stand immobile in the middle of the trees all you can hear are the bees, and as you listen it seems to get louder and louder  to a point of it being almost deafening, in fact being the only sound you can hear, it has a strange hypnotic effect. The lavender fields of Valensole produce the same humming noise, but in July it is also combined with the clicking of cameras, the cries of delight in 20 different languages and thus loses some of its hypnotic qualities.

*For more on the cicada click here

A view of the village of Moustiers Ste Marie

We continue across the Plateau with our next destination being Moustiers Ste Marie. This picture postcard town set against the rocks, which if you follow to the right, will lead you into the Verdon Gorges (another article coming on these too) is dominated by a star hung between two rock ledges on a huge chain. The original star was hung by the Blacasset, a soldier and troubadour who vowed that if he returned to Provence after his capture during the seventh crusade he would erect a shrine to the Virgin Mary. This he did in the form of a 16 pointed star, emblem of the family, hung on a chain over the village of Moustiers which today 800 years on and after a few falls and restorations still hangs proud, but with only 5 stars now. 

Moustiers is also famed for its pottery or Faience and the town is dotted with shops offering their beautiful creations, with the unique blue/white glaze typical to the town. 

One of the many shop fronts in Moustiers Ste Marie
selling the famous Faience de Moustiers

Moustiers is a town where you can spend quite some time wandering the narrow streets, and for the fitter amongst you, a climb up to the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Beauvoir offers a splendid view over the rooftops of Moustiers Ste Marie. Friday is market day and so arriving in the morning and purchasing the making of a Provençale picnic during your meanderings and then driving the short distance down to the Lac de Ste Croix is a perfect program. Alternatively you could book the ultimate picnic experience at Alain Ducasse’s  Bastide de Moustiers,with his picnic in the 1950’s Chevy.

The village of Ste Croix du Verdon

For the continuation of this article let’s go with the simpler picnic by the lake.  The Lac de Ste Croix is the fourth largest man-made lake in France covering 2200 hectares. It was filled in 1973, submerging the village of Les Salles sur Verdon (a new one was later built on the banks of the lake). At one end of the lake is the entrance to the Verdon Gorges and it is the Verdon River that feeds the lake, at the other end on the other side of the Dam are the smaller Gorges du Baudinard which are a delight to canoe up on a hot summer day. Heading down to the village of Ste Croix du Verdon, when you first see the lake it is the turquoise blue colour of the water that catches the eye, this incredible hue is due to the beige coloured stone on the lakes bottom, which makes the crystal clear water of the Verdon blue with the refraction of the sunlight. You can get into the holiday swing of things by renting a pedalo or an electric boat (no engines on the lake) or a Hobie Cat when the wind picks up in the afternoon. Following the path along the lake side there are plenty of shady spots away from the crowds to picnic and swim, but beware, even though the water close to the banks and on the surface is warm, it is very cold just below. There is no sand to speak of but medium sized pebbles so some form of waterproof footwear is a good idea. Also it is strictly forbidden to light any form of fire, and if you try, the park wardens will be there in minutes! The lake is regularly used by the Canadairs, the famous French airborne fire fighting team, and watching the planes pick up water on the lake is a very impressive sight indeed.

If you would like to know more about touring the Valensole plateau and beyond (only a tiny bit of the treasures of this region have been covered in this article) then use the contact form here, and it would be with great pleasure that we can help you plan a trip to this magical part of Provence.