Fromage.

Here I am sitting at a table in a cafe in the Place aux Herbes:

My husband has taken himself and the baby off on a jaunt to Montpellier.......to look at a bike, as he has been struck with a sudden urge to conquer Mt Ventoux......in the saddle. I'm feeling somewhat virtuous as I've already been for a jog in the garrigue on the hillside outside town......except that I've cracked and  taken up coffee again, oh.....and after eight weeks of abstinence, sugar.

I needed a jog after the weekend. We made a sentimental journey back to stay with friends in Espondeilhan,  the village where we spent most of 2010.....it's only an hour and a half from here on the motorway....or significantly longer if you take a wrong turn, as we did on the way back. Anyway, as our friends who we stayed with are part of a wine producing family, Domaine l'Arjolle.... there was a lot of wine involved.

My husband may have found his French late on Friday night at the bottom of a red wine bottle. The conversation had moved onto the subject of Cannes and all of a sudden he was telling everyone about my friend Rebecca. Now, Rebecca.....who I met, at the gym of all places, when our now five year olds became firm friends at the creche way back in the day when we were both nursing a workout fixation.....is a filmmaker who wrote and directed the cult Tasmanian short film.....Cupcake: A Zombie Lesbian Musical. She is heading to the Cannes Film Festival later this month as she's working on her zombie lesbian musical being made into a feature film. You can imagine my husband trying to describe all this.....in French. It gets better. One of the songs  that accompanies the original film is 'My Girlfriend Ate My Pussy - Literally'. This is where we managed to pick up a couple of quirks about French language pronunciation. If you happen to find yourself having a conversation, in French, about your cat......it could happen....and you inadvertently pronounce the 't' at the end of the word 'chat' (cat) then you aren't talking about your cat but rather a woman's rude bits. Beware.

Think this is all just a tad too bizarre.....well, on Sunday....more food, more wine...more friends and their family......come the cheese course and out came the microscope to examine.....the cheese. I kid you not. On the cheese board was a young Mimolette, an 18 month old Mimolette and a chèvre style Mimolette that I'd bought from the Pezenas market the day before:

Mimolette is an orange, pockmarked cheese....orange because of carrot juice and pockmarked because of cheese mites which live on the rind and enhance the flavour. You can tell by the state of the holes, which cheese is older as the bigger the holes, the longer the cheese mites have had to do their thing. Supposedly, cheese mites, their skin and their excrement are wiped off regularly during the course of ageing and before sale. The whole cheese mite thing understandably grosses people out...... so much so that Mimolette has recently been banned in the United States and you can only buy the young, supposedly not so mite encrusted, Mimolette in French supermarkets. I must admit that I did have to psyche myself up to actually put it in my mouth the first time I ate it.....yet I can report that it really is delicious, with a firm texture and a nutty flavour. Truly.

Anyway, on Sunday, out came the microscope to check the state of cheese mites on the Mimolettes:

There were wrigglers on all three.....including the cheese from the supermarket. Under the microscope they looked like this:

Source: Wikimedia Commons

And the cheeses were teeming with them. Apparently....and I only have this on hearsay....the mites are good for your digestion, especially if you eat a lot of cheese and drink a lot of wine. Which is good news for my husband....he had seconds of the Mimolette.

Rx