Entertaining Friday: French Country Dining

I have a recurring daydream. It's about a dinner party. A big one, full of interesting conversation and great, late-summer food. All the guests are seated at an impossibly long, simply dressed wooden table. They drink cocktails made with farmers' market ingredients and some of them, inexplicably, wear Gael Greene-style hats. It takes place in my backyard. There are lights in the trees and everything's green and which, in the daydream, kind of looks like this:

Everybody gushes over the simple, but delicious food that's on their plates. Which looks kind of like this:

Unfortunately, in real life, my backyard is a bumpy mess that would never stand up to a super-long table and, anyway, the late summer is usually so muggy and buggy that eating in the yard wouldn't really be practical.

But a girl can dream, right? Which is exactly what I did when I read this August F&W article about Le Pain Quotidien founder Alain Coumont and his gorgeous home in the south of France and the fabulous entertaining he does there.

I tried to quell my jealousy by reminding myself that Coumont probably works so hard during most of the year that he barely gets a chance to breathe, so really he only actually enjoys those couple of summer months that he and his wife and daughter spend at their home, which is 30 miles outside Monpelier.

Unfortunately, that didn't really work. I'm still jealous - and now actively trying to figure out how to level out my backyard so it can handle a table of this magnitude. I wonder if Cooper can build a temporary platform that we can store in the garage. It's probably time for him to start a new project anyway...

[Photos from Food & Wine, August 2009. (c) Martin Morrell]