S. Worthen | Weblog

Back in January, I won lunch at a cooking school in France. For the past several years, Chez Pim has organized a series of raffles, the Menu for Hope, which benefits the UN World Food Programme. Prizes are donated by food bloggers and their friends. For each raffle ticket purchased, a specific prize must be specified for it to go to. Prizes vary from cookbooks and muffins to lavish tasting menus with accompanying wines at highly-rated restaurants. Figuring that the raffle was bigger this year, I aimed high: five tickets for five entirely different culinary tourism prizes - and, to my amazement, I won lunch.

Susan Herrmann Loomis is an American journalist and food writer, author of numerous cookbooks, runs a cooking school from her lovingly-restored ex-vicarage home in central Louviers in Normandy. I knew quite a bit about her home, as did most of the other people at the lunch, since we'd read her autobiography, named after her school, On Rue Tatin. On a cool, sunny Tuesday, a dozen-or-so of us (including C.) gathered in her front yard, sheltered from street traffic by fences, hedges, and flowers which hid the passersby while showing off the church immediately accross the road in all its Gothic extravagance. It's quite a location.

( I'm still thinking about those olive biscuits... )