The South of France - It's Yours, and You Can Have Your Strawberry Shortcake, Too

I haven't shared any holiday recipes with you because, other than Thanksgiving, I'm not really into holiday cooking all that much. For the Fourth, I believe in corn on the cob and lots of strawberry shortcake (below) and that is about it.  Corn on the cob should have an unhealthy amount of butter and salt.  

There is only one way to make shortcake:  You follow the recipe on the back of the Bisquick box, which makes a good, unsweet, warm on the inside and slightly brown on the outside, short bread-like cake after about 12 minutes baking time. It should be baked in a round cake pan and sliced ( Count on four servings per pan, after seconds. It's that good.)while still warm.  Put a piece of shortbread in an individual  bowl and pour on an absurd amount of  chilled fresh strawberries and their juice that you have mashed (potato masher works best)in a big bowl (you'll need several quarts of strawberries) with white sugar, until you have undone all the merits of the fresh fresh fruit.  Do not dilute with ice cream, whipped cream, or anything else. Sink into a stupor and watch the fireworks from an Adirondack chair in your back yard. If there is any shortcake and strawberries left over, it's great for breakfast, very cold. Then you can return to your diet. It's a great country.

We aren't having strawberry shortcake on the Fourth this year. We are waiting for two days and having it, instead of a cake, for our son's birthday two days later, when our family will be together. Our son is not into cakes. Growing up, he wanted tiramisou(which I may have misspelled here,) which is pretty easy to make, but this year, we are back to shortcake.

Tomorrow, many people from around here will run in the Peachtree Road Race. We used to turn out to cheer, and it was fun, but this year I have a truly hedonistic pleasure to start the day. I am a huge fan, a glutton for, The Tour de France, as it is televised (daily for 3 fabulous weeks) on NBC Sports, which is something like Comcast Channel 45 and 845 in Hi-def, which is what Hi-def was made for. 

 I am not a fan of cycling. The rules are complex and beyond my knowledge, it is a sport much abused in the name of money, and frankly, I don't care who wins or how. What I care about is the t.v. cameras poking into the fields of hay being harvested by teams of horses, the village cheese fairs, and then in a swoop, up above the intricately tiled rooftops of a sixteenth century chateau by helicopter, then down again into fields of lavender and sunflowers, and once again up and over a fourteenth century basilica as the peleton of two hundred flying, colorful riders snakes past on a winding road.

  Through several mountain ranges, along seasides, and through villages and cities, it's a dream of motion and color. Tomorrow, it begins the day in the countryside of Vincent Van Gogh, Aix-en-Provence. The first three days (it began last Saturday) covered the mountains and coasts of  Corsica. As always, it will end in Paris, this time (the 100th race) as the lights come on at twilight on the Eiffle Tower.

 I hope you join me.