Where’s the Pasta?

I know, I know. I’m in France not Italy.

My husband and I are spending 13 nights in L’Isle Sur La Sorgue, France. We rented a small ‘typical’ village house on VRBO in order to settle in one place for a while to write. We arrived on Saturday fully anticipating the beautiful canals aligned with restaurants, bakeries and shops, winding narrow bricked streets, and the famous Sunday market.

Acclaimed as the largest flea market outside of Paris, L’Isle hosts hundreds of vendors selling everything you can imagine – wait stop right there – I imagined pasta and couldn’t find any. I’m sure you are wondering, wait a second, aren’t you in FRANCE not ITALY? And, of course, you are right, I’m in France. If you had blindfolded me and dropped me into the market then told me to walk around, it wouldn’t have taken me long at all to figure that out. Every third stand is selling either goat cheese, tea towels with “Provence” scenes, or herbs de Provence. Well, maybe not every third stand, sprinkled in are sausages, scarves, olives, and garlic. Lots of garlic.

This is not to say I was disappointed in the market. It was definitely a cool experience. But, you see, I was on a mission. We knew many of the restaurants would be packed with market shoppers and other tourists on Sunday and many would be closed on Monday; so we were shopping for meals for Sunday and Monday. Since pasta is an easy fix, and since we were enjoying fish and meat prepared by French chefs, we opted for veggies, smoked sausages and goat cheese. And hoped to prepare some garlicky pasta. Having successfully found all but one of the ingredients we needed, we set out to find the hidden gem of a fresh pasta stand. Certainly among the hundreds of vendors there had to be one; certainly, I was just missing it. We circled and circled and couldn’t find it.

Oh well, the day was far from a bust. We ended up with lots of goodies pictured below. I did find a restaurant in the village that makes homemade pasta so we will go there tonight – now that I’m craving it. But, if anyone knows whether there is an elusive pasta stand in this legendary French market, please let me know. I’ll go back again this Sunday, and maybe I’ll get lucky.