I'm by no means a food snob. I've had M&M's for dinner and felt no shame for it. But every now and then, you get treated to a meal that makes you truly appreciate the art of cuisine. Instead of a quick dinner before heading somewhere, you get an evening where the meal is the main event and you can appreciate those artists who turn ingredients into absolute poetry.

We got such a treat two weeks ago when we were invited to a hotel 40 kilometers outside Paris, which is the home of the restaurant Carmontelle. At Carmontelle, the women's menus don't have the prices on them and the servers announce your meal with a detailed description as your plate reaches the table. My entrée was lobster salad: the shell of a lobster's head that hid slices of tender lobster with wedges of coconut on a bed of roquette salad. Sounds simple enough, but there was something in the sauce that made me lose track of thought as I ate that lobster meat. So good. It couldn't be topped. Until I had my main dish: (If you're a vegetarian, look away. Otherwise, you'll know what you're missing out on.) The tenderest roasted lamb surrounded by walnut sized eggplants stuffed with garlic risotto. The meat was so tender, it almost had the consistency of fish. Literally melted in my mouth with all its flavors. As usually happens at Carmontelle, the portions are small but by the time dinner's over, you're helplessly full. We didn't order dessert but were given a tray of little snack size cakes and tarts anyway. A glass of Bailey's at the bar after, and we were off into blissful food coma.

To continue my gastronomic babble, it's mushroom season in France. We gave a visit to my in-laws in the countryside last weekend and arrived to see they had 5 buckets full of 'em. My father-in-law had gone out to the forest and came back with his car stocked. They go out to pick them and then look in their mushroom guidebooks to see if they are poisonous or not before eating them. I'd always thought there were 5, maybe 7 mushrooms you can eat, but my in-laws have have 3 novel-length books full of all these different shroomies that says whether they are delicious, so-so or toxic. Apparently, they'd had a mushroom dinner a few years back and spent the rest of the night puking in the bathroom. It happpens. I could see where you can mistake one mushroom for another- some of them look totally similar. I asked if people have really died after serving up a toxic mushroom omelette. They guess that maybe 10 people in France die a year after fatally mistaking one type for another. Then I asked the obvious question: Have people ever accidentally tripped out on mushrooms they've brought home for dinner? (I was picturing us all at the dinner table with finished plates, rolling on the floor, laughing hysterically at the singing sun and electric butterflies flying over our heads) But no, that's never happened to them. Then, my father-in-law says "You know what the neighbor told me? There's people out there who eat the toxic ones on purpose! It makes them hallucinate! They know which ones they are and they do it on purpose! Can you believe it?" Yea, I might have heard about that.

Saturday afternoon, we biked to the only bar tabac in town- actually, the only public establishment in town and played pool by the fireplace. Two old men came in during our game and chatted up the owner for a bit before turning to us. One asked us if we knew how to cook mushrooms (we said no, but we knew someone who did) and then gave us a sack of mushrooms to take home that he'd just picked. He said they were delicious, and due to their white stems and dark brown caps, he shamelessly added they're called tête de nègre. (Nigger heads?! Is he serious?!) Offensive language aside, we took them home and looked them up in the book. No, that wasn't their official name and yes, we could eat them. They even had two forks in one of our books' description which means they are between ok and phenomenal. We cooked up them with butter, creme fraîche and some herbs and .... miam miam! I am starting to prefer the French word for yum. They add an extra letter because here, you get more than M&Ms for dinner.