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Nothin’ Could Be Finer Than to Live in Carolina

But my Midwestern Matt remained stunned. I didn't dare tell him that we also grew up singing other songs about our state. "I Like Calling North Carolina Home" and "Carolina in my Mind" would have gotten similar reactions. It's like knowing the words to "The Star-Spangled Banner", "Our Country 'Tis of Thee" and "America, The Beautiful". You hear them, you absorb them, you never forget them, and you always sing out with feeling.

Apparently, more and more people like calling North Carolina home, at least part-time. CNN and Money Magazine voted my hometown of Wilmington as the seventh best place to buy real estate because of its growing economy, temperate climate, beautiful coastline and affordable real estate. Almost forty percent of those real estate investors are nonresidents who vacation here because the living is easy and the weather is fine. One real estate team that not only appreciates the good life, but lives it themselves, is The Fine Coastal Living Team at Keller Williams Realty. Headed by CB Johnson and supported by his marketing assistant extraordinaire, Melody Browne, this group understands Wilmington and why it appeals to so many. They make finding the perfect property a breeze by allowing you to house hunt in lifestyle categories like: Golf, Beach, Historic, and Luxury.

Nothin' could be finer than good company, good wine, delicious crepes, and luxury gourmet bon bons. This week, The Fine Coastal Living team spent an evening at our place enjoying fine coastal living South 'n France style. We were thrilled to learn that the following day, the team sang our praises on their blog. Here’s what they had to say:

"Last night, The Fine Coastal Living Team and friends ventured The Maison Rose at 822 Orange Street (aka South n’ France) to experience the new Crepes and Grapes Party offered by nationally acclaimed/locally located Bon Bon experts Charlene Dupray and Pascal Siegler.

Playing Along at Crazy Eights

This week our friend, photographer-extraordinaire Millie Holloman, double-dog-dared us to share eight crazy, unusual, little-known facts about ourselves. Here’s one about Millie: she once scheduled a ski trip for 40 youth and when she arrived, there was no snow... oops! Visit her blog to learn seven other interesting things about her. Pascal and I decided to share Millie's challenge, so we'll give you four crazy facts each:

Pascal

Halloween in July and Christmas in March?

Biblical Billboards Bemuse the Bon Bon Queen

The two signs that caught my eye recently were:  "Wal-Mart isn't the only saving place!" and "Looking for a lifeguard? Ours walks on water." This got me to wondering whether our local men and women of the cloth make these things up themselves, or if there is a reference guide for religious billboards. A little online research revealed not one, but twelve reference guides for God’s disciples of drive-by sermons. Titles included: Forbidden Fruit Creates Many Jams, Signs for These Times, and The Proverbial Marquee: Words to Drive by. Some are even conveniently arranged by categories such as: Eternal Damnation, God-on-the-go, Guilt, Funny, and Thought-Provoking.

Well, my thoughts were certainly provoked, and I couldn’t resist picking out a few gems to share with you.  I have put them in my own categories:

God with a Capitalistic G
God is like Coca-Cola; he’s the real thing.
Try our Sundays. They are better than Baskin-Robbins.
Under same management for over 2,000 years

Wacky and Downright Tacky
Don’t give up; Moses was once a basket case too!
Jesus died for "myspace" in heaven!

The banana that leaves the bunch gets peeled.
Body Piercing Saved My Life (No Kidding: while driving home from a singing telegram in Sunset Beach a few weeks ago, I recently saw this message in bumper sticker form on the back of someone’s car. It wasn’t the message, but the accompanying illustration that was most disturbing!)

Road-Side Admonishments
Seven days without prayer makes one weak.
Those who throw dirt, lose ground.
The Ten Commandments are not multiple choice.
Don't wait for 6 strong men to take you to church.
If you’re too open minded your brains will fall out (which was clearly what had happened to the person who made this one up!)

Devilish
WARNING: Exposure to the Son may prevent burning!
Try Jesus. If you don't like him the devil will always take you back.

Healthy Advice
The best vitamin for a Christian is B1.

But my all-time favorite is the one I wish I would see more often on those crazy church billboards: Sign broke; message inside.

They Came; They Tried; They Laughed; They Cried

Can I tell you how much my husband loves his job? At least a few nights a week, Pascal is surrounded by groups of beautiful women who listen carefully to everything he has to say.  Under his tutelage, they often laugh, they sometimes cry (okay, Katie, you were the only one who cried!), and they always try to follow his instructions to the letter. I’ve never seen Pascal shed a tear over the state of a guest’s cooking skills, but he often has a good laugh. Here are some great images (taken by Grapes and Crepes Party guest, Tami Mansur) when she and fourteen of her girlfriends recently spent the evening learning how to make crepes with us.


Nicole (in the pink and black) may not be the best crepe maker in town, but she is certainly an incredible gift-giver. She surprised us with a framed photograph of Rue Mouffetard, the street in Paris where Pascal and I met. Months ago, after hearing the story of how we met, she contacted a photographer friend in Paris and had him visit the street to get an incredible shot for us. She presented it to us at the beginning of this party. But that wasn’t the only wonderful surprise of the evening; Dolly announced to all of us that she’s expecting her first baby!

While we’re having fun every night at our place making bon bons and crepes, the folks at dinewilmingtononline.com are capturing other fun food-related events in the city. If you haven’t already done so, visit their photo gallery to see what’s been going on around town!  You’ll even find more fun images from our South ‘n France Bastille Day event last month.  Stay tuned for more photos of life at the Bon Bon Factory; we can’t wait to show you what happened this past Saturday night!

A Thousand Minutes in Italy While Staying Right at Home

This past Sunday, Pascal and I enjoyed a day of rest. I spent the entire day intermittently sleeping and reading The Lady in the Palazzo by Marlena de Blasi. It’s the third in a series of memoirs, following A Thousand Days in Venice and A Thousand Days in Tuscany. I usually devour her books in one sitting, and this day was no different. Marlena is a woman of many intense passions: passion for life; passion for food; passion for Italy; passion for beauty; passion for people; passion for romance; and thus, naturally, a passion for her Venetian husband, Fernando, a man with “blueberry eyes"

Her first book opens while she’s a middle-aged chef operating a small restaurant in St. Louis, Missouri. While visiting Venice, Marlena meets a local bank manager who falls in love with her at first sight. Just a few months later, she finds herself leaving her old life behind and moving to Venice to marry this Italian" stranger”. Marlena chronicles her new life in Venice, a subsequent sojourn in Tuscany (after her new husband surprises her by quitting his job at the bank where he had worked for 26 years), and finally, a move to a grand apartment that was formerly the ballroom of an important palazzo in Umbria. Along the way, she introduces us to an incredible cast of Italian characters while extolling the virtues of domesticity, romance, slow food, and taffeta.

Marlena’s travelogues are the kind that I cannot read fast enough because I’m so eager to discover what comes next, while simultaneously wishing that I will never reach the end.  Whether writing about baking bread, changing her hair color, shopping in Florence, or setting the table for a large dinner party, Marlena’s descriptive prose keeps me completely enraptured. 

But, beware: her food writing is so inspiring, I ended up making pasta with Italian-herbed chicken meatballs in a sun-dried tomato alfredo sauce for a late afternoon lunch. Later that evening, another suggestive chapter led me to pour a glass of Madeira that I sipped while savoring one of our very own Cookies ‘n Crème bon bons. It was a perfect day of rest indeed - fine food, fine wine, a good book and a comfortable bed. Best of all, I traveled to “la bella Italia” for a thousand minutes without ever leaving home.

Here's to you, from South 'n France

Get out your Louis Vuitton bags, put on some hip-hop music and prepare to drink stars this Saturday, August 4th. It’s International Champagne Day! What do LV handbags, rappers, widows, monks and a spoiled Russian tsar have to do with Champagne? They all play an integral part in its history: 

Veuve Clicquot (vuhv klee-koh): Let’s start with the widow since she’s our favorite. This champagne is named after the widow (veuve in French) Madame Clicquot. When her husband died, she not only took over the business, she revolutionized the production of the bubbly beverage with new inventions and created a sales force for international distribution. Take a look at her portrait below; she was clearly a formidable woman!