Four dishes and a soup bowl

I don’t really believe that we eat with our eyes — for one thing, think of the mess it would make for people who wear contact lenses. But I do know that the appearance of a plate of food has a big impact on its appeal.

With that in mind, I’m offering a look at four dishes and a bowl of food that were both attractive and delicious when we enjoyed lunches with friends at two different restaurants over the past several days.

The restaurants in question were our new fave, Restaurant O Moulin in Carsac, and Daglan’s own  stand-by, Le Petit Paris. (I’ll not add more about the restaurants themselves, as they’ve been covered thoroughly and frequently in Radio Free Daglan.)

I’ll begin  with an entrée of foie gras, as served at O Moulin. In my posting of April 7, 2019, I showed off a similar dish in which the foie was topped with chocolate. In the latest version, each half circle was topped with a raspberry jelly, and decorated with various raspberry-related bits and bobs. Here you go:

Raspberries on top? Why not?

Staying with entrées, this was a special-of-the-day at O Moulin that my wife Jan ordered — and raved about. It’s a crab soup, loaded with crab meat and topped with thin slices of octopus. Here’s Jan’s bowl:

Is this special, or what?

At Le Petit Paris, where we ate on the terrace, I had this main course, featuring a long and tender filet of glazed salmon, accompanied by a long pastry cylinder that was filled with shredded vegetables. Voilà:

A lovely way to  plate a simple salmon dish.

Even more colourful was my main course at a lunch at O Moulin this week, as it featured a nicely coloured filet of trout, well decorated with shoots, pea purée, and tiny cubes of toasted dark bread (like miniature croutons). Here it is:

A flavour-packed trout dish.

And to finish on another colourful note, here’s my dessert at the most recent O Moulin lunch, which included a cookie base, a fruit sorbet, halves of marinated cherries, and decorative pastry shards on top:

Bright and light.

Currently we are awaiting the arrival of good friends who have a holiday home very near our house, and of course we’ve already made a reservation at O Moulin for next week.

Can you have too much of a good thing? No, not really.