Picnicking in Style

Just as we finally got the new car the other week, we started thinking about driving out of town to get some fresh air and have some picnics. The weather did not cooperate since then and turned to the worse. Here, around Mexico City, the picnic season is year long, as long as you do not mind some cold morning in the winter, and some rainy evening during the rain season. Winter was finally over and the weather was becoming unseasonably hot, and the rain season was still a few months away, when last weekend the weather turned to cold with daily rain showers or thunderstorms in the afternoon. It put a stop to our plans for a picnic last weekend and we will see how things turn up for next weekend. As I write this the weather is cloudy and it is raining. I could do without this depression-inducing mess…

Those of you who do not know us, would not know the story of how Normita and I met. We were one of those lucky couples who met in the early days of the Internet. Back around the winter of 1998 we started exchanging emails regularly after Normita sent me a message in some forum. She was in Mexico City and I was spending my time commuting and working between Québec and Washington, DC. We started an extended daily email exchange that lasted for 4-5 months until one day her parents were planning a holiday trip to Canada and she decided to take some time off from work and join them. Before she left we agreed to meet in Montreal for a day when her tour was passing through town. We both were nervous about this, even though we had been sharing our thoughts and lives daily for months. Strangely enough we never had spoken to each other and it was strange when she called me the day before we were supposed to meet to confirm.

To make a long story short I planned a nice picnic for our first meeting, and we agreed to meet at her hotel so that I could pick her up. After somewhat of a false start, since they put them in a different hotel across the street and she was calling my cell phone to let me know about this, and she was thinking that I really did not want to see her as I was not answering. What I had forgotten to tell her, was that my cell phone was one of these huge in-car units, as to get any service in the mountains where I lived at the time I needed one of those powerful monsters. I was waiting at the hotel she had told me, and she finally went there to check and it was love at first sight, but that is another story. We left for visiting the city and later to our picnic at the top of the Mont-Royal and we have enjoyed regularly picnicking since the first day we met.

Over the years we have tried many different ways of picnicking in style, and our favorite was always the ones we enjoyed on our pontoon boat on the large lake where we lived in the Laurentian mountains of Québec. We could slowly circle the lake listening to nice music on the stereo and enjoy looking at the scenery while slowly eating our nicely prepared picnic. We also regularly did some fun picnics while cycling. Actually not while pedaling the bicycles, but by cycling to interesting destinations and eating there.

The common denominator to what we have always enjoyed was the style of food we always brought. We have a tendency to get on the fancy side of cold picnics with nice shrimps, smoked salmon, foie gras, and stuff like that. I think that it dates back to the days when I was living alone and traveling all over the world all the time, and I used to have little picnic feasts in my hotel room. I’d buy a bottle of nice champagne, some caviar, foie gras, shrimps, and smoked salmon, as well as a nice baguette and have my little celebratory picnic on the hotel bed. I enjoyed it so much that once a month, when I was at home; I did the same in the living room while watching some movie on TV or listening to some nice music.

Since we like to picnic in style we assembled a nice picnic basket with some nice place settings, good quality cutlery, some nice clothe napkins, and some sturdy quality acrylic glasses, though most of the time we were bringing real crystal INAO standard tasting glasses wrapped in some thick dish clothes, as they are very versatile and somewhat more robust than regular stemware. We have not had the opportunity to picnic much in recent years, but we plan to do so again. In the coming weeks I plan to start assembling a new picnic basket so that we can have it ready for whenever we feel like jumping in the car and having a nice picnic in style. Normita bought me a nice little portable gas BBQ grill last summer, and we only found the proper propane bottles for it last week, so we might get even a bit more involved in our picnicking this time around by preparing some cooked dishes on-site.

In the coming week I will post on how we setup our new picnic basket, reviews of equipment including the grill, and some nice recipes that can be enjoyed with minimal fuss. Hopefully the weather will clear up for the weekend and we will be able to enjoy our first outing. If not we might give it a shot and picnic on the bed like I used to in the old days…

Lucito