Susan Herrmann Loomis, her husband Michael and 2-year-old daughter Fiona are making their place in the little French town of Louviers, where the imposing Gothic edifice of L'Eglise de Notre Dame rises just across the street from their home.

Louviers is best known for the mammoth Gothic church that dominates the center of town, but as I walk toward L'Eglise de Notre Dame, past the butcher shops, bakeries and cafes, I'm more curious about the leaning stone and stucco building across the street. With its crooked wooden timbers, wavy glass windows and tiny bell tower atop a slanted roof, it looks like a gigantic gingerbread house.

I check the address - 1 Rue Tatin - then open a wooden gate that leads to a courtyard herb garden. Firewood is piled near the front door next to a pick and shovel. Blue patio chairs are folded against one wall. Pots of herbs and wicker baskets line a brick walkway. I knock and Susan Herrmann Loomis comes to the door. Nothing about the way she looks hints at her Northwest roots. Gone is the pulled-back hair and blue plastic parka she wore in a picture for the seafood cookbook she wrote in Seattle some 20 years ago. Greeting me is a smartly styled woman wearing a canary yellow flared coat, black leather pants and a scarf of turquoise and hot pink.

After eight years in Louviers, a town of about 20,000 an hour's drive from Paris, Susan Herrmann Loomis has adopted not only a French look but a way of life, one that's taken the former Seattleite far from family and friends but closer to her goal of building a career as an author, food writer, mother, teacher and cook.

Loomis finds her wicker shopping basket among the coats and boots scattered about the entryway in the centuries-old former convent that her husband Michael has been renovating for the past eight years. We are on our way to what's become her favorite part about waking up on a Saturday morning in a small, French village - the weekly farmers' market.

One of the great pleasures of living in Louviers is the access to fresh seafood, meat and produce from shops and the weekly farmer's market, which Loomis calls "an anchoring aspect of life" in town.

While the timbered walls of the house on Rue Tatin were a charming attraction, the rooms inside were so dilapidated and full of rubble that Loomis' son Joe called it "the Messy House."

A renovated kitchen in the former convent features Loomis' pride and joy, a pine-green Cometto stove, its backsplash emblazoned with a crowing rooster logo on a bronze medallion.

It's been a hectic week. Their work on the house and their plans to open a cooking school in it this summer are attracting attention. (A British magazine has already been by for a photo shoot.) She and Michael have plans to meet friends for dinner in Paris later this evening, and Loomis is getting ready for an eight-day trip to New York and Boston. But this morning, her mind seems to be only on food.

There are meals to plan for Michael, their son Joe, 10, and 2-year-old daughter Fiona. And she's invited me back to the house for lunch.

"I think about food all the time," she tells me. Her tall, trim frame reveals no sign of this.

Normandy is a rich agricultural region, known for its dairy farming and famous for its butter, cheeses and apple brandy called Calvados. Louviers is Loomis' culinary heaven. A five-minute walk from the house is her favorite butcher shop, where the owner taught her to trim the fat from lamb chops so it curls just so when cooked; a fish monger; shops selling pork patés and local sausages, and on Saturdays, the bustling outdoor market.

Her wicker basket has wheels, and she pulls it behind her as she greets neighbors and friends. We pass the stall of a farmer who raises wild pigs. "Taste this," she urges, handing me a slice of his salty, cured ham. Into her cart goes a head of delicate lamb lettuce, a half-dozen fresh Brittany scallops, a whole duck, several loaves of bread, a few wheels of Camembert for friends in New York and a round of three-day-old goat cheese purchased from her favorite cheesemaker whom she knows simply as "the goat cheese man."

When she doesn't have recipes to test, she lets whims dictate what goes in the basket. This is one of those mornings. She spots langoustines - delicate French prawns - and shrieks with excitement. Whatever she is planning for lunch, I sense the menu changing with each farmer or fisherman we meet.

At 45, Loomis is living her dream of working and raising a family in France. Using journalistic skills honed in Seattle, where she lived 10 years in the mid-1970s and '80s, she has fused a background in reporting and writing with her passion for cooking. The results are impressive: six books in 15 years on subjects ranging from seafood to French and Italian farmhouse cooking, a weekly online food column for Condé Nast magazine, her own Web site and plum food-writing assignments such as one for the May issue of Bon Appetit, in which she tracks down the best spots for Parisian snacks such as caviar and champagne.

A degree in communications from the University of Washington in 1977, some high-school and college French and a culinary education gleaned from living among a family of cooks drew her to food writing, but she came late to cooking. Her mother, Doris Herrmann, who lives with Loomis' father Joseph in Bend, Ore., rarely cooked the same dish twice. But Loomis didn't put in serious time in the family kitchen until her senior year in high school, when her sisters were out of the house.

	Loomis shops the produce stalls at Seattle's Pike Place Market during a recent tour to promote her latest book, "On Rue Tatin," about her life in France.
BENJAMIN BENSCHNEIDER / THE SEATTLE TIMES

"I decided that if I was going to write about food, I should learn how to cook." So after working a year in public relations at Cabrini Hospital, she found a cooking school for English-speaking students in Paris where she could work in exchange for tuition. In 1980 at age 25, she moved to France. There she met her mentor, Patricia Wells, a food writer for The New York Times, who came to the school looking for an assistant. Loomis agreed to help Wells test recipes, and the two began a long working relationship and personal friendship.

"Certainly Susan's enthusiasm, character, sense of assurance at a young age were all appealing," says Wells, now the restaurant critic for the International Herald Tribune in Paris. "Plus, she is just fun and informative and easy to be with - characteristics that count in friends as well as assistants."

Susan met Michael Loomis, a tall, bearded sculptor, at her brother's Bainbridge Island home during one of her trips back to the Northwest. Within a month, they were engaged. Michael Loomis was in the mood for adventure, and he agreed to join his future wife in Paris. She landed a job running a cafe inside the Village Voice bookshop on the Left Bank, and later helped Wells in compiling "The Food Lover's Guide to Paris." While Loomis and Wells scouted the city's best wine bars, cafes, restaurants and pastry shops, Michael worked on a farm that produced foie gras.

The couple married in a village not far from Louviers, but with their work projects completed, they decided it was time to "get serious" about their careers. In 1984, they returned to Seattle and bought a house on Capitol Hill.

"Food and environment were kind of my special interests. So when I came back to Seattle, the first thing I thought of was fish," Loomis recalls. "Oysters were the very first story I ever did, and I went and talked to every oyster producer in the Pacific Northwest."

Loomis began writing for the New York Times, The Seattle Times and other publications, and landed a contract for her first book, "The Great American Seafood Cookbook," published by Workman Publishing in New York in 1988. The book combined recipes with the stories of fishermen whom Loomis spent months interviewing from Chicago to Alaska and the Northwest. Seattle, she says, was just beginning to find its way onto the culinary map.

"The years we lived in Seattle were a pivotal time for me. It was a time in Seattle when food was really exciting. People were really talking about farmers. Larry's Market was bringing farmers into the store and I was right in the thick of it." By the time the couple left Seattle for New York and later Maine in the late 1980s, Loomis had honed a formula for combining the roles of journalist, storyteller and cook. It would lead to four more books, including "French Farmhouse Cooking," the project that brought them to Louviers in 1993.

The story of how the family - their son Joe was 3 years old at the time - found their 15-room house and adapted to life in a town where they are the only Americans became fodder for her latest book, "On Rue Tatin," published in April by Broadway Books. In Seattle recently for a reading at the Elliott Bay Book Company, she told the story of how she bought the house without Michael, still on the East Coast, ever having seen it. They faxed plans and inspection reports back and forth, and finally decided to make an offer, which was immediately accepted.

When Michael finally arrived in Louviers, "I held my breath as I walked with him through the rooms," she writes. "We didn't talk ... I'd truly forgotten what a mess the house was in." Michael Loomis banged on walls, wiggled doors and finally passed judgment. "I love it," he said.

"The house must have been a perfect convent, for it rambled on and on," Loomis writes. "The rooms were in varying states of decay. Some had graffiti scrawled on the walls and ceilings," the result of an absentee owner allowing squatters to settle in. The wooden floors were worn, and on the third floor a coal stove sat at one end, its pipe jerry-rigged out the window.

"The downstairs looked like an archeological dig - big holes, mounds of rubble, a total mess. The walls were in terrible shape, their pale blue paint streaked with grime. Dust covered everything. But the house was filled with a palpable, warm presence." With financial help from French friends - a family Loomis lived with for a while during her student breaks - they closed the deal, and settled temporarily into a nearby cottage while Michael began renovation. A year later, they moved in.

For the past 25 years, the house had been owned by a Parisian who had planned to live there and open an antique shop on the first floor. When those plans failed, Loomis writes, the woman stripped the house of everything from fireplaces to a crystal ball that once graced a stairway ramp, and let the house tumble down around her.

When Loomis and her husband took over, they scrubbed and cleaned tiles, built shelves, rebuilt the kitchen and finished Joe's bedroom, once a tiny chapel. They also made a room for themselves and an upstairs office for Loomis. In the process, they got to know their neighbors - the church clerics, the corner florist who insisted on storing his plants and pots in their backyard, and the owners of Chez Clet, a gourmet-food shop where the store ledger refers to her simply as "L'Américaine" - the American.

Today, with the major work on the house complete, plans are percolating for another book, an art studio for Michael and the cooking school - week-long sessions that will combine hands-on cooking and bread-baking lessons with country lunches and visits with local cheesemakers and cider producers. It's an idea that came about partly as a way to help finance the repairs and mortgage on the house.

"We live in a beautiful place and people love coming here. We wanted to share it," and "honestly we needed to figure out how to make a living," Loomis says. "Books are great. We lived on books for a long time. But it's like any type of freelance work. You have to plan for those times when you're not working."

The classes will be expensive - $2,000 per person not including lodging - but Wells, who runs cooking classes in Paris and Provence, thinks Loomis may do just fine.

"It's true that Susan Loomis is not a household name, and Normandy may not be one's first choice of regions in France. But I think that if she can begin to build up steam, she will be very successful as the classes fill simply by word of mouth.

"Susan's niche," says Wells, "is that she is easy to approach, very informed, passionate about ingredients and quality, and eager to share her knowledge."

As we talk, Loomis reaches for one of the skillets hanging above her stove, and begins to make lunch. Family life centers around the kitchen, which Loomis describes as "a great funky open space," when they first moved in, with no heat and an old-fashioned fireplace.

The remodeled version, designed by Michael with the cooking classes in mind, includes an open hearth for roasting and grilling meats, a marble island and her "dream" stove, a pine-green six-burner model with gas and electric ovens.

While Loomis cooks, Michael and I sit at the counter sipping coffee and snacking on warm madeleines, spongy lemon tea cookies she has baked in seashell-shaped cast-iron molds. She cleans and sautés the scallops in white wine and butter. We each eat two. Then come the langoustines, which she cooks quickly in olive oil and garlic, and finally lamb chops grilled over the open fire.

"Cooking for me is relaxation," she says. "In a sense, there's nothing I love more than (a day like) today. Sure, there are days when I say, `Oh no, what are we going to have for dinner?' But there's always something." Sometimes even if it's pizza or popcorn.

Joe, who is fluent in English and French, comes down from his room wearing a new Seattle Mariners uniform he received as a Christmas present. Soccer is the sport most French children play, but someone in the village decided it would be fun to start an American-style baseball team, and Joe is a star player.

Fiona awakens from a nap and toddles to the kitchen, begging for her favorite cheese. She is the only one in the household for whom French is a first language. Loomis describes Fiona as an "unexpected miracle," a surprise pregnancy that strengthened the family's ties with villagers and made them feel less like outsiders.

"I couldn't believe that at age 43, this was happening to me, but it was incredible to be pregnant here," she recalls. "There are not many older mothers in Louviers." (Her best friend will be a grandmother soon.) "They treated me like a queen."

"On Rue Tatin" ends with the birth of Fiona. Loomis had just finished work on "The Italian Farmhouse Cookbook," a project that took her and sometimes Michael and Joe on frequent trips to Italy to talk with farmers, vintners and gardeners. The timing was right for a book Loomis could write from her second-floor office, a cluttered cubbyhole with a view of the church out the front window. The house, town and villagers were topics that meshed with her desire to try out a new style of writing and a different type of book.

"Writing was hard for me up until the past three years," she reflects, drizzling lavender honey on the goat cheese and slices of ripe pear. "I would say that in the last two years, it's become a joy. I couldn't not do it. I was always afraid to write. Intimidated. But it's becoming something I love to do. I think it's part of getting older. All of a sudden, I'm 45. How did that happen?

"How is it that you can be 45 and still feel like you're 21?"

Carol Pucci is a Seattle Times travel writer.