food, glorious food

La marché.

Mark has blogged a wee bit about the market. I will fill in a little bit more. It is my favorite weekly event. It comes every Tuesday morning, and so far Mark has been willing to drag himself away from his work to join me each week. I think he loves it too, and will continue to come with me every week. It is a nice time for us to stroll through the village and then up and down the aisles of vendors. We have already learned that you can’t rely on any particular vendor to be there, which makes it a little extra fun. Except our favorite vegetable vendor, who seems to be there each week. There is one fellow who works there who seems to enjoy practicing his English on us while we fumble through our French with him. That is how I choose to see it, anyway. Surely he does not find our French so bad he feels like he has to speak in English! In any case he does so with a lovely grin and a sweet disposition.

One of my favorite things at the market, oddly enough, has been the act of buying eggs. A woman there has a large basket, lined with straw, with dozens of eggs laid out. Next to it are a pile of 6-egg cartons and you pick your own. I just love that. Talk about farm-fresh!

There are many cheese vendors each week, and usually an odd assortment of folks selling jams, butters, pesto (in all sorts of flavours) and more types of dried sausage than you can shake a stick at. There are also quite a few vendors selling prepared food, paella and the like. We have not yet bought any, but we eye it each time and talk about it.

And, if you feel like you would like to purchase a furry poncho, you are in luck. There are always folks selling clothes, often pretty chic-looking stuff, though not always my, ahem, style. The furry outerwear is just one example.

Cooking in Cotignac

We have an oven with more options than I know what to do with: heat above, heat below, convection, heat above with convection, heat below with convection etc etc. The possibilities are almost endless. Meanwhile, I struggle with the simple conversion of Fahrenheit to Celsius. And the stove-top is based on some sort of fancy induction principle. Sadly, it only works if the burner is completely covered by a pot so our stove top espresso maker has been useless here.

Baking has it’s own set of challenges. Firstly, I find the stores here organized in a relatively inscrutable manner. There is not a “baking aisle”, which it turns out I was kind of banking on. That is, if things are organized categorically like that it cuts down on one’s need for baking-appropriate vocabulary. Which it turns out I don’t have, but am learning. So, instead of all the baking stuff all in one spot, cutting down on my confusion, I find flour in one aisle, sugar in another. And SO many sugar options (various shapes and sizes of cubes, super-fine, confectioners, raw, plus many faux-sugars) but no brown sugar as I have come to expect it. But that is OK. It turns out you can make chocolate chip cookies without it. Whew. Anyway, I’m getting distracted. So, I finally found a little trove of baking stuffs (separate, of course, from the flour and the sugar). In this aisle I found a bazillion different bags of almond flour, but no straight up cocoa powder. And I could find nothing that translated to “baking soda” or “baking powder”. I found “levure du pain” and “levure chemique”. These were both packaged in little individual packets, the kind I associate with instant yeast. So I figured that the “levure du pain” was yeast, but I really had no clue what the other was. It seemed like it had little pictures of muffins on it, so I bought it hoping it would look white and powdery when I got home. I was a little concerned when I looked up levure chemique in our French-english dictionary and it said “brewers yeast”. But when I opened it up it looked white and powdery (makes me wonder what else that dictionary has led me astray on!). Anyhoo, since it is white and powdery, I have been using it like baking soda to good effect. While I was puzzling this out I realized that I don’t really know what the difference is between baking powder and baking soda. So, while I am here I am going to pretend there IS no difference and soldier on.

Despite my failures and confusions in the grocery store and being perplexed by the many options on our oven, I have successfully made chocolate chip cookies (I learned that the French don’t really make cookies, so I thought it would make a nice treat for us to bring to Nathalie & Ollie’s for that meal they invited us to a couple of weeks ago). And yesterday I made Annette’s famous lemon bread. It was pretty successful, but I clearly have some things to learn from Annette about it. I think I will blame the inferior product on my equipment. Not the oven. But clearly, it couldn’t be the cook!

Yesterday we had Ollie, Nathalie and their kids (Claire, Thomas, & Victor) over for Sunday lunch. We did it French-style with the lunch being huuuuge. Since I didn’t want to try to make something French and fail, I decided to make some Indian food. I was inspired by the “Spice Girl” (our name for her) who comes to the market every week and who was selling some yummy looking tandoori spice mix. The meal was quite successful (tandoori chicken, dahl, spicey green beans, rice, raita & mango salsa). Oh, and of course, we had to have a green salad and a cheese plate after that. Oh, and then dessert after that. Oh, and did I mention that we started with some appies & champagne? And of course beaucoup du vin during the meal. As I am sure you have no trouble imagining, I had no need for dinner when 6pm rolled around. But, it was a success, and I was glad to have finally, finally had a chance to do something nice for Ollie & Nathalie!

A quick amusement for those of you who know about my reputation for refusing to believe there is anything out there that isn’t actually better with lemon on it. Well, it turns out that Jasper is following in my footsteps. And sadly, I can’t even really take the credit for it! Well, except perhaps, genetically. In fact, she was surprised to hear that not only am I famous for being a bit crazy for lemon, but am mercilessly teased for it by my family. In any case, between me, and her, and now Maddox (because he doesn’t want to be left out) we are going through somewhere between 7 and 10 lemons per week!

Lastly, I didn’t want to close today without assuring everybody that Maddox is doing fine. Today was Monday morning and he had no trouble. And no tears last night. Perhaps he has gotten over some hump, or perhaps last week he was a little extra low. He did have a cold and ended up pretty sick by the end of the week. Today Maddox told me that there is a girl who plays with him at recess. He said, “…but, I don’t know her name. But that is OK.”