Our Blog - MiscMarch, France

March has been an interesting month so far ... we haven't done any traveling since Valentine's day but we have been doing a lot of trip planning for the future. So this blog is a bit of everything that we've done over the last 3 weeks or so.

Living in basically "the country of bread", you may find it odd that sometimes, I attempt to make bread. Mind you ... I never try to make the breads that I can get at my local bakery ... only really focaccia and bagels. I haven't yet really mastered it, most of the time I think the root cause of my bread-problems is the yeast. I have purchased active dry yeast that I keep in a cool/dark closet, I use a thermometer to make sure my water is not too hot or too cold, but invariably ... it doesn't "activate" well enough and get all "foamy" in the glass. This was my first time attempting bagels. You can somewhat find bagels here ... but not really. Most of them really are just baguettes in the shape of a bagel and most of the stores here that have bagels use them only for sandwiches and you can't even purchase JUST the bagel (without the sandwich toppings). I had gotten a bag of rye flour during our last trip to Normandy, and so I was attempting to make rye bagels. Needless to say, my yeast didn't get very foamy but they still rose a little bit. I did the boiling and then the baking ... and here is the result! A little dense but they had the chewy texture that I was looking for.

Then the last time I stopped by my local bakery, the owner was there and there weren't other clients, so I took a few minutes to chat with him. I explained (in what I assume was horrible French) the problem. He said that definitely, I can buy the yeast from him which will be better (and cheaper) than the grocery store, He also said that rye flour has less gluten than normal wheat flour. I'll wait another week or so and take another shot at bagels using yeast that I will get from my local bakery as well as all-purpose flour and see how that goes. Watch this space for the next time ....

While the temperatures are still cook, we try to have plenty of activities for Lucy, since we know that the summer is a bit warm for her to do lots of high-intensity activities. She continues to do Agility every week and we hopefully are getting better at giving her proper directions. We still have a few more weeks that she can go with us to the golf course and play with her ball on the fairways, and we have also bought her a frisbee. One of the other dogs had a red frisbee that Lucy was playing with, so we bought her a frisbee and play with it sometimes on a soccer field nearby.

Cassoulet is a rich, slow-cooked stew originating in southern France ... I think of it as French Chili :-) It was (supposedly) invented in 1355 in the town of Castelnaudary (which is a less than an our from here). The base is beans, similar to chili, but here it is white beans instead of red kidney beans. Then you include the meat, which can be slightly different based on which version. The Castelnaudary version is pork (loin, ham, sausages) with sometimes goose or duck. There is a Carcassonne version which uses mutton and sometimes partridge, and the Toulouse version has Toulouse sausage, pork, and duck leg. There are several restaurants in town that have Cassoulet as one of their main dishes (only in the winter at some places). Each year there are competitions for "the best cassoulet", and in 2023, the winner was a local restaurant called Le Genty Magre. So of course, we wanted to stop by and check it out while it was still relatively cold outside.

It is also getting to the end of the Volleyball season and we have managed to go to a couple games, trying out different parts of the arena to see where we thought gave us the best views. Tom likes the seats at either end of the arena, and this time, I tried to get seats right at the net. Unfortunately, the seats were right behind the ref, so it was difficult to see all of the action right at the next. The seats on the other side, which are not obscured by the referee, I think are reserved for season ticket holders. I still got a couple good pictures as we were able to look a bit to one side.

And lastly ... we spend quite a bit of time at one local café, especially in the morning. Almost every morning that we aren't doing our market shopping, we stop by after Lucy's morning walk for a coffee. There are several others who are also there almost every morning. One day, a gentleman was talking to us and gave us a flyer for a music concert at a church about 10 minutes walk from our house. He explained it was for charity and it was a "pass the hat" concert, so free to go but they ask for donations. Okay, no problem. A couple views of the church from our seats.

There were 2 different choirs that sang ... with 2 different styles. The first one seemed to be more religious to me.

The second one seemed to sing things that were a bit more modern.

Walk