We’re eating all sorts of French stuff. Some of it’s great. Some of it’s not-so-great.
First the not-so-greats. You can get lots of different varieties of floury apples, including floury gala, floury royal gala, floury braeburn, floury granny, and floury red delicious. But you can’t get apples that are sweet or crisp. It’s not apple season in this part of the world, so I shouldn’t expect great apples. But when you are used to having good apples year-round, and have some major apple-eaters in the family, it’s frustrating to not find any apples worth eating. Fruit and veges have often been disappointing so far.
Pizza. Due to lack of options for us early diners, we ate pizza at Collonges-la-Rouge, our half-way stopping point on the trip from Paris. Sad pizza. With the benefit of hindsight, we realise that asking for the ‘chicken curry pizza’ was probably not the wisest menu choice.
Coffee. France still serves the same style of underwhelming coffee that they did decades ago.
Breakfast cereals. On Wednesday I searched the breakfast cereals aisle of a large supermarket and found that every cereal had at least 17% sugar. I bought a muesli (at 17%). It is unpleasantly sweet. Luckily, today we located some Weetabix and some porridge oats. Yay!
Now for the good stuff. Bread. We’ve had lots of excellent fresh baguettes: crisp crust, soft inside. Ollie has written about this already.
Rabbit. This week we made a rabbit casserole for the first time, and all of us, including Nicholas, enjoyed it. It’s a very lean meat and has a mild and distinctive flavour. We’ll cook that again soon.
Cheese. This is the highlight, in my opinion. Great cheese is affordable here so we are making the most of it. We bought some cheeses from a nearby goat cheese farm, and some tome (a full-flavoured cow’s cheese) at a hamlet on the way back from the mountains yesterday. We have also bought some cheeses from the supermarkets. Jennie and Tomos have also blogged about the cheeses.
Chocolate. ‘Milka’ chocolate. It’s so good! It doesn’t last long, though.
I think we realised at the time that curry pizza was not going to be good. But that’s boys for you… That was in Collonges la Rouge – ‘un des plus beaux villages de France’, in the Correze. A region I would like to visit again, from the brief glimpse of it.
Sorry for mucking up that town name again. How many French villages are described as ‘un des plus beaux villages de France’ (one of the most beautiful villages in France)? We seem to have come across lots of them. Collonges la Rouge was genuinely beautiful and unusual, though.
We have an official guide to 156 plus beaux villages de France! But maybe there are more. Collonges-la-Rouge with its houses in red stone was on our wish list last trip but it was an awkward cross-country drive from Salers and we ran out of time. We’re envious but glad you saw it.
156! I’m trying to imagine a list of the 156 most beautiful NZ villages/towns.
They have Pink Lady apples in the Carrefour and Leclerc – If you really crave a nice apple. Not French but tasty.
Thanks. I’ve generally stopped even looking at the apples offered in our Carrefour. However, I think my criticism of French apples was too harsh – it is not apple season, after all. I have since discovered some excellent local fruit. The peaches sold on the Wednesday market in Quillan are to die for!
Thanks for the tip – we tried one today and they are delicious