To Market, To Market*

*(no pigs were purchased)

I love this view of Gan - this amazing old tower/gateway thing.
It's near the centre-ville and I see it most times that I drive through the town. 

Wednesday is Market Day! 

Today, in addition to the produce purchases, I was tasked with seeing:

Marc, the knife-sharpener (oh no, I just realised I did not get a photo of his genial self)

These photos will blow the mind of any Australian, for whom the knife laws are very strict! - in Australia, no purchases by anyone under 18 years of age, certainly no carrying in public unless under lock and key. Here in France, these knives just lay around in open cases, one of them not even covered!

Marc is at our local market every second week. We have been waiting eagerly for today, to get a couple of the knives I'm using in the kitchen sharpened. I took them wrapped in a fabric shopping bag. He charges €5 per knife. I now have a chef's knife (sort of) and a smaller knife that are wonderful to work with. He handed them back to me wrapped cleverly in some newspaper taped with silver duct tape 🤣 - which I am now continuing to use as my knife safety holder. 

Next I went to a little booth/trailer (which I also forgot to photograph!) where a lady does on-the-spot sewing repairs. One of the kids' sneakers had its velcro closure tearing off. She did a quick and fantastic job replacing the velcro, in the time it took me to go around and make my food purchases.

The French are big into repair/re-use/recycle, it's very impressive. 

I saw this Very Good Boi sitting so neatly and quietly at one of the brasseries in the centre-ville. 

It was maybe the second time since I've been here that we had rain - a storm had been predicted overnight but did not quite eventuate, but it did rain, and the morning was cool and still and grey when I got up. 

All the mountains were obscured by mists. Beautiful. 

And finally, soup weather!!!! 

I made Pumpkin Soup for lunch (Wednesdays the kids are home from school so it's family lunch), served with bread fresh from the market (so good), and cheeses and ham to fill in the cracks. And then fresh fruit - I found some perfect little pink-cheeked pears at the Bio shop 😊

And then it was immediately time to start dinner! - Wednesday afternoons are our busy day and I have to be extremely organised. I thought something that I could cook ahead of time and then just warm through right on dinner time. 

Spinach and Leek Quiche (with ninja zucchini because I thought it wasn't going to be big enough), with a salad because we didn't have salad at lunch time. 

Oh Thursday, I took a little drive out to the village where Lish will be renting an AirBnB (about 10km up the road from here).

It's ADORABLE.  I don't have any info on any of these photos, but just take a look at how cute it is!  

This is actually the street (if you can even call it a street) where Lish's accommodation is!

The main (and nearly the only) street through town. In that white building with the black sign, is an English tea salon. I will enjoy visiting there when Lish arrives!

I am feeling the need to grab a book from this little street library, by way of a souvenir of my trip!

Église Ste. Catherine

Another in my series of whimsical door knobs!

The only bar in town! - and apparently just purchased by a group of five young guys. Facebook - Les Moutchassss

I was on school pickup duty.  The kids are at two different schools so there's a bit of driving around the town to scoop everyone.

There's a big area just across the road from the primary school, where the old French dudes meet (every day, from what I've seen - whether it's the same guys or different, I haven't yet worked out) to play Boules. For the Italians reading this, it's probably very similary to Bocce. 

I was enchanted to see that they have these ingenious things - a magnet on a strap, which enables them to pick their balls up without having to bend over!
They didn't seem to mind me photographing them,and we exchanged
a few genial pleasanteries. 

Dinner was a succcess - RecipeTinEats: One Tray Moroccan Baked Chicken with Fennel & Chickpeas, with sides of young green beans from the garden, and roasted sweet potato. 

My knitting group expanded further, with Leah starting her first square. 

I don't think she has the tenacity that Chloé has. Let's see. 
Chloé has now changed from red yarn to blue yarn, and only has a few more rows before she can take her third colour. I'm very impressed with how quickly she is picking it up! 

Friday and Saturday were pretty nothing, just more of the same old, same old ... bumming around in this gorgeous corner of the French countryside, cooking up stuff, knitting other stuff, hanging out with French kids. Bliss. 

🦔

Apparently hedghogs are a thing in this part of the world!!! I want to see a hedgehog so bad!!!  

Friday night is pizza night! - this week I bought pizza dough from the boulangerie, and the pizzas did not puff up to ridiculously epic proportions :) (I did love the baguette dough ones last week though, and I'll get that dough again in preference)

Chloé gets to spend a half-hour longer with me after her siblings have gone to bed. We knit and we chat. I am really enjoying our time together. Here she is modelling my WIP - she picked out the colour scheme for me. She does not yet realise that the completed project will be my gift to her 💚💛

Leah has been begging for gnocchi, almost since I got here. On Saturday I had the runway to be able to make some! 

Look how YELLOW the pastry is! - the eggs from our hens always have really outstandingly bright yellow yolks.

Pan-fried gnocchi, with a Puttanesca-style sauce (hold the anchovies)

The Pic du Midi d'Ossau decided to show up this morning wearing a soft cloud scarf. 

À très bientôt! 

 Flâneuse*

.... eventually!

*Flâner is the French verb for walking around a place aimlessly, seeing the sights.

Pau is the larger town, the one where the TGV (very-fast-train) comes in from Paris. Where we are is about 15 min drive further south - a village named Gan. 

Now that I have Manuel Poo-got, I should be buzzing all around the countryside every spare moment I get! - but I have been strangely reluctant to leave this peaceful spot!

On Thursday and Friday pretty I was pretty much left to my own devices - where you would expect me to run out and explore. Turns out, "free time" means more time to spend in the kitchen, just playing! 

A friend posted a reel on Facebook for Fig Leaf Syrup, which I decided, with the enormous fig trees on the property, I very much had to try!  Gotta say, it isn't mind-blowing, but it was interesting! 

Then I made a round of Figs, roasted with honey, rosemary and balsamic vinegar.

These were GOOD, and I'm not even particularly a fan of figs!  We have been using them with granola, with yoghurt, with ricotta and honey on brioche for Saturday brunch...

We even put them on a pizza with Bayonne and chèvre, which was mind-blowing! (see further down, Friday night pizza). 

I made Honey Jumbles! (no pic, unfortunately). Well-received. Next time I want to make Anzac biscuits. Any others that I should showcase? 

I need to pace myself with the Aussie biscuits roll-out. A lot of our biscuits are much more sugary than the French goûter biscuits. 

Last week, for pizza night, I bought supermarket pastry, which did the job but was not magnificent. For this week, Alex suggested ordering at the boulangerie, portions of baguette dough. He got me four, and then ran away for the weekend (for work). 

One portion is pretty big, to start with! And baguette dough RISES. A LOT. 

Clockwise, from top left: jambon de Bayonne, roasted figs & chèvre; Avocado mushroom & corn; Margarita with our own tiny tomatoes and basil; Leftover Firecracker Beef

They blew up to focaccia-high levels! 

Five of us didn't get through even two of the four! We had the leftovers for Saturday lunch and Sunday dinner! And I think there were still two slices remaining, so the chickens got those!

On Sunday, after church, there was a church social, where we managed to go to the wrong location, so arrived rather late, but not too late. It was lovely to chat to all the members and adherents. There is a surprising number of Anglophones in the group. 

The people hosting the picnic have a languages school. To promote it, they drive a London bus around Pau! 

... which the children thought was brilliant. I believe they were using it as a sort of indoor monkey-bars thing :) 

On Monday, I forced myself to leave the farm and go up to explore Pau. 

Pau has an enormous outdoor parking station, where the fees are extremely cheap, which encourages people to park there so that most of the traffic in the town is pedestrian. 

Contouring the parking area are these nice leafy areas:

I'm constantly being astonished at how much English has penetrated the language here. 

In English, when we are trying to be spiffy, we use French words - for example 'couture'. When the French want to sound upmarket, they go for the English word, such as:

"Tailoring" 🤔 

I walked past the Église St Jacques - 

the Tribunal Judiciare -  

 Nice statue in front of the Tribunal - 

- and found the 2 dolla shop! 😜

Some guy about town is a comedian - 

Oh! some other clown around town has taken it upon themself to steal ALL the "U"s in the town's signage! 

This looks like a restoration of a heritage building. They are leaving the façade and probably building on behind. 

I like this guy! Also how's the sky?! 

I worked out how to position it so that you can see the Pic du Midi d'Ossau in the background! 

(to the left of those two pines, in the middle)

For context, that mountain is front and centre of my back yard view here.

And by this time it was 31C, and I was dying of thirst, and hungry, and also on Mondays half of the town is closed! - so I was bored as well. So I found a brasserie that had outdoor seating but also in the shade! - and had myself a lovely little lunch.

Salade de chèvre chaud, oeufs cuits, poitrine (which I fully thought was going to be chicken breast, but turned out to be more like bacon); and an extremely welcome Lemonade with pressed orange in it! And an absolutely delicious mousse au chocolat to follow!

(NB that wine bottle is being recycled as a water bottle, just in case you were wondering! 😜)

They also had horse steaks on the menu! (I did not partake)

And somehow, after that massive lunch, I managed to pull together and eat some dinner! 

Lion White Beans, with pangrattato, and leftover sausages of dubious extraction.

Credit: "Tonight" by Nagi Maehashi, p127 (no link)

On Tuesday, I had a special request for vegetarian lasagne. I love audience participation! 

This involved a 24-hr lead time, as I like to use dried lentils and soak them overnight. I cooked the puy lentils in the morning, and made the infused milk for the bechamel. We had a lot of tomatoes that had come in from the garden, so they went into the red sauce. (We have another crop ready to be picked in the next day or so - I'm expecting that will be the pizza sauce for Friday night). 

There was a layer of eggplant and a layer of courgette in amongst all the veggie goodness. As it was a late entry, I didn't have time to shop, and we only had one packet of lasagne and it wasn't quite enough, so I improvised with the top layer of pasta being spaghetti! It worked fine! 

The weather was changing and my weather app forecast a thunderstorm at about midnight! - but we lived dangerously, and ate outside, and it was great. 

In non-food related news, while I was in Pau, I bought some cheap and cheerful acrylic yarn and some biggish knitting needles, and I have started teaching Chloé to knit! She's GOOD. She's only been at it two and a half days and already she's worked out tension, and is starting to be able to 'read' her knitting to see what she's done wrong and to fix it. I'm seriously impressed!

Now Leah is pestering me to be taught, too. 

While on the subject of knitting, I finished my socks that I brought away with me. 

The yarn was a souvenir from our Dec-Jan trip - purchased in Bath, UK! A lovely link between that trip and this.

Pattern: Apple Slice Socks

I've immediately cast on another project - it will be a pair of fingerless mittens for my littlest knitter. She picked out the colours from my scrap yarn that I brought over here. She doesn't know what I'm making or that it's for her - she thinks it's another sock. 

I will work out how to upload the pattern, some time. It's currently written up quick and dirty as a PDF, in my OneDrive.  I've made them a bunch of times, it's a quick and fun knit.  Watch this space!