Showing posts with label france. Show all posts
Showing posts with label france. Show all posts

Tuesday 7 June 2016

Tempted?


My husband sends me photos like these...and accompanies them with tantalising descriptions of strolling through the Annecy market with the smell of roasting chickens, their potatoes swimming in rather large quantities of fat underneath, floating in the air.


He's there and I'm not, more's the pity. 

And, the cheese ... I still remember my surprise when first I discovered that you could buy cheese, like wine, by its year. It was in our early days in Annecy when I was still rather over-awed by the speed with which market transactions took place and the amount that I did not know about good, fresh, locally produced food. No doubt it was just to bring me back to that pleasant moment of discovery that my husband lashed out and bought a slab of 2014 Summer Beaufort, alongside the Tommettes Fermières pictured.


As an aside, the Tomme de Savoie (the tommettes above are smaller versions of the Tomme) is celebrating its 20th year since being awarded an IGP (Indication Géographique Protégée). If you are a cheese lover, it is at this must-visit site http://www.tomme-de-savoie.com (excerpt below), dedicated to this cheese, that you will be regaled with recipes, health facts, production secrets and more.

La Tomme de Savoie fête ses 20 ans d'IGP


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La Tomme de Savoie est fière de fêter cette année les 20 ans de son IGP !Ce signe officiel garantit la qualité et l'origine d'un fromage fabriqué dans le respect d'un cahier des charges strict. Seule la véritable Tomme de Savoie IGP est habilitée à porter le fameux marquage "Savoie" qui la différencie et la rend reconnaissable entre toutes.

To the delightful aroma of the roasting chickens add the look of the bread, the smell of which I can imagine from the other side of the world, the anticipation of the rows and rows of strawberries, the baskets full of a mixed variety of tomatoes, the crazy shapes of the capsicums and the sweetest mini rockmelons anywhere and you have just another normal day at the markets in France...lucky, lucky husband.








Saturday 28 May 2016

Markets and vide-greniers

First...and last coffee of the day. No time!



I had a lovely Saturday recently on the Central coast of New South Wales attending the French Country Market, held on the grounds of the Chertsey primary school. I booked and ran a stall and it was a pleasure to spend the day chatting to fellow francophiles about my book and our French house, which we have on holiday let.

French Country Market - Chertsey


Our little stall in Chertsey


We were clearly the amateur stand alongside the well-polished stalls! The last time that we had done something similar was when we were living in France and we participated in the Talloires vide-grenier, literally 'empty attic', the equivalent of a whole village garage sale.

Vide-grenier - Talloires



Similarities
  • Both days were in May and, for us as stallholders, they started at the crack of dawn, were amazingly tiring but were brilliant fun. 
  • We sold more than we were expecting!
  • Both were friendly places where people happily stopped to chat and swap stories. 








Our little stall in Talloires, looking out over the Annecy Lake.
Differences
  • The weather... A few days out of winter here in Australia, and despite the fact that I started the day wearing a coat and jumper, by 9 o'clock I was wishing that I had dressed in shorts and tee-shirt.
  • The setting - as the photos attest - French village v. Australian bush.
  • Australians don't haggle like the French do!








Friday 20 May 2016

In the newspaper !


I know it is not the New York Times, but thank our local Sydney paper, the Manly Daily, for the mention...






Wednesday 11 May 2016

Contrasts


Highs or lows; reds or blues; g'days or bonjours; same spiritual connection...

My husband returned from a work trip last night. He had been to far central west Queensland and, from Sydney, it had taken him 28 hours to get there by car, 3 planes, car, an overnight stop and then a 6-hour flat bitumen and dirt road trip. Along the final leg of the journey, a distance of nearly 400 km, he passed a car - one. There was a bit more life at the only roadside shed/pub, where he stopped to have a Diet Coke and was gently ribbed by one of the, well, I presume, locals, for "living it up, mate!"

Job completed he turned around to do the whole lot again that same afternoon, hoping to make it past Winton to Longreach for his next day's flight out. There were no rooms to be had at the inn or anywhere else. A rugby league carnival had come to town.

Undeterred, he took a room in Winton and shared it with the thousands of bugs that commandoed their way into his room around locked door and window frames, to keep him company. Astute he is, my husband. He calmly turned on the air conditioning until the flying insects could shiver no more and got a few hours of rest, before completing the last 180 km to Longreach and his next plane.

I thought I'd share his journey with you.

From the French mountains to the Australian desert plains; the bright blues and greens of the Annecy Lake to the many shades of outback red; the sensual sounds of the French oh là là to the slow, unhurried Aussie drawl - you can see for yourselves how we live our different lives.




























Sunday 24 April 2016

N'oublions jamais l'Australie


April 25th - it is ANZAC Day.

It is a special day in Australia and New Zealand.

We remember fallen soldiers from past and present conflicts, give humble thanks to our serving men and women and try and imagine a world of peace and love.

Here is an excerpt from the Australian War Memorial website, describing what took place, 101 years ago: (https://www.awm.gov.au/commemoration/anzac/anzac-tradition/)

The Australian and New Zealand forces landed on Gallipoli on 25 April, meeting fierce resistance from the Ottoman Turkish defenders. What had been planned as a bold stroke to knock Turkey out of the war quickly became a stalemate, and the campaign dragged on for eight months. At the end of 1915 the allied forces were evacuated from the peninsula, with both sides having suffered heavy casualties and endured great hardships. More than 8,000 Australian soldiers had died in the campaign. Gallipoli had a profound impact on Australians at home, and 25 April soon became the day on which Australians remembered the sacrifice of those who died in the war.

Although the Gallipoli campaign failed in its military objectives, the actions of Australian and New Zealand forces during the campaign left a powerful legacy. What became known as the “Anzac legend” became an important part of the identity of both nations, shaping the ways in which they viewed both their past and their future. 

It is now 9 o'clock in the morning, here in Australia, and our dawn services, emotional, poignant and attracting ever-growing support, are over. But, in a little village on the other side of the world, another ceremony will take place in a couple of hours.

In the west of France, in Villers-Bretonneux, liberated in WW1 by Australian forces, the local school is called l'école Victoria, in honour of the Victorian school children whose fund-raising attempts helped re-build the school after the war, rows of graves of Australian soldiers are perpetual reminders of sacrifice, maps of Australia are strung in the corridors of the secondary schools, 'N'oublions jamais l'Australie' is chalked up on primary school blackboards and Australian visitors are treated as part of the family.

There, ANZAC Day will soon be commemorated. It will be in French, but another language, that of love and mateship will assist with the translations.

Let us not forget.




Friday 4 March 2016

Plougoumelen and the groggy wake-up call



I hear the rooster crowing as I lean out through the double shutters of the first-floor window. It is grey and misty, but at roof-top level, I can make-out the church spire to my right, closely clustered roof-tops to the left and the semi-wild, walled garden below.

My son, barefoot and dressed in a hastily pulled on pair of shorts and pyjama top, runs through the damp  grass towards the swing. At regular, gentle intervals his feet appear before vanishing into the foliage.

What is the rooster playing at? It is nine o'clock in the morning, with dawn long gone. I push on the shutters to open them wider and crawl back into bed, accompanied by his continued, groggy calls for me to rise. The côt, côt of a chicken joins his long, single-noted last attempt. We all know that it has been a failed attempt.

From beneath my crumpled blue doona I survey the room. The wind, rustling the leaves on the tree, draws my attention back outside. I feel young again, energised by the thought that I could be facing the magical branches of THE Faraway Tree and long to be able to disappear into their embrace. The drone of a distant airplane makes me twitch, as submerged childhood memories resurface and I see myself standing waiting, in a deserted schoolyard, with night falling, for my father to draw himself away from his books, and remember that he is supposed to be picking me up.

The room is perfect. Not in the clean-lined, not-a-thing-out-of-place, bold new furniture way of trendy magazines. Perfect in the orderly jumble of lovingly collected furniture and home- and hand-painted artworks. Perched on top of a rough-at-the-edges armoire, a mermaid looks across at a decent-sized paper parasol, shielding a figure, humble in her papier mâché body and black straw hat. She is lying on her side, propped up on one elbow and completely absorbed in her book.





The floor is made of skinny slats of polished wood and there is enough space for two roof lamps to be hanging. Walking produces the occasional, unfamiliar, but not uncomfortable, creak. The double curtains covering the second, unopened window permit the introduction of a diffused light.




Dishes clink and I hear the repeated squeak of compressed springs.

There is a dishwasher to be un-packed and jumping on the trampoline will not stave off my son's hunger for long.

I swing my legs to the floor.

Poor rooster.

Valiant, but out-matched.


Monday 1 February 2016

French delicacies


Christmas finally! What a long wait – and, sadly for my son, the wait will start all over again in a few hours. We’ve reached that point in the afternoon when, feeling rather like the stuffed turkey, we’ve all retreated to the various parts of the house to rest our inflated stomachs and have some time-out. My daughters are happily watching the first of the five seasons of ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ which came tucked in their Santa sacks. Their arrival today explains why the girls, through my husband’s ebay account, were never the lucky final bidders on all the auctions selling the series that they had repeatedly asked him to bid on. My son started building his Ninjago Lego temple and dragon at nine o’clock this morning and, apart from lunch and a short walk, he has not moved from his room all day, so intent is he on his construction. The adults are either sleeping, reading or sleeping while reading.

In fact, we didn’t even make it through lunch. We had to pause after main course leaving the wonderfully aged Vacherin des Bauges cheese course, the Christmas pudding made in Australia and flown over in my parents’ luggage and the beautifully crafted and decorated gingerbread house and papillottes that were to finish the meal. Little wonder given the amount that we had already eaten.

As an aperitif we served a Cremant from Bourgogne, which is what we used to call champagne but cannot officially anymore, as it is not produced in the Champagne region. To the sparkling wine, we added a liqueur with raspberry overtones, bought at the castle in Chambord in the Loire Valley. To be honest, when I bought it I had no idea if it tasted good or not but the bottle was exquisite and the description on the label sounded encouraging. If you did not know any different you could be forgiven for thinking that it was a perfume bottle. It has a beautiful shape and its cap is decorated in fake jewels, no doubt alluding to the castle’s royal past. The style of drink, wine with a fruit-based liqueur added, is called a ‘kir’ in French or a ‘kir royal’ if champagne replaces the wine.

To accompany the drink, my husband had made various delicately presented blinis and, on the recommendation of our French friends, had prepared the foie gras, a Christmas delicacy, on top of a slice of ginger cake, all topped with an onion jam. It was an unusual sweet and sour combination, which masked the taste of the foie gras. I couldn’t help thinking that if you were going to consume all the calories in the foie gras, it would be better to actually be able to taste them.

An unnecessary, but now compulsory, part of the meal followed – the snail test. Just before our first Christmas here, at the tiny market in Marceau, we came across a snail breeder selling his snails. They were presented in edible puff pastry cases and, as we were throwing ourselves resolutely into doing as much as possible in the French way, we had decided to include them on our Christmas menu. The green colour was a bit off-putting and the garlic butter that they swam in, powerful, but, encased as they were in pastry, they resembled just another innocuous hors d’oeuvre and slid down reasonably effortlessly.

The second year here, we bought snails in their shells, frozen and ready to heat in the oven. This time, naturally enough, the snail shells were inedible, so the still clearly identifiable, curled snail bodies needed to be hooked out of the shell with a small fork. They came out with a faintly audible sucking noise looking very green and smelling very strong. This presented too much of a challenge for my sister’s children, who were here visiting from Australia. As the hosts, we were obliged to lead by example and so I had to put on a brave face and resist the overwhelming spontaneous gagging reflex.

So why, you ask, did we force ourselves to go through that again this year if it was such a challenging experience? For one, they look perfectly edible, presented as they are in their frozen packets at the supermarket. You see only the shells and the top coating of herby looking butter and think that it really cannot be that bad. Secondly, and more importantly, we had guests again and they could not come to France without learning to say ‘merci’ instead of thank-you at the baker’s as they bought their morning croissant, and they could not leave without eating snails.


My father’s competitive spirit enabled him to pass his snail test with flying colours, outdoing the miserable failed attempts of his grandchildren the year before. His reward - the rest of the meal, where we had graciously omitted the frogs' legs, boudin and andouillette (more innards masquerading as sausages), in favour of prawns, pork and salmon.

And still they come to visit…



Saturday 2 January 2016

Places to call home


I was looking forward to our planned road trip; a mere 1400 km across the desolate, wind-swept, outback plains of Australia, dotted with the crumbling remains of dwellings long ago resigned to their slow, silent end; tin-roofed farm buildings, only fully alive when beating to the rhythm of the passing, oft-longed-for raindrops, and piles of rarely used or abandoned farm machinery - which, it was hard to tell.

We slowed occasionally to watch as the cows, straddling the main highway and unaware of their priority status, crossed in front of us to paddocks more desirable, unconcerned about timelines, variable property prices, drought-affected incomes or our need to 'just be there'.

Changing speed limits marked our entry and exit to the small, and getting smaller, towns; one of which I used to call home. It was hot, too...but that, opening the car door from our air-conditioned comfort and stepping into a veritable furnace, we expected.

What I had forgotten, and what struck me the most, was the straight lines. We had become used to the contours of our French mountains, cursed them occasionally as we struggled up and down them on our bikes or returning on foot from the village with our laden shopping baskets. But, happy to post photo after photo of soaring, beautiful peaks. Out here, it was achingly limitless, flat and open; nature and time disappearing into the horizon.
It was all coming back to me, how, divorced from the distractions of city living, I used to feel. If I was lucky, being there, in the Australian outback, brought with it a calmness, a sense of peace. But, that sentiment floated, as it always had, dangerously close to a darker push and pull - attraction and dissatisfaction. If I had had the choice would I have loved the land, happily lived the entwined lifestyle of land and farmer, oblivious to the bigger world out there?  Or, would I have known that, despite sincerely wishing that it was, that it would never have been enough?
I suspect that I know the answer. And, it probably has little to do with any one particular place. That push and pull has become more vigorous, determined to keep shaking me out of my now and onto my next destination.