Adieu Detox Salad, Bonjour Tropézienne

A while back after a yoga class, my mobile started to ring. I was standing in the co-ed change room and trying to turn off my phone but I was also a wee bit worried because Chris was away and few people other than the school have my mobile. So I answered it. My friend M. from our village was calling to say she was in Aix and wanted to know if I wanted to take a coffee? Lucky me!

Problem was, I was starving (what else is new), so I dragged her off to to a restaurant so I could eat something and we could both have something warm to drink. That Thursday was day one of the coldest Mistral days I’ve experienced here. The winds were blowing 120km/hr and silly me had left the house in capri length yoga pants and no socks.

So off we went and I ate something called a “detox salad” full of quinoa and avocado. It was delicious and that resto is one of the few places in Aix I wasn’t embarassingly underdressed for lunch. Their massive communal table is great cover up when you show up for lunch in your gym clothes which is considered terribly uncouth in these parts.

After lunch when I got home, I received a notice about a new café opening in Aix called La Tarte Tropézienne. It’s a chain restaurant and one has just opened up not far from french and yoga. I immediately emailed M. and said “to hell with the detox salad, next time we’re going there!”.

Before arriving here I had never heard of, seen, or tasted a tarte Tropézienne. There are three of them pictured below and these ones are from the epicentre of deliciousness in Aix, the historic bakery Béchard.I was treated to my first tarte Tropézienne within weeks of our arrival in France. My friend L. bought one and fed it to us at dessert.

I borrowed this photo from another blogger.

It was the.most.delicious.dessert.I.have.ever.eaten. I kid you not but I dreamed about that cake three nights in a row!

I am not the first nor will I be the last to write about this tarte. This blogger does a terrific job of sharing how Brigitte Bardot helped name and popularize the dessert. It is a simple creation with two pieces of brioche cake hugging delicious cream filling. Have I told you they are delicious? I googled “tarte Tropézinne” and looked at the images that popped up. None of them. Repeat none of them come close to suggesting how good this cake actually is.

I like them so much that one afternoon I fired emails to all of the french bakeries I could think of in Toronto asking if anyone them made this desert. Nary a one … yet. Looks like I need to start making them myself! Luckily, we’ve got back-to-back visits with Grandparents and two birthdays coming up between now and when we leave so we’ll have lots of good excuses to indulge.

Long may your big jib draw …

One evening long ago at an urban planning conference in St. John’s Newfoundland, I found myself joining the legions of those who come-from-away as I participated in a “Screeching In” ceremony. When asked “Is ye a Screecher?”, if you want to answer “yes”, you need to drink some “local” hooch (a.k.a. Screech, not really local at all but Jamaican dark rum), recite some prose (the excerpt above mean “may the wind always be in your forward sails”), and kiss a cod as a way of wishing “bon voyage” to those sailing away to bring back the rum.

The other day when we decided to eat my Easter fish for dessert, I was reminded of that sloshy evening in St. John’s and felt the urge to kiss the fish. We cracked it open and found many MORE delicious goodies inside. The four of us, over a few nights, had lots of fun tasting M. Brunet’s delicious chocolate creations. When we get back I’m heading straight for the Chocolateria to see if I can inspire some Easter fun for next year.

I’m a hasty photographer and as I’m posting these pics I often cringe at the everyday objects that lurk in the backgrounds of my photos. But these bits and pieces are true artifacts of our life. Note above: there is a half-finished glass of water – that’s my fault and a common bad habit of mine. And there’s a pink hair elastic – for the love of all that is good if hair elastics were currency I’d make the Forbes 500.

I love objects with surprises inside – kinder eggs, Christmas crackers, and now Easter fish. M. Brunet’s chocolate is truly delicious and he is such a gracious and low key chocolate maker. The fish was great just on its own but then when we popped it open we were treated to a variety of new delicious things. It’s funny how even as a grown up treats like these can delight!

[editor’s aside: It’s funny, all kissing of chocolate cod aside, when writing this post, I stumbled upon another common experience between France and Newfoundland. Earlier this winter I wrote about the tasty tartiflette I made. The recipe for it concludes with putting an entire reblochon cheese on top of a huge casserole full of potatoes, onions and lardons. The recipe for tartiflette isn’t an old Alsatian tradition — it was recently created to increase the sales of reblochon cheese. Well, même chose avec le Screech. It’s not some age-old Newfoundland tradition but a newish one geared toward tourists. Ah, the power of food and booze-related economic development!]

Joyeuses Pâques

Happy Easter to everyone who celebrates it! We’re in the fading hours of a three-day long Easter Weekend here in France. Surprisingly Monday is a holiday here and not Good Friday when the kids had to go to school and all the stores were open. H. coloured this “Joyeuses Pâques” chick at school on Friday and brought it home much to our delight and wee surprise. We’ve long grown used to our schools at home taking non-denminational approach to holidays.

On Saturday the girls and I attended an Easter Egg decorating workshop at the home of a local artist. There were about 15 kids and a handful of mums from the village. Agathe, the artist, had an amazing array of paint, dyes, and sparkly things to add to the eggs. In my french class last week we had an interesting discussion about how at home in Canada we decorate white eggs while my European classmates and french teacher were comedically insistent that only “real” eggs could be brown. The kids also decorated cartons and baskets to hold their colourful creations.

Creativity is certainly abundant here at Easter. I had no idea, before coming, how much fun the Easter chocolate would be in France. I assumed it would be delicious and can report indeed it is. When mes beaux-parents were visiting in December we all took a food tour of Aix where I learned about how, in France, pastry chefs learn how to make pastry, bread, chocolate and ice cream. If you haven’t yet seen it I recommend “The Kings of Pastry” to highlight the intensity and creativity these chefs possess. Our tour guide introduced us to Brunet Chocolate which is now my favourite chocolate shop in Aix (4 rue Laurent Fauchier, Aix-en-Provence).

When buying the chocolate owl for Chris last week I happened to be in the shop when M. Brunet was carrying out a lion made out of chocolate. It stood about 75cm high and it was magnificent! I was kicking myself that I didn’t have a camera with me but you’ll have to trust me that his creation was whimsical and edible. The terrific fish and owl shown above are M. Brunet’s chocolate creations. The fish is being held together with a ribbon because it’s full of something delicious!

The Easter Bunny brought our girls the chickens, the white “chocolate” duck and the sheep. The big bunny heads are from Walkers Chocolates in Burlington ON (thanks to Grandma and Grandpa Gore) and if we were home they would have been hidden under napkins at Easter Dinner. It feels a bit like we’ve been observing the chocolate devouring part of Easter for while now thanks to the early arrival of some Easter treats from Nana Beth which have served as our amuses bouches this last week.

Today is April Fools Day. In France, April Fool’s day is observed by funny efforts to slap paper fishes on the backs of your friends and yelling “Poisson D’Avril!”. We instead ate the delicious chocolate shaped sardines shown above.

If we’d been home for Easter we likely would have done of our twice-annual Lake Ontario end-to-end drives from Kingston to Burlington to allow for visits with three sets of grandparents in one weekend. R. remarked on Saturday night this was the first Easter in a very long time where the Easter Bunny would hide eggs at “home” for the girls instead of the hotel where we are often staying. The girls were also surprised on Saturday night when they found out that I brought their baskets from home. So, as with the Christmas stockings, we have some well travelled ornaments in our household!

Our clocks changed here at 2am on the 31st. I expected our girls to wake us very early on Easter Morning but they let us sleep until a bit past 8am. While her sister watched a tv show, H. kept herself busy making us Easter cards. The inside of mine had this great rainbow bunny which I thought was an excellent celebration of spring, Easter and, little did she know, the growing terrific and inclusive political efforts in the United States to extend marriage rights.

This Easter weekend ends with an odd week for our girls. Much to their chagrin, they have to go to school on Wednesday. At the last minute in the fall the Toussaint break was extended from 10 to 12 school days so the government decided to make up the 2 extra days later in the year. The first “make up” Wednesday is this week. It’s been a good long time since our girls had 4 days of school in a row. Our reminders that it is good practice for when we go home are not persuasive. We also keep reminding them that they only have 9 more school days until friends from Toronto come and they, once again, have two weeks of holidays to enjoy!

Bon courage to everyone at home tonight as you pack snacks and lunches. Just like the week after Halloween, I’m always reminded of how astute the rascals’ negotiation efforts are with the goal of adding a few eggs to boost their learning power. Happy spring everyone!

Tuck Shop

Four years ago we decided it was time to lay the ground work for getting R. interested in sleep-away camp. When R. was younger she didn’t welcome new activities that involved being away from us. But as a child who was keen on the outdoors, team activities and being busy, we thought she might, eventually, be keen on an all-girls camp. So one rainy Sunday afternoon in late spring we started to weave the tales of camp where she could swim every day, canoe, rock climb, make crafts, be rowdy in the dining hall and eat candy from the tuck shop!  At the end of our little wooing effort, R declared “sign me up!”.

For an almost 7-year old the the camaraderie of girls, adventures outdoors and the chance to buy candy without the watchful eye of her parents appealed. My own memories of camp are, I think, sharper because of the brain-enhancing power of pixie sticks and mo-jo’s brought back to the cabin in small brown paper bags. And yesterday, thirty plus years later and thousands of kilometres away I was reminded of the joy of the tuck shop.

Good Friday is an ordinary work day in France which surprised us. But we decided to “observe” the stat holiday from home and go out for lunch in Aix-en-Provence (about 30 minutes away,  the closest large urban centre to our tiny village). Aix was full of tourists – well-dressed ones from the north and, judging by their accents, plenty of North Americans. It was funny walking around a town I’ve come to know quite well watching other people attempt to navigate its tangle of centre-ville pedestrian streets and alleys – I felt more like a “local” than usual. But if you looked inside one of my shopping bags you would have thought I was back at home in Canada.

Last October a curious new café/shop opened up in Aix. It’s called The Provence Shop where they “offer good coffee, tasty food, international groceries and a relaxed atmosphere in the heart of Aix-en-Provence”. Expats are their target market and based on our experiences so far, they are doing a good job both feeding and selling things to Anglo people craving things from home.

The Provence Shop is a popular spot – don’t be fooled by this picture taken before the shop opened! It has a rather counter-intuitive name since the only things it really sells from around here is terrific wine. Regardless, their menu is excellent and the owners are lovely.

The store carries food and goodies from the UK, the Netherlands and North America. It’s a quirky mélange of nostalgia, curiosity and utility for us. At lunch yesterday, our table was in the back where we were surrounded by Betty Crocker cake mixes and frosting in a can, Pop Tarts and marshmellow whip, Dutch toast sprinkles, breakfast cereal for the Anglo expat diaspora (Lucky Charms, steel cut oats, and Dorset Granola), baking supplies (including royal frosting mix and baking power which is hard to find here), and cold items like Red Leicester cheddar, Strongbow cider, and English breakfast sausages. We had a hilarious conversation in which I explained the importance of Birds Custard Powder in making Nanaimo bars and trifle. Around the corner from our table were crackers, cookies, local wine, and a bevy of condiments including curries, fish sauce and satay spices, vinegars, “mayonnaise” (the Miracle Whip kind), baby food and all kinds of junk food.

Here’s what we bought yesterday. Our kids have (finally!) come to their senses and realized the deliciousness that is peanut butter – a few weeks ago our friend Lisa and her awesome teenaged daughter H. served up some peanut butter chocolate cupcakes and now our girls are hooked. The Reese’s peanut butter cups will be a fun treat for them. There’s a bag of mini Cadbury Easter Creme eggs in honour of Pâques this weekend. The three people in our house who normally report liking them claim that these particular ones have an orange flavour which is not to their pleasing. We’re headed to our Aix-based friends Lisa and Steve’s for Easter dinner on Sunday so we bought a box of After Eight mints for pure 1970s Canadian “dinner party” nostalgia. A third family is joining us for dinner at their house and they observe Passover. I’m bringing pre-dinner apéro snacks and so I was delighted to find some Matzo crackers. Chris and I spent over an hour that morning in the giant Carrefour attempting to find something that was a Passover-friendly base for dips and spreads. We also bought some granola and a bottle of malt vinegar which will replace the massive bottle of white vinegar we keep in our pantry for when frites served here.

To be clear even without these expat groceries there is no culinary suffering happening in this household. I’ve written enough about delicious food this year that you all know that “all we do around here is eat”. While when attempting to bake/cook there are ingredients from home that would be nice to be able to access (e.g. cream of tartar, peanut sauce, baking powder, hummus without fresh cheese in it) there’s not much we actually miss or long for.  At lunch yesterday I turned to Chris and said “I feel like we’re in a grown-up tuck shop”. Kids at camp don’t need candy just like expats in France don’t need salt and vinegar chips or Golden Syrup. But even on an amazing adventure sometimes it’s a treat to be reminded of fun things from home.

Place the whole Reblochon on top.

What can I say? I’m a sucker for a recipe with odd instructions and the recipe I chose for Tartiflette made me laugh out loud.

Tartiflette is a delicious combination of potatoes, onions, lardons and importantly Reblochon cheese. Our kids have had it at the cantine for lunch at school but I had my first one, at R’s urging, 2 weekends ago when we went skiing. Then recently at a bookclub the hostess served one at lunch. So next I decided to make one for Sunday dinner.

As legend has it, the dish has its origins in the Savoie region of the French Alps. The recipe was supposedly created in the 1980s to help increase the sales of Reblochon cheese. This relatively recent invention of the dish might be one explanation why I couldn’t find a Julia Child recipe for it. Reblochon is a soft round cow’s milk cheese and from what I can tell, it’s a cheese equivalent of moonshine. The cheese was apparently kept a secret for a long time because it was made from milk withheld from the tax collectors who kept the milk quota.

When I was trying to find a recipe I began to wonder if Tartiflette was a bit like risotto? Risotto purists (I’m one) nurture the arborio along allowing the starch of the rice to provide its creamy deliciousness – no cheating with parm. Here some recipes called for crème fraîche to add to creaminess of the Tartiflette while others did not. I decided to try the one that seemed to rely on the starchiness of a particular variety of potatoes and said “put the whole Reblochon on top of the potatoes” just before putting the dish in the oven.

It took me over an hour to peel and slice the cooked potatoes – no ‘comfort food in 30 minutes’ here! Here is what mine looked like before I put it in the oven.

Look! A casserole in a washed rind, smelly fascinator.

The recipe I was using made it sound like the cheese would break open and ooze down onto the potatoes while cooking. After about 20 minutes of the 40 minutes it needed to cook, my cheese was still structurally intact so I helped it along a bit by poking it. I had to cook mine about 1h10m to get it as bubbly as I thought it should be. And then I made a silly blogger mistake – I was in so the groove of making dinner that I completely forgot to take a post-oven picture before we ate it!

Mine looked pretty much like this one and everyone at the table enjoyed it. Tartiflette  would taste great in the middle of winter at home in Toronto but it’s unclear whether I can get real Reblochon cheese there or not. Tartiflette traditionalists claim it never tastes right without the nutty flavour of Reblochon.

Check back next January to see what I’ve managed to wrangle up in Toronto – I guess by then I would need to rename my blog noussommesrevenusauCanada.wordpress.com. After reading that boring blog you could watch paint try, see Anna and Bates read their mail to each other on Downton, or listen to your kids read the phone book aloud … yawn, oh well. At least my abilities to pick the verb for going home and to to put it in the past tense are getting better.

Turn left at the donkeys then drive over a small creek …

So began the directions we got from our friend Eric finding a vineyard he recommended called “Domaines des Masques“. Last weekend they had an open-house event so we decided to go with a small rascal in tow.

Before Christmas, Eric told me about this place so I had some sketchy idea of where it was. But I hate driving around with no real idea of how to get someplace so I began a fruitless internet search for real directions to the vineyard. One big cultural difference between Canada and France is the degree of precision that comes (or not) with instructions, event announcements and directions. In France it’s the norm to offer the “ish” version of said details. Try as a might, I never was really able to find clear directions to the vineyard.

We started with what I could remember from Eric’s original instructions: “Drive up the mountain, when you get to the donkeys [at La Maison Ste. Victoire, I’ve been here long enough now that I knew where he meant] turn left, then drive over a small creek …”.

After crossing the above pictured creek we began a 20 minute muddy and bumpy journey down a road that didn’t exist in our GPS. Every once and a while we’d see a small wooden sign for “Les Masques” so we kept going, going, and going. Eventually we started to see groves of newly planted olive trees (a good sign here of a vineyard/civilization), field after field of grape vines (another good sign) and then suddenly the road was paved.

A few minutes on the paved road and we spied the vineyard and its sign.

Yes, that small sign is THE sign for the vineyard. So up the drive we went and then into the tasting room. At home the only vineyard I can recently recall visiting is Huff in Prince Edward County where we usually stop at the beginning of our holiday, pick up a case of their rosé and then head on our merry way. We never taste it before buying it, we always like it. Here I’ve stopped at a vineyards to buy a bottle or two of wine for dinner but this was our first proper vineyard visit and we had no clue what to expect.

Oddly, last week I just finished reading Corked which is a book about a woman from Toronto who goes on French wine tasting odyssey with her father. In the book they taste lots of wine but I didn’t really put it together that by showing up at this vineyard we’d be doing the same thing.

So in we roll with a 6 year-old in tow and we’re greeted by a lovely woman named Pauline. She opens the door to the tasting space and it’s this über-calm room with a groovy minimalist design and a u-shaped table made out of barn-board and pristine white corrian countertops. There are 5 men there sitting quietly, well into their tastings – three youngish guys and, guess who?, Eric and a friend of his! We all have a good laugh while Chris, H. and I pull up stools.

Given the all-male, serene company I’m then wondering if we’d unwittingly committed (yet another?) faux-pas in France by bringing a child to a vineyard for a tasting? My friend D. recently posted an article about Paris and its cultural norms so this idea we’d done something rude was fresh in my mind.

Pauline was gracious, lovely to H., and spoke that crisp, clean and just-slow-enough french that is well matched with my ability. We tasted all eight wines they had to offer with H. doing some smell tests for us in between making friends with the vineyard cat and dog outside. Well over an hour later we left with 2 boxes (one of red, the other of white) plus a bottle of extra-special red they call Syrahdictive. It was a fun Saturday afternoon adventure for us and now we’ve got a decent stash of wine.

We’ve got Canadian friends coming to visit on Friday and we’re keen to offer them a fun evening of apéros, food and wine. On Sunday we made a stop a food and wine festival in Saint Maximin la Sainte Baume, about 20 minutes away from our house. There we stocked up on a delicious array of spreads for Friday evening which we look forward to sharing. All we do around here is eat indeed!

You know you’re a regular when …

Earlier this sabbatical I wrote about our Friday night pizza habits fuelled by our village pizza truck. Recently we had a good laugh about an event that signalled we were true regulars in our temporary french village home.

It’s not enough that now, each Friday, Tuck eagerly awaits his piece of ham from the dog-loving pizza truck chef/owner Claudine. But on our last visit, Chris came home with 3 boxes of pizza. Our norm is two – the kids eat a cheese one and we rotate between a bunch of varieties with lots left for lunch on Saturday.

So the three boxes puzzled me. Chris quickly explained that Claudine was testing out a new recipe, she wanted to know what we thought of it. So she sent home this “tester” half pizza for our feedback. This delicious creation was made from crème fraîche, cooked lardons and roasted onions. Delicious! Delicious! Delicious!

La Galette des Rois

I blame the money cake. Those of us of a certain age might recall birthday parties in 1972 and 1973 with cakes with coins hidden inside. My mom wrapped the coins in waxed paper because we all know how dirty money is (ha!). I have very vivid memories of my confetti birthday cake with cooked pink fluffy frosting, multi-coloured little ball sprinkles on top, and a handful of small change baked inside as a surprise for the lucky recipients. For as long as I can remember I have had a whimsical love of food with surprises inside.

For New Year’s Eve I ordered DIY party crackers from the UK. The kit to make you own comes in this very inconspicuous flat package complete with shiny foil wrappers, ties, cardboard forms, jokes, hats, and the things you pull to make the “pop”. I love the moment when the cracker is popped open, the insides go flying and then everyone scrambles to read their jokes, tell their fortunes and compare whose plastic chatchka is better. Crackers are tacky and fun – we’ll stuffed ours with french sweets and had good laughs on the 31st with the cheezy jokes.

I love fortune cookies too – not for how they taste but for the fun of cracking one open to see what is inside. Ditto for the KinderSurprise but I like the outsides on them too. We like them so much in our house we had baskets of them at our wedding!

So I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m a wee bit excited about the arrival of la galette des rois – the king’s cake – in celebration of the Epiphany today. The Epiphany, celebrated on January 6th, is (I’ve just read) the Christian celebration of the revelation that Jesus was the son of God and is also known as the 12th day of Christmas or the 12th night. This article has an excellent history of the cake and its origins.

The galette des rois is a fun part of the Epiphany feast and it takes many forms around the world and even here in France. There appear to be two versions here in Provence.

This frangipane one with almond paste inside came from our local bakery complete with the fancy hat.

This one is more like a brioche with fruit confit and aspirated sugar on top.

Tradition dictates that there is a “charm” hidden in the cake. At its origin there was a bean (une fève) hidden in the cake and the eater who found it is king or queen for the day and is promised luck, wealth, power, and virtue. The King or Queen also gets to pick his/her Queen or King for the day by dropping the charm in the glass of their chosen royal consort.

H. has an epiphany – the first piece of cake goes to her sister.

People apparently take this process of cake cutting and piece distribution quite seriously with processes in place to reduce bias or advantage in potential charm finding opportunities. When cutting the cake, the youngest guest gets to decide who gets which piece. In particularly rowdy families the youngest gets to sit under the table while the cake is being cut and call out the name of the person who gets to receive the cake piece that was just cut.

It seems that people start eating these cakes before the Epiphany so that if you find the charm on one day, it’s your turn to provide the cake the next day. Other traditions suggest if you find the charm you need to buy a round of drinks for your guests. I learned on facebook recently that in Mexico if you find the favour you have to host a tamale party for everyone.

By the mid 19th century the bean was replaced with a porcelain charm including some produced by Limoges. Now the charms (still called la fève) take many forms. I’ve seen cakes with Asterix and Obelix on the label at the grocery store and I’ve seen many photos on line of charm collections that look like the ones shown in this photo including the same figurines you’d find in a manger scene. Apparently the collection of these trinkets is serious enough that people who are rabid about it are called fèvophiles! 

Last week Chris and I had a good laugh at our local bakery. We’d gone up to buy baguette for dinner and noticed a new sign on the door showing a set of 12 charms of french politicians we might find in our galette. Can you imagine cutting a cake and finding a mini-Rob Ford or Prime Minister Harper as your “good luck” talisman? This is a photo of the fève we found in our cake today.

This is a porcelain caricature of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. He’s a long standing member of parliament and he keeps a blog too: http://www.jean-luc-melenchon.fr.

Look who is King for the day! Figures the political scientist would find the left-leaning fève in his cake piece.

When reading up about the tradition surrounding the galette I found this blog post “All they do around here is eat!”. The title made me laugh because sometimes it really seems like that is the case!

Tomorrow, as at home in Toronto, our girls go back to school. While this holiday was only two weeks long it felt like a real break so I think it will be a bit of a rough grind tomorrow getting everyone back in the groove. So we’ll take the good luck from our king’s cake and spread it around to all of you who are prying little people out of bed, packing snacks, and generally smoothing the transition back to “normal” life.

Les Treize Desserts de Noël: In practice and other delicious things we ate

Merry Christmas! On the 24th I posted about the tradition of Provence of serving the thirteen desserts at the Réveillon dinner.

We had a lovely Christmas Eve with our Canadian friends. The host family has a tradition of eating West Indian food on the 24th so we were treated to a meal of dal, rice, very garlicky and delicious eggplant, stewed tomatoes and homemade fresh roti. Growing up my mum made tortière pie for the 24th so I added one to the table and the twelve of us had a fantastic feast!

When it was time for dessert I assembled my version of Les Treize Desserts de Noël. In the picture above you will find:

Les quatres mendiants (the four beggars):  1. Hazelnuts or walnuts (we had both, symbolizing the order of St Augustin); 2. Dry figs (symbolizing the Franciscan order); 3. Almonds (symbolizing the Carmelite order); 4. Raisins (symbolizing the Dominican order).

5. La pompe a huile (the olive oil pump) – it’s the bread that looks like a sheath of wheat. We broke it with our hands, not a knife, to bring good luck in the new year.

6 and 7. Dark nougat (with caramelized honey and almonds) and light nougat (lavender honey with pistachios)

8. Fresh dates

9. Fresh clementine oranges from Spain

10. Winter pear

11. Fruit confit – small clementines preserved in a rich fruit syrup

12. Fruit jelée – small jellied candies shaped like fruit – ours were delicious!

and 13. Les Callisons d’Aix – the very white pointy ended oval candies just above the oranges in the picture above.

We had lots of fun tasting and sampling the 13 elements but dessert didn’t end there. We also had “Les Beaucoup de Desserts de Lisa” (our hostess)! The table was long enough to seat 12 and it was lined end-to-end with her Christmas baking that included: shortbread cookies, sugar cookies, chocolate and vanilla spiral cookies, Mexican brownies, chocolate fudge, date squares, mincemeat tarts, linzer cookies, and light spice and rum cake. Everyone left the table well fed!

The label on our bottle here is a little worse for wear.

On Christmas Eve Eve we had drinks with village friends who introduced us to a new aperitif Le Pineau Des Charentes. Charentes is in the west of France, south of Nantes and north of Bordeaux. We’re planning a western France driving trip for our April break so I’m thinking we’ll have to do some tasting along the way. By complete fluke I managed to find a bottle of Pineau a grocery store in Trets (a village about 10 minutes away with larger grocery stores than the one in our village).

I was in my second grocery store trying to find plain ice cream. Who knew that come Christmas it is very difficult in this part of the world to find vanilla ice cream? There were ten different kinds of ice-creamy-yule-log things and pear sorbet but no ordinary vanilla ice cream! So my failed ice cream efforts found me on the phone calling Lisa while standing in one of the many aisles of alcohol [by square meterage French grocery stores seem to be 25% cheese and 30% wine and booze I think!]. As I was talking on my mobile I looked up and lo and behold, a sole bottle of Pineau was right in front me! I took that as a sign it needed to join us for apéros before the Réveillon dinner.

On Christmas morning, after we opened presents we had gingerbread pancakes with some good Canadian maple syrup (we’ve been saving some stuff from home). I tried to convince everyone we should try the Gingerbread Spice Dutch Baby pancake from the Smitten Kitchen Cookbook we got for Lisa but I was out voted.

Then was time to cook our turkey. In an earlier post I wondered aloud what the turkey I ordered would actually look like? Well, after enduring the mosh pit at Stephanelli’s butcher in Trets on the 24th, I got our turkey – cleaned, (mostly) featherless, headless, 48E (gulp!) and 3.16 kg.

When I ordered the turkey I didn’t specify a weight because the woman asked me how many people it needed to serve (eight) so I let them do the weight-math. When I picked it up I realized that in France on Christmas Day you are eating your five or seven course grand repas de Noël so if a turkey is served it is a much smaller portion than at home in Canada where the turkey is the main event. C’est la vie and I guess lucky us because if I had bought a North American sized one it would have cost me $150! On Christmas Day we were back chez Lisa where there was plenty of food and as it turned out we had enough turkey so that there was meat left for one sandwich on the 26th.

This picture comes from the blog: http://www.lottieanddoof.com. They used Martin Picard’s recipe from his Au Pied de Cochon cookbook. Not surprising, his version is even more rich than the one I cooked up!

The host family is vegetarian so in addition to the turkey we had delicious broccoli and mushroom strudel, sweet potatoes, whipped mashed potatoes, green beans and parsnips. For dessert I made a favourite winter dessert from home called Maple Pouding Chomeur. The recipe I used comes from Anita Stewart’s Canada Cookbook and it serves 6 so we doubled it.

Having Christmas dinner with two other families was an excellent end to delicious day. Now it’s time to start thinking about the next Réveillon dinner on December 31st. Raclette is on the menu which means we get to crack open the box on our new machine. In the meantime, it’s probably good that we’re hoping to get a hike in today and tomorrow we’re going to ski.

Gingerbuild 2012 with a Chèvre Finale.

Early this fall one of our girls’ most articulated worries was that “we won’t have a fun Christmas”. This fear was easily dispatched with an early commitment do something with the kids’ village friends to celebrate Christmas. So, today six friends joined our two rascals for an afternoon of Christmas merry-making centred around decorating gingerbread houses.

The path to hosting this party was littered with:

a) the realization that the chemistry of baking here is much different than at home. There is, for example, no readily available cream of tartar in France. This is a problem when most gingerbread house recipes recommend using royal frosting as the mortar. Ones that don’t take cream of tartar sometimes suggest glycerine (no clue where to find it!) and meringue powder (I think I could more readily fine a yeti on Mount Saint Victoire behind me than this stuff).

b) failed experiments with chocolate and liquid sugar as alternative glues for the gingerbread houses – I was glad I erred on the side of excess  by having an extra house just “in case”. Well, “in case” happened. The facade of my first assembled fell off and smashed on the kitchen tile floor.

c) a trans-Atlantic plea for cream of tartar – thank-you Lisa for your last minute run to the BulkBarn and the bag of it that you brought me back.

d) some funny discussions about raw egg whites in royal frosting (the gingerbread house mortar) – there are no “pasteurized egg whites” (a common ingredient in North American recipes for royal frosting) in the cold section here! This absence is not really surprising in a country that happily eats unpasteurized cheeses, fresh mayo made from raw eggs and menus often serving steak tartare.

e) our learning that peppermint flavoured candy-canes are a North American thing. The ones here look like the ones from home but taste like fruit (e.g. cherries and strawberries). Who knew? Not us.

All’s well that ends well! I made good friends with icing sugar in the last 24 hours and am adding gingerbread-master-builder to the LinkenIn profile I never change or access.

I took a bunch of pictures today and I think they do a good job of showing how the afternoon went.

These are canisters of icing sugar.

Ready. Set. Go.

This is the tray of decorations we gave to everyone. It’s hard to know if we had more fun pulling this assemblage together or if the kids had more fun using it.

Rascals: grande et petite just before we started.

S. was my muse when I made this demo-snowman.

Sugar high: mid-stream. Packing eight kids into this kitchen was a bit of a tight squeeze but we live in a 14′ wide house in Toronto so we’re used to it.

A. with her lovely creation.

L. after eating some pop rocks.

S. still eating his pop rocks.

R. wishing her mom would stop taking so many pictures! This child is not from the less-is-more school of design!

L. with no front teeth and her most excellent house. She’s the poster child for 6 year old girls 🙂

ChaCha with her shrinky-dinks decoration and gingerbread house in the background.

A close up of the marshmallow snowman ChaCha stuffed in her chimney.

Ta-da! H and her final creation!

After three hours of house and ornament making the party ended and kids started to trickle home. I sat down for a cup of tea with two of the moms when a rather ridiculous adventure unfolded. It all started with us hearing the sound of sheep or goats in the sejour (the kitchen) – one of the moms asked if it was a toy (nope) and then looked outside to see two goats in our town square. We didn’t think that much of it – there are flocks of goats on the mountain – and carried on with tea.

About 20 minutes later one of the women called her husband to check in. In my earlier post about dropping my keys down the sewer I talked about the awesome Eric. Well this phone call found Eric across the road, in the village square, with the two goats we heard earlier. Turns out these goats followed 2 hikers down the mountain this evening and were apparently separated or lost from their herd. Eric was helping the hikers figure out what to do!

So we all headed over to meet the goats – a mum and her kid – and stand around watching this lost-goat adventure unfold. Lots of phone calls were made, grass and water were retrieved by our kids to feed the goats, and eventually these lovely village people showed up and offered their barn space to the lost goats for the night. They figured their 2 donkeys wouldn’t mind sharing!

We parted company with the goats as Eric was loading them into his truck to drive them off to the barn-share. Eric has had an interesting week in the égouts (sewers) and the chauffeur for animals for the transhumance. The plan tomorrow is to try to find the shepherd and to repatriate the goats. Never a dull moment …