Friday Shopping

When I was growing up, holidays meant France.  Renting a gite in some corner of rural south west France.  There was lots and lots of eating out. I was maybe eleven or twelve when we had classic trout with almonds and then a mind blowing blackcurrant sorbet.   It's the earliest thing I recall eating, but tasting those flavours today transports me straight back.

And we spent hours shopping too.  A bit different to the soulless trolley pushing back home.  And no chore, even at that age.

Interspersed between visiting cathedrals, museums and exquisite villages improbably perched on hill tops, we became regulars at the local boulangerie and boucherie, charcuterie and of course the vegetable markets.  

I guess that naïveté alone is to blame for expecting something similar when we moved here.

When hunting for our renovation project/building plot, amongst the must haves on the list was a bakery in the village.  I’m about twenty years out of date.  There isn’t one and of the four in the nearby town, two have closed in the three years we have been here.  There is a bread van, but given that it arrives here at about two thirty in the afternoon, it is not a lot of use for lunch.  Not to worry, we have a bread machine.  A solution or part of the problem?

As for a butchers, well our tiny budget doesn’t allow for much spending in that department, anyway.  We quickly learnt that much of the cheap meat in the supermarket was both cheap and nasty.  We would never eat it back in the UK, so why did we think it would be any different here?  It all comes from the same EU factory farms, after all.  

And then we discovered the boucherie in the next village but two.  The shop is tiny, the range of cuts impressive and a handwritten board tells you from which farm each animal originates.  It's not cheap and why should it be?  There may not be a huge supply chain to finance, but years of love, skill and experience go into each and every dark aged morsel, from the bloodlines of the animal to the passion of the butcher. 

Today we bought two steaks cut from the lamb gigot and a single rump steak, for which we had to wait; the piece we wanted, the butcher decided was not good enough, so prepared a new slab and cut our single steak from the heart of the rump.  The bill was almost half our household budget for the week, but is all the meat we’ll eat for the next two weeks in all likelihood.

My only concern is the food miles of the beef; the farm it was raised on is closer to us than the shop it was sold in!