We kicked it off with a long walk through the quiet streets of Paris and ended it with the holy trinity - cheese, wine and bread. A good start to the new year!
Walk into any fromagerie in France during goat cheese season (April to November) and you will be faced with a tempting array of wrinkly rectangles, fresh drums, blue mold covered cylinders, two-toned cones, grey pyramids, white diamonds, discs wrapped in leaves, and a distinctive four-leaf clover, le Trèfle du Perche. In the French cheese world, this one is fairly recent creation. Back in 1999 a group of 7 artisan cheesemakers in the northern part of the Loire Valley and the southern part of Normandy established l’Association des Fromagers Caprins Perche et Loir (after numerous meetings involving copious amounts of local cheese and wine I like to think) and created a new goat cheese. Their goal was to come up with a fromage de chèvre that would be instantly recognizable and that would become associated with their region. During its inception, one of the members spotted an unusual, four-leaf clover shaped clay cheese mold in a local rural museum and the rest is h...
It's not every day that you get invited to spend an afternoon sitting in a small room overlooking the Seine with an MOF or two, the president of la Chambre professionnelle des artisans boulangers-pâtissiers de Paris , a delightful fromagère, Djibril Bodian, the winner of last year's Best Baguette in Paris competition and, most importantly, two long tables lined with baguettes. 155 baguettes to be exact. To be tasted by only 15 of us. A seemingly endless and daunting task, yet it was taken very seriously. We inspected, sniffed, poked, prodded, chewed and tasted 71 baguettes each over the course of the afternoon. The tasting wrapped up around 6:45pm, the final numbers were tallied up and the winner was called just after 7pm. Then the bottles of Champagne came out, I'm sure with the goal to both toast us for our efforts and to get the flavor of bread out of our mouths. Baguettes, as far as the eye can see! As I mentioned in my most recent post , the jury is made up of mai...
Our old house in Normandy, which is now a charming rental cottage . We highly recommend this place! For the first 10 years that we lived here, whenever I was visiting the U.S. and met someone new, they would inevitably ask me where I lived. When I would reply that I lived in France, their response, every single time , would be, "so how long have you lived in Paris ?" I always found that pretty funny. It's like telling someone that you live in the U.S. and they respond by asking how long you've lived in New York City. But I get it. Paris represents "France" to most foreigners. However there is much, much more to l'Hexagone than Paris! And over the years we've been fortunate enough to live in a few regions and have enjoyed exploring a good chunk of this beautiful country on many of our vacations. I know that once you've chosen where to go, picking where to stay can be daunting. The sheer number of holiday rentals out there is crazy, so I thought ...
Komentar
Posting Komentar