La Soupe de Noel

     Right now, stores around here are groaning with food. I had a stack of supermarket flyers all ready to scan and post--but they've gone missing or, more likely, I've recycled them and they're in the giant bin up on the road to Aigues Vives next to the bottle bin to which we've contributed more than our fair share in the past couple of days (annual party not excessive personal drinking).
    But those flyers...it seems to me that, when I lived on the other side of the Atlantic, turkeys featured and maybe hams. Here, I'd say 80 percent show foie gras and if it's not that, it's oysters or smoked salmon or scallops or champagne or any other luxury food or drink you'd care to name. Even Aldi (a bargain supermarket) has--or did last Thursday--the following impulse items next to the check-out:
1) Cans of foie gras
2) Packaged brioche slices (to spread the foie gras on)
3) Half bottles of Sauternes.
     Christmas is very much less commercial here. Where the money goes is on food.

     I didn't know about La Soupe de Noel but I did pick up the requisite cheese and recipe a week ago. Unfortunately, due to social craziness, the soup (layers of baguette, layers of cheese) never got made but the cheese was delicious.

What a difference a day makes.

Less than twenty-four little hours separate these two shots.

Sunday afternoon

Monday morning.

Mirepoix on a wintry afternoon....

We drove into Mirepoix the weekend before last for its Christmas market. The day was sharp and cold as a diamond but I've rarely seen this medieval town look more beautiful. It wasn't too crowded, and the winter light was low enough to spotlight the carvings under the arcade. Anyway, mes amis, some photo ops with extended captions.

A boulangerie that believes when it comes to Christmas decorations, more is more. The climbing Santa figure is very popular around here. 

Different varieties of honey, from the mountains, from wild flower meadows, from the forest. Don't their amber and gold colours make your want to spoon them out on to freshly made hot buttered toast?

I love this butcher's shop in the corner of the square. See those rotisserie chickens behind the sign?



Kids around here watch these instead of television. 

This sign hangs outside a store catering to pampered chiens et chats.

More sheep...

   Yes, my life is about a gazillion percent more rustic than it was a couple of years ago--and I wouldn't change it for the world. So often we find ourselves saying: "isn't it great that we live here?" My chic city friends are probably crossing their eyes...
   Anyway, I promised you more sheep--and more sheep are what you're going to get. I wish I'd had the camera with me the other day when we drove the back road over the hill to Intermarché and, as we came to the crest, saw--silhouetted against the smoky cut-out shape of the Pyrenees--a shepherd with his dogs and about two hundred sheep dotted on the slope below him.
   These sheep (if I haven't lost you by now) I chanced on when I was walking beside the river the other day. It's a nice chuckly little river, our Touyre (Occitan for "torrent") and, on this particular day, the shepherd was herding his flock along the footpath that runs beside it, letting them scamper down the bank for a drink en route.

    The white horse? It lives at the end of our impasse. If I go out on the balcony upstairs, and look to the right, this is what I see. A few chickens are usually clucking around near his feet.

Sheep May Safely Graze

   Bear with me but I have to find a link to an mp3 file or YouTube so you can play this while you read the post and gaze at the photos. Right, here you go...


Amazingly, about a squintillion videos exist of Bach's heart-stoppingly beautiful Sheep May Safely Graze. Many of them show sheep. For the purposes of this post, I have looked at more damned sheep in the last 15 minutes than you would believe. In the end I settled for a pianist so that you wouldn't be distracted from the real sheep, the Léran sheep, that, on Saturday morning appeared as a couple of friends and I strolled along the river bank on an utterly gorgeous autumn morning.
    Suddenly, ahead of us, we saw the local flock crossing the narrow foot-bridge and then, with the three-legged sheepdog urging them on, they headed for fresh fields and pastures new.

The Hunters' Feast.

    Every few months, we have a communal meal in the village, usually in the hall where, each Wednesday at 8 p.m., the choir meets for a rehearsal (and right now, we're in mega-rehearsal mode with a number of gigs upcoming).
    Last Saturday night, we had a hunters' feast. We borrowed a number of trophies including a wild boar's head, and three deer including one with an antler-span of close to a metre and, about 6:30 p.m., gathered together for aperos. A couple of kirs under our belts and we sat down to an enormous salade composée, and then the main course--le plat-- of a daube of sanglier (wild boar), and white beans.
   Sangliers can be enormous. I don't know the size of the one we ate but it had been shot around Belloc, a village a few kilometres from here. Gilberte, who is the village's chief cook at events like these, told me she'd marinated the meat for two days in red wine and herbs, then cooked it for four hours. She did that a few weeks ago, froze it, and then reheated it for four hours more. All I can say it was delicious, tender as anything, and deeply flavoured.
    Cheese came, then apple tarts. Red wine flowed, and then homemade eau de vie supplied by Jean-Marc, our former mayor. Choir members burst into song in Occitan and French. And then we went home.

Dishing out the daube.

Here's Gilberte on Sunday morning taking the trophies back.

    And on Sunday morning, we went back to help clean up the hall, arriving with empty ice cream containers and leaving with them filled with leftover daube and beans.
  

Back in Léran and a clean-up around the lake.

   I've written before about how a group of volunteers occasionally gets together to hack back an overgrown hiking trail or free up the tiny canal that once irrigated the chateau's vegetable garden. This time, the morning after we got back from Paris, we met up at 8:30 for coffee and croissants, and the distribution of black and yellow garbage bags.
   Maps were handed out and carloads of us set off to pick up any rubbish that had been left over the summer. Misty and golden, it was the most glorious of autumn mornings. Once we'd arrived at our designated area, we set off.

The water level is low at this time of year so you can see the stumps of the tress that were cut when this valley was deliberately flooded.

Finds included a tire, a wheel, two bras, one pair of knickers, a washing line (which suggested that the lingerie was less the product of lakeside orgies and more likely due to a gust or two), numerous bottle caps--Heineken mostly--wine bottles, beer bottles, and lots of paper towel and tissue half-buried in the woods. We didn't want to think about that too closely but were glad we'd all worn work gloves. But, given the hundreds and hundreds who come here each summer to camp or picnic, there was surprisingly little rubbish to get rid of.
   Back in Léran, we all met up at 12:30 for an apero, followed by a long lunch, the traditional conclusion to a clean-up operation--except that this time we shared a found bottle of wine, which we named "Chateau du Lac".