Saturday, September 22, 2007

Of Jets And Baguettes

While Callie was down for a nap on Friday, I had time to do up a quick post for this morning. As you may know, I'm home alone for a couple days while Ken takes his sister and her friend back to Paris for their flight home. They went by way of the Mont-Saint-Michel. Ken will be home later today.

A shot I took from the deck the other day as a plane went over. It's zoomed to the max. These planes are high up at cruising altitude when they fly over our house.

Callie has been keeping me busy, and I've been doing a little cleaning here and there. There's really no cooking to do because we have a ton of leftovers from this past week in the fridge.

I asked our bread lady a few days ago about getting a ficelle instead of a baguette while Ken is gone. A ficelle is a small loaf that is half the weight of a baguette. It's better to get that than to have to freeze excess bread. She said sure, but that a half baguette costs less and it's à l'ancienne whereas the ficelles are moulées. I like the bread to be cooked on the oven stone (à l'ancienne) rather than in a metal tray (moulé), so I said I'd take a half baguette on Friday and Saturday and that we'd go back to whole baguettes on Monday (no delivery on Sunday).

If you don't already know, our local bakery delivers bread to our house five days a week. If we want something other than a standard baguette or pain, we just tell the bread lady a day or so in advance so she can have it on the truck when she comes by. At any rate, on Friday morning she came and said, "You want a half today, right ?"

I said yes, so she grabbed a baguette from the back of the truck and a knife from the seat next to her and cut the loaf in half. The crumbs went all over the steering wheel, but she just brushed them off. "Voilà," she said, "A demain !"

Elle n'est pas belle, la vie ? (life is good) :)

3 comments:

  1. Those itinerant bakers, butchers and the likes are slowly disappearing, but you're so lucky to have known this aspect of French country life.
    Such a nice post, Walt!

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  2. We keep buying bread from her because we don't want the baker to lose business. There are many older people around who might not be able to get out to buy bread.

    There's also a butcher and a frozen foods vendor that come around in their trucks, but we've never stopped them.

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