Today's lunch of soup and flat bread
Advent Day Four
We started today by making a batch of flat breads that will keep nicely in the freezer and enable us to have one each with our lunchtime soup for the next ten days. Soup quickly became a winter lunch staple for us when we moved to France in 2004. I can’t even remember if it started with the summer glut of courgettes that became a freezer stocked with soup, or from the realisation that despite gloriously warm summers when our old stone house remained cool inside, winters in rural France turned out to be so much colder than I’d imagined. The cool stone quickly became cold and damp with icy air invading through draughty gaps. Nothing warms you up from the inside quite like a bowl of chunky soup, served piping hot and topped with melted cheese.
Here is a fun French fact - did you know that despite the French accompanying most meals with a baguette, the one meal they don’t serve with bread is soup?
The baguette vending machine in our village
This week the French baguette was granted a UNESCO world heritage status. Buying their daily bread is part of the rhythm of life for French people with twelve million of them shopping in a boulangerie every day and with over six billion baguettes being baked every year, it is the most popular of all French breads. This prompted our local French newspaper to run a poll, asking “do you still eat baguettes daily?” and I was surprised that only 70% of respondents said they did. Sadly, we fell in the 30% who don’t – shh, don’t let on to my French friends, but even when we had a boulangerie down the road, a daily baguette intake just doesn’t agree with my English digestive system, and I’ve yet to use the baguette vending machine that was installed in our village in April.
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| Envelopes and post box for Père Noel at our local boulangerie |
We did visit one of the local boulangeries this week, for a croissant to have with a coffee, and I couldn’t help smiling when I saw it has become a temporary Christmas post office. Isn’t this just the sweetest Père Noel post box?
If you want to know more about French bread, you might like this post from two years ago:
Here are the links to my previous 2022 Advent posts, just in case you missed any of them this week:
Back in the Creuse with a great fun cosy Christmas who dunnit
Rick took a baguette baking class a few years ago and since then he turns them out every week or two. He usually makes eight, doubling the recipe, and freezing them and he's always on tap to bring bread to Cork Poppers or other occasions. On Christmas Eve we deliver bread and cookies to friends. But I had no idea that soup and bread weren't a match in France!
ReplyDeleteI bet your place smells delicious with all that baguette baking. I do miss the smell of our Boulangerie - it was just two doors down and we awoke to the smell of baking bread every morning. I always found it odd that everything is served with baguette, except soup which was probably the only thing we ever had with bread back in the UK.
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