Tag: Cheese

My Village is getting a make over.

/ Matt Talley / 4 Comments

One of the issues we have had during our time in France is that our village has huge potential, but all the little shops and cafes dried up and left.  we have to get in the car and drive one or two villages over or into Toulouse to get  almost anything.  I have stood on my soapbox and bitched about it more than once.  Karma, it seems, has a sense of humor…

Just as we leave, a huge new shopping facility is being completed near the main Village traffic circle.  Every-time we drive by, there is something new and awesome going in and I start cussing.  Here is a short list of the shops that are opening JUST as we leave France:

  1. Picard: It is like a whole store worth of stuff from the Trader Joe’s frozen food section.
  2. Cheese shop that promises artisanal cow, sheep and goat goodness.
  3. A wine shop that is the French version of BevMo with a climate controlled cave in the store where they sell “The Good Stuff”
  4. An organic grocery store
  5. A bakery that has been woo-ed from another village that happens to be a national medal winning pâtisserie and boulangerie.  Dammit!!
  6. A real sushi restaurant that will serve both sashimi and maki.
  7.  A real gym, with squat towers, benches, weights, machines, etc…

I swear to the GoT gods, old and new, that if I drive by and there is a tool shop with chisels and planes in the window I loose my mind!  I am really glad all this is opening, but why now?1  Why did it all have to wait till we were leaving?  to make us have second thoughts about moving home to Seattle?

Gluttony: Deadly Sin #2 accomplished.

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We spent Christmas at a friends’ parent’s house near Pau (pronounced “Po”), France. It is in the middle of the Jurançon wine region and near one of the historical centers for mountain pasture fed sheep and goat cheese. Our hosts were incredible and the amount of food we consumed was staggering! Below is a semi complete list of the things that we enjoyed:

Aged local Brebis (sheep) cheese
Steak grilled in the home’s fireplace
Prosciutto
Coffee
Herbal tea
Cured ham
Roasted Rabbit
Strawberry preserves
Roasted potatoes
Rice pilaf
Pate
Christmas cake
Croissant with honey
Baguettes
Wild Boar
Foie gras
pumpkin soup
3 types of Jurançon wine
Saucisson
Aged Pyrenees goat cheese
Boudin
Swiss and German chocolate
Dutch Stroopwafel
Bottle after bottle of amazing 2008 and 2006 Bordeaux wine

 

France – The first 30 days.

/ Matt Talley / 1 Comment

Still Love France.
My French has gotten SO bad.
I did forget how slow things are to get done here. 
You want a buy/lease a car?  Three weeks-ish. 
You want cable and internet? 1 month.
Want it to work? 1 more week and 14 phone calls
Love my J-O-B
No such thing as coffee to go… even if you get it in a tiny paper/plastic cup, there is no lid.
Really like the house here. The 16″ thick concrete walls and steel shutters give it a homey crypt-like feeling.
Miss our house in Seattle.
There are doctors who speak English, but their receptionists who book the appointments don’t… 
You want groceries on Sunday?  Nope, not going to happen
I also forgot how amazing the eggs and meet are. 
Want to sit and have coffee and talk to my mom, miss that.
Bread goes with EVERYTHING! Awesome bread.
Having a really hard time finding a shop that sells wood lathes – only power tool I want/need here.
The weather here in winter is better than summer in Hamburg.
Miss my furniture. We have been “Camping” since Halloween and I am about 99.9999% done sitting on the floor to eat my dinner.
Want my tools like a junkie wants their cooking spoon.
Stamps-With-Foot is buying enough cheese to make the regional sale figures blip. 
Our dog< Brodie, has fully integrated and will cop a squat in the middle of the street, sneering at anyone who dares to question his right to do so. He goes to restaurants with us like he is a little prince. The wife slips him duck breast, cote of Beaof, and aged cheese under the table.  I had 2 glasses of $4 wine that we bought at the grocery store with dinner tonight.  It was awesome.  No, truly.  Wish my kids were here. I miss Starbucks, but I have a Killer espresso machine in the kitchen.  Can now watch Netflix and BBC One with country specific VPN accounts - sticking it to the man! Miss my bikes. Can't wait for them to arrive next week (insert giddy face) The designer dog food here is sold in breed specific bags - really. It is crap, but it is packaged well. I have lost a little weight because I am not eating crap and started running again. Very, very nice wooded trail near house - miles and miles long. Flying to Florida for work next week and am bringing home coffee beans, dry dog food, and Cajun Seasoning. Packed an extra duffle bag... Went for a drive in the country today and happened by a 16th century chalet with turrets and a moat about an hour form the house. 
The thought of Stamps-With-Foot driving in France scares the Hell out of me!
Life is damn fine on the whole.

Some Big News…

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So… My J-O-B has made us an offer that is very hard to refuse: a two year stint in the south of France and they will fly us home 3 times a year. We get to keep our house and I get to come back to my job in Seattle when that period ends. THE SOUTH OF FRANCE!! Warm weather, amazing wine, spectacular cheese, lavender, honey, the French vacation plan. We would be living outside of Toulouse – the third largest city in France. It sits at the foot of the Pyrenees Mountains, is an hour from the coast, has one of the 10 best Saturday markets in Europe (so says the interwebs), and has more sunshine in 6 weeks of summer than Seattle has all year. We are so freaking doing this!

There is some red tape that we have to cut through, namely a work permit. Since around 27% of the French population under 30 is out of work, getting a permit right now, even in the aerospace field, is tres difficile. Fingers crossed. If this happens, then The Nana will move into La Maison du Talley, pay the utilities, and keep the zombie horde away. Visualize a sweet grandmother rocking away on the front porch with a shotgun across her lap. Add a Marlboro hanging from the corner of her mouth and you will have an accurate picture of The Nana.

I will miss my shop and my yard for those two years, but I will plug the hole in my heart with Cote du Rhone, Comte, a day trip or 6 to the Mediterranean coast, weekends in Paris/Rome, sunshine, and a yearly vacation to Morocco. I will be taking a chest of hand tools and am planning on making some small detailed pieces while there. I also plan on scouring the flea markets over that two year period for planes, chisels, and joinery tools.

Stamps-With-Foot is not concerned about logistics or housing or much of anything other than “How is Brodie going to handle that long flight?!” She feels that we will be taking Brodie back to ancestral homeland and has spent some amount of time talking to the dog about this possibility – trying to get him psyched about the proposition…

Hanging out in our ‘hood this weekend

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We had a quiet West Seattle weekend: Friends over on Friday and we all drank no small amount of great Italian wine and ate the last of our French Comte cheese. I worked around the house and in the shop (me and the lathe are friends) Saturday morning while Stamps-With-Foot nursed a touch of a hangover and snuggled with the Brodie – He didn’t complain. Sunday was lazy with Brunch at Meander’s in White Center (Go For the Chicken and Waffles!) and afternoon coffee at C&P. After coffee and reading, there was a trip to Trader Joe’s, home for left-overs, some quality hottub time, and then we finished the evening with glasses of port, sitting in front of a fire.