Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Snowshoes, and a food post

Has anyone been snowshoeing recently?  As beautiful as it is here, there isn't a whole lot to do, so yesterday we rented snowshoes to take a hike around the lake.  The last time I checked in with snowshoes, they looked like tennis rackets and the Canadian Mounted Police wore them in cartoons when I was a kid.  In fact, in French they are still called raquettes, but nowadays they are big oval plastic things with something like a ski binding.

This is probably me just refusing to have fun like my kids always say, but I just didn't get it.  It is really hard to walk on those things, kind of like walking in deep snow with clown shoes on.  You can't ski downhill like with cross-country skis, but you have to schlep uphill exactly like cross country skis.  I experimented by stepping into the deep snow, and sank up to my thighs just as I would have if I didn't have them on.  So after a while I took them off and carried them.  My boots worked fine.  Carol and Michele fought the good fight and are better people for it.

We of done most of our eating at la Cuisine Michele, but today (after three hours of work!) we decided to go out to lunch.  I have been over this a million times... here we are in the middle of nowhere in a tiny little ski village, and the local plat du jour was Serrano ham on little pieces of toast topped with some kind of raspberry vinaigrette with chopped shallots, followed by sea bass, broiled with perfectly crispy skin on garlic mashed potatoes, and a homemade blueberry tarte for dessert.  The place is called Le Chanson du Coq.



There is also the local supermarket, a perfectly ordinary chain place they have everywhere in France, Carrefour.  You know what the food place is like in an American ski resort?  Overpriced and bad.  Here, in back, they had a butcher counter with an actual butcher.  There was a long line because every single customer had a long consultation about what exactly they were looking for, while Monsieur showed them the various cuts.  Michele was getting ground beef which he ground by hand while we waited.




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