Happy Easter

Easter - a celebration of spring! Back in the US, we'd usually celebrate with a dinner of ham, but here the only sort of ham available is what we think of as country ham, delicious in its own way, but quite different from the juicy, slightly sweet ham we'd have for dinner. On Friday, we went to the LeClerc in Bergerac to do our grocery shopping and came across something else that's seldom if ever seen here - chicken breasts with the bone and skin not removed. I was so excited to see these that they became my choice for Easter dinner. Since John doesn't eat chicken - or any other sort of birds, he opted for a roulade de porc Provencal, from the butcher counter. Both were wonderful. With them, we had a potato gratin and some fresh asparagus - and wine of course.

Dessert came from one of the local patisseries. These are called framboisiers and consist of layers of cream, sponge cake and raspberries. They, like absolutely all French pastries, are delicious. Amazingly enough, though, in the years we've been here, I've grown a bit bored with French pastries, and don't eat them all that often. Instead I yearn for apple pie, pecan pie and ordinary gold cake with white butter cream frosting - in other words, standard birthday cake! And I secretly long for powdered sugar doughnuts....

Before dinner, I picked this bouquet of flowers from the yard and garden. There's one of the last blooms from a lilac, a rose from the bush climbing up the trellis in front of the house, pansies and snapdragons that have been blooming all winter, and with them some wild flowers: dandelions, daisies, a couple of others whose names I don't know, and even some sprigs of grass. Nothing like flowers to celebrate spring.

Farm Country

The hay was cut two days ago, sat drying in the sun for a day, and then today it's swooped up by an impressive piece of machinery, and then sprayed into a truck running beside the giant machine.

Spring!

This is the view looking from our veggie garden towards the treed area - which I call the forest - and to the field behind. This is the first time we've seen these tulips. Last year this time, we were finishing up packing for the move, so we missed most of the spring flowers. Right now the air is perfumed with lilacs, apple blossoms, mock orange and wisteria. It's delightful. I plan to add to this by planting a honeysuckle under the bedroom window.

On Friday, we were in the nearby town of Beaumont and saw preparations for some event - maybe the brocante (antiques and used furniture and whatnots) that we forgot to go to yesterday. The local butcher had added a huge donkey statue in front of his shop. It's soft, covered in black cloth - a cloth mother? (Reminded of this by seeing a BBC show on TV about Harry Harlow and his monkey experiments) The donkey is carrying a shopping bag bearing the butcher's name, and stands beside a display of photos of people sporting these bags. I suppose anyone who is anyone must have one - or so the butcher wishes anyway!