Croquant Fest

Croquant Fest  On Sunday, Place de la Bride, where I normally sit to go online, hosted a croquant fest.  Croquants are a Cordes specialty that I make at work almost every day.  They are a crispy almond cookie.  I posted a photo of them earlier.  Two men in old fashioned straw hats came and set up a flat platform grill.  They started a wood fire and then brought the hot coals under the grill.  The process took a really long time.  The end result was really cool.  A plate of hot fresh croquant was 2 Euros.   Yesterday, Lisa and I went to Toulouse so I could get a haircut and to go to the cinema.  We hitched a ride with one of Lisa's friends who is visiting from Colorado.  We were planning on taking the train back, but there was a train strike yesterday.  We stayed at a hotel last night and I took the first train back this morning.  I was only an hour late for work which isn't bad considering we were stranded in Toulouse.  It ended up being a pretty enjoyable evening.  I was a real commuter this morning.  It took more than five minutes to get to work.   I like my new haircut and we saw Terminator Salvation.  It is called Terminator Renaissance here.  I think seeing subtitled American movies is helping with my French.  The cinema already has signs for Transformers in VOST.  VOST means version original sub titles.  That is the key element to not seeing a dubbed movie.  I love going to the movies.  At the theater we go to, you are corralled out a back entrance after the movie.  No double features.  It's always a little disorienting to leave a dark theater descend multiple flights of stairs and then exit onto a street behind the theater.  Luckily we are beginning to become more knowledgeable concerning Toulouse geography. I don't know what is in store for next weekend, but the following weekend we are off to Barcelona to see U2.  I am really excited to try to speak spanish and to go to such a huge concert.

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M.O.F. Event

Last Sunday, Chef Manu drove Lisa and I to Soreze for a day of M.O.F. Demonstrations.  It was about an hour and a half southeast of Cordes.  The M.O.F. is an honor bestowed on craftsmen and women in many different fields.  Many of those fields were represented in Soreze.

There were shoemakers, blacksmiths, marble carvers, fur makers and embroiderers to name a few of the crafts.  The food world was represented by a Chef from Toulouse who demoed Foie Gras cooking, a breadmaker who had an oven set up to make fresh bread to try and Jean Francois Arnaud creating a sugar sculpture.  Chef Arnaud worked at the Musee du Sucre, where I am staging now, for many years. He made many of the sculptures on display in the museum.  At the demonstration, he created a dragon sugar sculpture.  

The event was free and open to the public.  It took place in an Abby.  It was a boys school in the past.  The event was pretty crowded.  

I will post a photo of the sculpture and the building in my next post.  The photo in this post is Lisa and I in the courtyard at the Abby in Soreze.