Back in Broze/Gaillac We Find A New Bakery – Mon, Oct 22

Monday is a day for errands -- a French approximation of normal life.

It may not seem like finding a bakery should be a big deal, but trust me, it is.  Mostly we’d been going to a more corporate/chain bakery in Gaillac on the road to the grocery store, Leclerc.  But, today we were in search of a regional products store whose ad I’d found in a local magazine last week.  After we find it, Maxine notices the bakery a block away.  It’s fantastic.  The couple who own it are working the store.  Damian is putting loaves of bread onto the big spatula so he can put them in the oven and he looks up when his two American customers come in.  We suspect that they don’t get too many customers in that they don’t recognize at all, and we’re it.  His wife suffers through our French sentence fragments.  And we buy the best bread products we’ve had since we got to Gaillac nearly 3 weeks ago.

Breakfast on the terrace of our house, courtesy of our new bakery:

 

Maxine promises to go back tomorrow morning to buy us more…

Lunch at home then a 2 hour walk on a country road, through the vines.  The weather is great and it’s very pleasant.

When we get home it’s nearly 5pm, cocktail hour.  But, of course we’re drinking wine.  So we open the bottle of sweet Gaillac wine we’d purchased a couple weeks ago and enjoy the sun setting, and the vines changing colors as the light fades.

That’s our day.  Dinner at home and we recreate an Aveyron-ish dinner of lentils and mashed potatoes.  We’d had a similar, and more authentic version of this on a rainy night in Paris six years earlier.  We’ve gotten this version from Leclerc, but it works to complete the evening.  That and some red wine from last week’s visit to Gaillac’s Maison des Vin.