A Taste of Garlic

Because we all like reading blogs about life in France.

Ann Mah

Ann Mah_1268685213215 My visit to Ann Mah reminds me that I seem to have been spending rather a lot of time in Paris recently.

This will have to stop. I shall have to find somewhere else to visit.

It’s not that I dislike Paris (although I chose to move to rural Brittany when I left London, and rural Brittany is about as far away from Paris as Basingstoke is from the moon!), it’s more that there seem to be rather a lot of foodie bloggers in Paris and I’m really starting to worry about my waistline!

So, with that in mind, where do I find myself but at the blog of the author of Kitchen Chinese and much as I tried to resist temptation, posts such as A year in a French market:Stinky Cheeses and Paella Party just proved too much for me!

Still, mindful of my duties here at A Taste of Garlic, I manfully struggled on and devoured delicious posts such as Boeuf Bourguignon, the spend less time inside method (which involves preparing the meal over four days) and A year in a French market:Plumbing Problems and Pesto (which offered all that the title promises plus Grilled Perch as well!)

I like the A Year in a French Market series and think that Ann uses it well to describe the seasonality of the produce she uses. It has to help that markets tend to be incredibly photogenic, even Parisienne ones!

A good example would be… A year in a French market: The Idle of May where Ann debunks some French myths; the French DON’T wear berets everywhere, they DO wear deodorant (at least some of them, anyway), and (some) French women DO get fat. However, she goes on to explain that, in May certainly, they don’t work an awful lot (all those bank holidays!) For a list of bank holidays, take a look at www.FrenchPublicHolidays.com (one of my other sites.)

The article ends up, as is only fitting, with a recipe for Fried Rice.

For those who need help. A year in a French market: What’s in season? explains what can be found and when. This is prompted by a dinner party conversation (and I borrow this from Ann’s site) where an old lady says…

“When I was young, we didn’t have any green salad during the winter,” said the woman across from me, poking her fork disapprovingly at a leaf of mâche. “Only endive. For the whole winter.”

Am I the only person who thinks that A year in a French Market would make a great coffee table cook book?

There’s another sub series in to AnnMah.net that copes with the review of cookbooks. I was quite taken by this recipe for Eggplant from heaven (originally from www.QuickIndianCooking.com)

An interesting article about French Frozen Food will be useful to anyone living in France and, just to prove it’s not all about food, there’s this lovely article about the Chateau de Versailles by Night.

I urge you to take a look at AnnMah.net before all the best courses are gobbled up. Just watch you waistline, is my advice!

And me, well I’m off to check out what’s happening at Spring; everyone (but everyone) seems to be talking about it!

All the best

Reddit Twitter Digg Share on Facebook Stumble Bookmark Email this page to a friend


BretonDiary	French Public Holidays	Images of Brittany	Market Days in Brittany	Website Design

Best Gites in Brittany	Roadside Tales	Internet Acceleration	MushroomDiary

The French Kitchen A delightful book in which Joanne shares with us ‘her family recipes, passed down through the generations. The French Kitchen is a tantalising collection of casseroles, soups, roasts, salads, tarts and sweets. More information	Cholcolat Joanna Harris creates a rich and vibrant description of a rural French village with all its petty rivalries and traditional, narrow-minded boundaries on thought and behavior. More information	Five Quarters of the Orange Five quarters of the orange’ is a story of a childhood tragedy in wartime France, and the shadows it casts across the later life of the heroine Framboise Dartigen. More information	Blackberry Wine Everyday magic, he called it, the transformation of base matter into the stuff of dreams – Layman’s alchemy. More information
The French Market Following the success of The French Kitchen, Joanne Harris and Fran Warde have collaborated once more to write a French cookbook with a difference. This time they have taken their inspiration from the rural markets of Gascony. More information	Coastliners Passionate, stubborn Mado, whose “head is full of rocks” tries to save the livelihoods of the villagers of Les Salants by urging them to work together to save the beach from erosion, both natural and man-made. More information	Five Quarters of the Orange Three sublime audiobooks from the bestselling author, now available together in a specially priced pack. Includes BLACKBERRY WINE, FIVE QUARTERS OF THE ORANGE and the huge bestseller CHOCOLAT. With a gentle touch and an eye for human frailty and strength, these mouth-watering audiobooks will draw you into her enchanting worlds. More information	French Lessons Failed rock legend, pickled onion manufacturer, air hostess and euro-entrepreneur George East takes us through another eventful year of his doomed attempts to make a living out of living in rural France. More information
French Flea Bites The character of France and the French people has been captured in words beautifully and the hilarious exploits of George his wife Donella, their neighbours and Cato the cat. More information	French Letters This is not so much a book as a continuation of the serial story of George and Donella as they carry on with their almost idyllic life in Normandy. It’s at least as funny as the others, but the hanky had to come out again several times. More information	French Cricket Once upon a time, former night club bouncer, seamstress and professional bedtester George East and his wife Donella fled to Normandy to escape their creditors and try to live off their wits in a foreign land. More information	Home and Dry in France Buying property in France is fraught with mishaps and misunderstandings. George East’s book brings humour and fun to what happens when people venture forth to a foreign land with more hope than money and humour than language skills. More information
French Kisses Those poor people who don’t like George East’s books often dismiss them as fiction. Not so, everything is at least based on real people and real happenings. George admits to a degree of embellishment and often combines several mishaps to produce a spectacular disaster. Such is the nature of his works. More information	Rene and Me Told in the inimitable style which has alrea dy won the author an army of followers, Rene & Me is a somet imes hilarious, sometimes moving and always captivating cele bration of human nature, people and, above all, life and living. ‘ More information	A Year in the Merde This very funny book sounds a lot more like the France that I know. Read it and you’ll still want to come here, you’ll just be a lot better prepared for the surprises that France has to offer. More information	Merde Happens Paul West is in deep financial merde. His only way out of debt is to accept a decidedly dodgy job that involves him touring America in a Mini, while pretending to be typically British. Also in the car is Paul’s French girlfriend, Alexa, and his American poet friend, Jake, whose main aim in life is to sleep with a woman from every country in the world. More information
Merde Actually A year after arriving in France, Englishman Paul West is still struggling with some fundamental questions: What is the best way to scare a gendarme? Why are there no health warnings on French nudist beaches? And is it really polite to sleep with your boss’ mistress? More information	Dial M for Merde In this book, you’ll get Paul, Elodie, her dad and some new French girls. All of them are of course hot and all of them adore Paul. Didn’t see that one coming… More information	Talk to the Snail The only book you’ll need to understand what the French really think, how to get on with them and, and most importantly, how to get the best out of them. With useful sections on: Making sure you get served in a café, Harassing French estate agents, Living with bacteria, Pronouncing French swear-words and much more! More information	1000 years of Annoying the French Was the Battle of Hastings a French victory? No! William the Conqueror was Norman and hated the French. Were the Brits really responsible for the death of Joan of Arc? No! The French sentenced her to death for wearing trousers. More information
The Olive Farm This is television actress Carol Drinkwater’s lyrical account of a new life in France; about her house, Appassionata, and the trials and tribulations of acquiring an olive farm, restoring it, farming the olives, overcoming the heartaches of taking on a “new” French family and understanding slowly the workings and lifestyle of a vivacious Provencal community. More information	The Olive Season This is an extraordinary and fascinating follow-up to The Olive Farm. The reader is drawn deeply and inexorably in to the world of the author, confronted with her personal struggles and entranced by her pastiche of growth and decay in the world of nature, a metaphor for her life. More information	The Olive Harvest Carol and Michel have again returned to Appasionata, the Olive Farm that they have restored, and Carol is eager to continue production of the olives and attain their cerificate for producing Organic Oil. More information	The Olive Tree THE OLIVE TREE charts Carol Drinkwater’s colourful and often dangerous journey in search of the routes that olive cultivation has taken over the centuries. Set during a springtime Mediterranean that is evocative and perennial, it is above all a tale of our time. More information
The Olive Route A tour de force from Carol Drinkwater in this, the fourth in her Olive series. The joy of this book is in the pen pictures that she creates of the unusual characters that she encounters on her journey. More information	The Illustrated Olive Farm The photgraphy is wonderful and the book is a great insight in to life with the olives and all that that involves. There are wonderful pictures of the dogs, family, friends, even the dreaded wild boar. Recipes as well. More information	Petite Anglaise Petite Anglaise is a memoir by Catherine Sanderson based on her blog of the same name. In 2004 Catherine decided to start up a blog based on her life in Paris. More information	French Kissing Name: Sally Marshall Status: single mother Age: 32 Nationality: ten years in France, yet still English through and through I like: Living in Paris, playing with my daughter Lila (four years old), the company of good friends, the smell of baking bread. More information
Tout Sweet You cannot help but fall in love with the author’s character. She seems like a Bridget Jones let loose in the French countryside, getting into a lot of funny situations with both ex-pat English and French locals like, as she adjusts to a totally different way of life. More information	Serge Bastarde Ate My Baguette John Dummer’s sharply focused descriptions of the landscape, towns and villages, and the weather of the South West of France form a animated background for a series of adventures with an array of characters from some intimidating and belligerent peasants to a sad little old man whose only companionship is a collection of antique dolls. More information	Merde! This book is an excellent source of words and expressions, of varying degrees of vulgarity, that are used all the time by french speakers. I used it often during the first of my two years in France. More information	Almost French “Almost French” is the story of a woman who goes to France to visit a French lawyer she has only met a couple times before and barely knows. Of course, she gets caught up in the romance of the city and stays on to live there. More information