the french ON holidays
Menton Pixabay
I am thinking about the French. Mostly I’m thinking about the way they go on holidays. The French have five weeks of paid holidays a year and these grand vacances are usually in July and August. Visit Paris in August and you’ll find even the boulangerie shuttered and deserted. It’s summer holidays and many Parisians flee the city for the country. Mostly the French stay within France for their holidays, unlike many Australians, most of whom came from somewhere else, even if it was five or six generations ago. Australians go seeking the uniqueness of other cultures, the French prefer their own!
Pixabay
Many French have access to beach houses where several generations of their family will gather for extended periods. They swim, eat, sleep, read, shop. They enjoy traditional, restful holidays. They eat the local specialties intermingled with their usual cuisine. When Australians go on holidays they rush from one site to the next, jamming in as many galleries and museums as they can. They hire cars to visit the cultural attractions, they take photos of all the statues and buildings and generally rush around, completing a detailed and exhausting itinerary.
The Brandenburg Gate, Pexels
I’m thinking about this as our next planned holiday fits all the criteria of achieving as much as possible every day. The Margaret River Region Open Studios, an annual event where artists in the region open their studios daily for two weeks is wonderful but requires meticulous planning to do everything we want to do in a week. Although the program is online, we prefer a paper copy. Using different coloured highlighter pens we both mark the studios we’d like to visit, or in my case, one I’d also like to re-visit. The studios are in four areas, making it easy to decide on one zone a day, so then the real decisions are made. Finally, we have a map with the places we’re visiting marked and try to stick to the plan. Next comes the booking of lunch time cafes and restaurants. It’s a lot of planning for a week away.
Pexels
Rigorous but stimulating, this will be a very busy break. Then I think we should plan a “French” style sea break. A swim in the morning, a pile of books and magazines, lunch somewhere close by, perhaps a little sleep, then a walk or another swim before a dinner of cheese, crackers and a punnet of strawberries. Unlike French style holidays, my beach break will involve no sun tanning and lots of sun screen! And a hat, always.
Pexels
Reading a French blog this morning I was pleased to see that espadrilles are de rigeur again this season. Not that I really care about fashion but I do really like the ones I bought last year and look forward to wearing them again. The beach outfits featured on the same blog are in a different category all together. Offering little coverage at all I think the dresses, playsuits and bikinis are intended for a particular age group which doesn’t include me!
fennel
Fennel is an eyecatching vegetable. So eyecatching, in fact, I bought one at the green grocer, although I have never prepared or cooked fennel before. We have enjoyed fennel seeds in Indian cooking and fennel salads in Alsace but I have never actually made anything from a fresh fennel.
Fennel Seeds Pixabay
Looked at lots of online recipes. Did you know fennel belongs to the same group as carrots? They don’t look alike! Fennel is eaten thinly sliced and raw in salads or roasted. It smelt slightly of aniseed when I was cutting it up but this wasn’t really noticeable when it was cooked. Most recipes I read advised keeping the cut off celery like stalks and any hard outer layers for soup. So I gathered up beans, carrot, cauliflower and the fennel stalks and outer layers and made a pot of soup, too. I kept some of the wispy fronds as a finishing touch when I served dinner.
The recipe suggested roasting fennel with carrot and onions. Did as I was told. The marinade was a mix of balsamic vinegar, olive oil, Italian herbs, garlic , lemon juice and salt and pepper. (I didn’t have any white balsamic vinegar, as recommended, so used red. Tasted very good) In another pan I roasted chat potatoes in duck fat. It was cold and stormy outside so a starchy, roasted dinner was very attractive!
Roasted fennel is slightly sweet and soft and really luscious. The three vegetables were slightly sweet and were well caramelised.
Salmon with Mediterranean herbs, the roasted fennel, carrot, onion and potatoes and a squeeze of lemon. Lovely dinner and leftover roasted vegetables for a salad and also there’s a pot of soup.
Spring
At the end of the month the Southern Hemisphere welcomes Spring. We are currently experiencing the cold and wet sort of weather I remember from my childhood. I have enjoyed the rain but also look forward to spring flowers and planting tomatoes. After disappointing harvests, for us, not the rats, I will grow them in a cage. So unattractive. Are you beginning to plan a Spring garden?
I love fennel and whilst reading your post I was trying to think what I put it into. We love it chopped into salad, it is an ingredient in a cucumber soup I make and also a dish I make in a tajine which included cauliflower, potatoes and peas and a number of delicious flavourings. I have tried to grow it without much luck. We are in full summer here so the garden is at its height, come the winter there will not be much growing at all here as it is too cold. I do have plants that survive the winter in dormancy so I always look forward to spring when they will start growing again.
I love the sound of a French holiday, not sure I could convince my husband though he is to much of a doer.
I’ve never seen fennel growing but will investigate simply because it was a lovely addition to the usual range of winter vegetables.
In between our rainy days we are seeing that spring will be here soon. I love reading about how the Southern Hemisphere seasons are the opposite of the Northern Hemisphere and how we each look forward to the seasonal changes.
This afternoon my brother cut down a tree trunk for us and now I can plan some spring plants to go in that bed.Exciting.