Saturday, October 10, 2009

St. Flour and Lozerian foraging

Today was a typical Saturday in St Chely. I went to the “gym” and then I got together with Mme S this afternoon to go shopping. She took me to St. Flour which is about 20 minutes from here in St. Chely. I finally was able to go to real clothing stores, shoe shores and a few home decoration stores. I can’t wait until I get paid! The prices were reasonable and I can get there on my own even without a car. She also took me to the grocery store so that I didn’t have to lug all my food by hand tomorrow morning. I bought some new running pants for the winter. Those were kind of expensive but that’s ok because I really needed them. I also got some things to decorate the apartment since it’s a pretty bland white. All and all it was a very successful trip and I hope to go back to buy my clothes there when I get paid!

At Carrefour today I bought “l’aligot” which is a typical lozerian side dish. It’s mashed potatoes with some sort of cheese mixed in to make it stretchy. It’s very good. Usually people here have sausages with it. I bought some sausage meat to eat along with it since I haven’t had meat in a few days. (I have to force myself to make meat since I don’t like it very much but I get too anemic otherwise) There are a lot foods in the lozere that are traditional but most of them have foraging involved in the preparation because here the terrain is so rugged that people can’t grow proper crops and traditional “french” foods. For example, lots of my students go foraging for mushrooms on Wednesday afternoons (there isn’t class anywhere in france) but the season is pretty much over now that its gotten colder. I saw lots of “edible” snails this morning on my way to the gym. (I took a picture!) It was pretty cool to see wild snails since we don’t really see that in Michigan. We have slugs but I haven’t seen snails like this before. Of course there is the famous lozerian yogurt made from goats I think. Even though I see more cows here than goats it’s still a traditional local food.

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