Despite our limited budget and the high price of food in France, we’re eating well. Muesli is hard to come by and we usually have to seek out the “bio” section of the supermarket to find one that is just a nice normal muesli and not some over-sweetened “croustillant” variety. So, the day begins with grapefruit or orange juice, muesli and then some cheap supermarket basic crepes Bretagne (€0.76 for a dozen!) with jam. We lunch on a baguette with either pate or cheese with cucumber and lettuce. These travel surprisingly well in the sweaty depths of the panniers…in fact a basic camembert seems greatly improved by a day or two in the bags. Pate is purchased in small tins, one of which does us for a lunch. The cucumber and lettuce travel in a string bag strapped on top of the rear rack and seem to last very well there.
Dinner is either pasta or rice with either a cream or tomato sauce, meat and vegetables. French supermarkets offer a fabulous little 20cl carton of UHT cream that travels well in our bags and makes a delicious sauce. The meat portion is usually dried sausage as, again, it travels well in sweaty bags, but occasionally we’ve been to the supermarket late in the day and bought some portions of frozen fish, which are delicious in a cream sauce seasoned with the dried seaweed we bought back in Roscoff. We also had a treat one evening eating “pea surprise”…the surprise being we hadn’t known we were having fresh peas until we found some growing mingled with barley and poppies at the edge of a field. Keith reckoned no farmer would have sown their crop in such a manner and thus these were self-seeded peas and thus fair for the picking. In just a few minutes we had enough for two meals and they were delicious. Our wine requirements, when not treating ourselves to a more expensive bottle purchased during a tasting, our served by a wide selection of €1.60 bottles of Cotes du Rhone, Bordeaux or Beaujolais.
threewheeling 