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Monday 26 May 2014

Montreuil sur Mer - part two

Saturday was such a glorious day that we decided to stay in town and have a foodie day but first was a walk around the ramparts to choose a suitable picnic spot (never go on holiday without access to plates, cutlery and a bottle opener!)

Well tended vegetable plots

This spot was a possibility


The walk was followed by a restorative coffee and then we hit the market. This is held every Saturday morning and has all the stalls that you expect to find including the one selling the outsize lingerie. Andrew was tempted by the paella but did not succomb.

Serious buying
 
These beautiful tomatoes went into the basket, swiftly followed by a punnet of local strawberries.

They tasted as good as they looked

I also bought a couple of kilos of apricots to take home so I could make a few pots of jam. I was nearly swayed by the melon offer, particularly when I overheard the stall holder ask the woman buying when she would be eating them so that he could select varying degrees of ripeness for her. The same thing happened to us at Cascus where the owner asked us when we would be eating our cheeses.
How can you choose from all this?

An excellent choice by the owner

After the market it was into the boulangerie and charcuterie for bread, celeri remoulade and a pot of chopped up vegetables in  mayonnaise before heading off to our picnic site.


Lunch time view

We've never made a visit to Le Touquet or Montreuil without seeing a car rally. There were two different ones on the ferry and on Saturday the Singer St.Omer to Ypres three day rally rolled into town. I think that they must have been using out of dates maps as to my knowledge it is only about 58 kilometres between those two towns and Montreuil would have taken them way off route but not three days. Still the cars were gorgeous and very shiny.

They do come in other colours

Spotless

As you may have gathered there is a lot going on in Montreuil and there is one last post as we were lucky enough to be in town for the 'Nuit européenne des musées'.





4 comments:

  1. That cheese and baguette... I need it now!!!

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    1. Nobody, but nobody, does cheese & baguette like the French! I'm already plotting our next trip...

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  2. I love buying melons in the market at Lavelanet. They were often sold in threes, and the stallholder selected one for today, one the next, and one the one after, marking them with 1, 2 or 3 spots accordingly. There now, you've gone and made me nostalgic for France for the first time in weeks!

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  3. Sorry! But I did notice that you wrote about buying in the present tense...

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