is this a local shop?

Sunday was tripe day in St Fraimbault. Highlight of the day is a 20 lap cycle race and tripe served in the village café from 8am to 2pm. That means us. Huge success this year. Too successful maybe..?
Monday afternoon the doorbell rang ....I opened it to it to an old man from the village. He looked around shiftily then muttered something about tripe...he had come to see if we had any spare that we could let him have. It was so good he said, he needed to eat some more. Luckily there was none left so we sent him away, but I spent most of the afternoon looking out of the window nervously checking for people with nosebleeds. What DID Gregoire put in the tripe? Whatever it was it was very very popular ....
An enjoyable day though- sadly we didn't guess the length of the sausage nor the weight of the basket correctly, and this year we didn't win the sheep. Such is village life.

Chemically speaking, chocolate really is the world's perfect food

and this is all that is left of a cake that measured 75cm x 50cm and was 9cm high.

a true chocolate triumph.

The white stuff you see is white chocolate (sorry cocoa butter) buttons melted down and mixed with fresh cream. the brown stuff is chocolate - milk and dark in varying degrees of intensity, inter-layered with home made hazelnut praline crunch.

sumptuous weariness

just how tired can one actually get? My mind currently feels too tired to communicate effectively. We worked flat out last night - satisfying many very demanding connoisseur taste buds. Everyone was happy, but a very short night following a stressful day and suddenly I feel like a toy out of Bagpuss. A bit floppy. A busy morning and lunch service has finished me off completely. Maybe I should try having a siesta this afternoon.

up the apples and pears

never did I realise how many apples and pears existed . Gregoire and Patrice (Hotel de France) ran pomme and poire cookery classes, Scarlet and I played giant Connect-4 (puissance-quatre) and strange ancient wooden games that all seemed to be called names starting with Q, the sun shone, we ate lots of apples and pears, and then we ate some more....a lovely afternoon was had by all.