French Vienoisseries

 One thing that people love about France are the pastries. As Americans, we probably use that word to cover everything from croissants to Napoleons to little fruit tarts. 

Here in France, those breakfast staples like croissants or pain au chocolat are called vienoisseries. It's made using yeast or puff pastry. When we first arrived, we were so grateful for any croissant or pain au raisin, but our tastes have gotten more refined. 

The bakery up the hill has a pain au chocolat (called a chocolatine in this part of France) made in the ancient tradition -- à la ancienne -- and the chocolate is wrapped inside layers and layers of flaky puff pastry. I have a favorite bakery for pain au raisin when I go to the Esperaza market on Sundays. 

But luckily, our local bakery has some vienoisseries that you don't find everywhere. I'm sure I've written about the chausson framboises, a kind of raspberry turnover, that the baker's wife reminds me should be chausson à la framboise. I've never seen them anywhere else. 

Recently, the bakery has started making croissant chocolat. You might think this is the same as a pain au chocolat, but it isn't.

Instead, it is shaped like a croissant. It has chocolate drizzled over the top, and it has melty chocolate in the middle -- totally different from a pain au chocolat. 

Un croissant chocolat for breakfast

I stopped this morning to get a sandwich that Earl and I would share for lunch, and I saw a tray full of croissant chocolat. What could I do? I had to order one. 

The inside has creamy chocolate, unlike the pain au chocolat. 

The woman waiting on me said, "Il n'y en a plus," there aren't any more. I waved my hand toward the tray, and she realized that the baker had refilled the case with a dozen chocolate croissants. 

My lucky day.

Do you have a favorite vienosserie? 

First Post From France -2017

I never know whether I should post about the things that happened the past few days or jump to today. But if I start posting about the past, then I never seem to catch up.
Traveling here was exhausting. I took melatonin on the plane but never managed to fall asleep, instead just dozing a few times. Maybe I'm getting too old to fly overseas and skip a night's sleep. Someday, I hope to relay the entire story -- two planes, two trains and one automobile, which the rental people seemed very reluctant to give us. "It is a new car," the woman said.
"Look, we aren't planning to wreck it," I wanted to say
But things improved rapidly after we got to the BnB, I took a shower and we went out to dinner.
The town where we are staying is fairly small. It has a boulangerie, a small market that sells everything, a pharmacie and a couple of wine makers. But it doesn't have a legitimate restaurant. Instead, it has a restaurant rapide, pizza place.
The woman in the market said it had good food, so we walked there.
We started with a glass of moscat, which is made locally.

It is very sweet and tasted delicious.
The menu offered goat cheese pizza with black olives, so that is what I ordered., along with a $14 bottle of red wine and a salad. About halfway through that bottle of wine, things started to feel much better.

By 9:30, we returned to the room and I fell asleep by 10.
I started my morning with a run. It's strange to run in a place that is unfamiliar. I needed to make sure I didn't get lost. So I ran through town and turned right. That took me out into the country a bit. I heard a rooster crowing and in the distance a ridge of mountain jutted up.

That distant spire is the church in the town where we stayed. 

 In Ohio, it's very flat so I'm not used to real mountains, only fake ones in the clouds that look like mountains.
I only went about three miles so we could go off on our daily jaunt. Our goal is to visit cities with markets in hopes of choosing an area we want to move. Not many cities have markets on Friday mornings, but Séte, a city on the Mediterranean said it had a small market, so we headed there. It's just half an hour by car, and although I nearly got us killed when we first started driving there, I got the hang of it and didn't put a scratch on the new rental car.
The market at Place de Stalingrad took up nearly two blocks.

It had every kind of fruit or vegetable we would want to buy. The cherries seemed quite popular. And it had lots of prepared foods too, like this paella. The man had several giant pans of food.

We enjoyed the sunshine and walked toward the Mediterranean. The town is quite industrial with a lot of fishing boats and other industries along the waterfront. The canals seemed to be the places that people enjoyed the water.
Some of the architecture reminded me of Nice,

while others reminded me of typical French style.

The restaurant where we ate lunch had mediocre food, which is always a surprise in France, but we have made up for it in other ways, with lots of other foods.

Thanks for visiting. I'll try to get a post written tomorrow before we run over to Aix en Provence to visit our friend Delana.