This is a bit of a life update on some of the things that we've been doing the past few weekends in January.
It's a tradition in France during the month of January to eat Gallette des rois or "Kings Cake," in English. I believe that it's a tradition shared by many European countries.
The name relates to the three kings of the Christian Bible and the cake is made of puff pastery that is filled with frangipane (almond paste). It also contains a small object hidden inside in the form of a trinket or tile.
Whoever finds the tile is crowned king for the day and gets to wear a paper crown that comes with the cake when you buy it. The person may also win a prize or have to buy another cake for everyone, if it is being served at the work office for instance.
The trinket can be small at times so you have to be careful when eating the cake so that you don't chip your teeth on it. It's also pretty common to cut in the exact spot of the tile with your knife when cutting the cake. This happened for us.
We were told that the cake is typically served with cider as well, so last weekend we got together with some friends and ate Gallette des rois and drank some cider. My wife also made some cookies for the occasion, a new recipe containing molasses, ginger and white chocolate, they are very good.
The cake was quite good too and the evening was a lot of fun. The cakes come in different sizes and we also bought a small cake just for ourselves which we ate the next evening.
A few weekends back my wife and I went to the theater to watch the new Spiderman movie.
The best thing about watching a film in a foreign country is that not many people go to the English version, so the theater is almost always nearly empty. There were maybe 12 people in the theater by the time the movie started which is the most I've seen so far in France. It was almost like having it all to ourselves really.
The movie was fine. It was a Marvel movie, so entertaining, basically just like all of the others.
Every once in a while my wife will make homemade pasta. It's a bit of a process and takes her a few hours but from a taste perspective is definitely worth it. It's much better than anything we buy at the grocery store. One day I'll do a post on how she does it.
She makes the pasta and I always make an Alfredo sauce to go with it. This time we also had some mussels as an accompaniment.
I did the mussels simply, in a white wine broth with lemon, garlic and butter.
Two weekends ago now our water heater broke down during the peak cold of winter. The radiators weren't working at all so we only had the fire place to heat our house. When you live in a foreign country where you can barely speak the language, everything you do is much more challenging. I won't get into the details but trying to hire a service technician to do repairs was pretty much a nightmare.
The house that we rent is quite old and the windows and doors are super drafty. Often it feels colder inside than it does outside to be honest
For a few days I was dressed in layers, with a winter hat on and walking around with a blanket over my shoulders. At one point I grabbed a coat rack from our closet and started using it like a staff, pretending to be Gandalf from LOTR's.
The cat loves having a fire though. She spends pretty much all of the day, curled up on my lap under a blanket whenever we have one. Actually she does this regardless of whether or not we have a fire.
The dog is the same of course.
But the heater is back up and running now, thank God. The house is still cold but at least we can take off some of the chill.
We have some woods by our house and we go for daily walks there when it isn't raining. Here is a picture of my wife standing out as a Canadian, you can tell by the flannel shirt that she's wearing. It's not just me who wears flannel.
The cat found a good spot to sit before our walk that day. Why sit on a cold bench when you can sit on some warm shoulders?
Well that has basically been our month of January thus far. We haven't done any traveling since the Christmas Markets in December and we don't have any specific plans for the coming weeks so we haven't really done anything too exciting and there's nothing on the horizon at the moment. We are still having fun though with daily lives and that's what really matters.
