French Food!?

Here are some pictures of the food I've been eating!!!

Every morning when I wake up I get to come down stairs and see this!! 

A table full with breakfast food! I usually have toasted baguette, or pain grille, with butter, but this morning I was surprised by a treat! Pain au Chocolate!...

Here's a close up of the buttery, flaky, pastry :)

After breakfast, Odette, Francis and I returned to Chalonnes for another market and for Francis to take pictures of the Loire river with ice on it! Apparently this hasn't happened in 50 plus years! So I snapped a photo too, it was beautiful!, And the ice made the calmest noise while passing by....

And I couldn't help taking pictures of these beautiful doorways :)

So after another extremely scenic drive back from Chalonnes to Les Ponts de Ce, I had worked up an appetite and had bought a fresh baguette "L'Ancient" I was ready to make my sandwich for lunch. Unfortunately, I remembered halfway through eating my sandwich that I wanted to take a picture of it!, So this picture only shows about half the size of my sandwich :(... But on the sandwich I had a slice of thick ham, and slices of butter comparable to slices of cheese! The butter was made in France with salt from a region very close to where I live :) On the side here is some mustard I took from Francis out of politeness... I really don't like mustard that much, but it was the best mustard I've ever had! 

In France on the weekends people eat about 4 sit down meals a day. Breakfast, Lunch, Snacks, and then Dinner. Its also very common to invite people over for "Les Goutes" which translates as the tastes, or snacks :) Today Odette and Francis told me I could have my friends over for les goutes to make crepes! So Odette made the batter and heres a picture of the mini crepe maker we used!..

I met Maria, Kelsi, and Amelia at my bus stop around 3 o-clock and after about a 30 minutes the fun commenced! We all had about 6 crepes each, which is a ton of food!!! Heres a picture of my first one :)

First with a scoop of nutella :)

Then you fold it like this or roll it up...

 And ta-da! It was delicious!!!

My happy reaction :D

Here's a picture of the steaming hot fresh crepes we just made! 

This combination was the best idea ever!!! Kelsi created it, Cherry Jam with Nutella, it was like a chocolate covered cherry on a crepe!!!! Soooo good :)

And here we are! Starting from left to right in both pictures...

Maria, Me, Kelsi, and Amelia :)

So after les goutes, I took a nap and knit a little while watching the french news, which is still completely filled with everyone freaking out about the snow and the cold temperatures, which I haven't been enjoying either :(. But Odette insists on us having "potage" or soup every night to keep us warm. So at 7 our dinner started with potage au tomate. It was pretty good!, But my favorite of her soups was her zucchini soup! With those crutons you can see in my picture it's delicious!

After soup we eat some form of meat and vegetable. Here we have the chicken odette bought me from a farm!, Pan fried in buter and some form of vegetable, I honestly don't know the name in french or english, but cooked with more tomatoes and garlic :) 

After dinner we usually eat about 5 different types of cheese with more bread, but today I took a second helping of chicken and veggies rather than fromage... But I absolutely had to save room for dessert because odette made chocolate mousse! I have had chocolate mousse here before in the school cafeteria, but I absolutely forgot it can definitely be home-made. It was perfect! And dessert is always eaten with a piece of bread, which I enjoy :)

So, thats a day in the life of my kitchen here in France!, I will definitely include pictures of interesting other meals I have but today was pretty basic, but as always very delicious :)