Photo Challenge: Reward

After a marathon three-and-a-half day journey from Arizona  – taxi ride, overnight flight, rental car, hotel, channel tunnel, drive, drive, drive, hotel, drive,drive, drive – to the south of France, our Reward was this:

and this:

and this:

and this:

and this:

And of course we got our just desserts:

To see more entries in the photo challenge click here ↓↓↓

The French (and My) Obsession

The ‘fruits’ of our shopping excursions to Beziers Flower Market, a vineyard and the boulangerie.

A perfect croissant to have with morning coffee.

Our hostesses for lunch.

Just for starters! A poached egg and bacon salad.

You may remember this main course from a previous post but
I’m making you look at it again!

As if we hadn’t eaten enough already (and this was only lunch!) the creme caramel and chocolate mousse were too tempting to resist.

Manuela and Valerie holding me up after lunch. I’ve eaten too much to stand unaided.

This delicious strawberry tart accompanied afternoon tea.

The source of our tipple – thousands and thousands of acres of vines.

We happened on some bathroom scales in a pharmacie in a village where I’d stopped to buy some indigestion tablets (I’m sure the irony isn’t lost on you). We both weighed in, memorized the number of kilos and stepped outside to convert the kilos to pounds using our phones.

To our surprise, we hadn’t packed on as many pounds as we had feared despite my increasingly prominent muffin top and Jimmy’s new belly.

With a gain of only three or four pounds each, we felt liberated to continue to stuff down pastries, croissants, baguettes with butter and jam or cheese, three course lunches with midday wine (as well as an evening aperitif and dinner) and calorific desserts with creme anglaise – a thick cream-colored sweet soup that makes absolutely anything taste better.

Vive la France!