Saturday, 25 June 2016

Supermarkets en France

sunrise
Supermarkets in France are much more tolerant of misshaped vegetables than in the UK. We bought a basket of potatoes the other day and only two of them would have got into Tesco’s racks, yet everyone was firm, fresh and free of eyes. Keep Tesco potatoes a week, even in dark cupboard, and they have eyes sprouting every which way.

Apples are ginormous, with rough, wrinkly skins in some cases, but they taste delicious once peeled. Onions are huge affairs, but bananas are smaller, sometimes greener and come from a French dependency whose name I cannot recall. (I don’t do the shopping – dh does it while I stay back at the mill with Tim, the main reason being that it is too hot to leave him in the car while we both shop. He’d howl if we left him alone at the mill, and though the noise isn’t going to bother anyone, we don’t like to think of him as that stressed because we’ve left him alone in a “strange” place. So I stay and do a general clean up or something until dh returns.)


Meat is different too. French butchers favour different cuts, unfamiliar to us and often in much larger portions than we are used to, with much more fat running through the flesh. I avoid the fish tanks in the larger shops. I appreciate they keep the poor thing “fresh” but it seems barbaric to me to point at one poor crab out of ten or so stumbling around the bottom of a tank and condemn it to death. I’ve never bought one (and never will) so I don’t know if they kill them or give them to you still kicking. All in all it is just as well dh does the grocery shopping.

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