2nd December
We have some very lovely neighbours – two elderly couples who live in adjoined houses. The ladies are sisters and were born in the house nearly 80 odd years ago when it stood as one large house belonging to their parents. Standing in the grounds of this house is a small cottage; a partially renovated dwelling with one large room downstairs, which they use when they all want to eat together or if they want to invite guests to eat with them. Today we were all invited to their little cottage for galettes.
For the uninitiated among you, galettes are a savoury, buckwheat flour pancake which is fried on a large flat hotplate and then filled with all manner of delicious things. To finish them off, the galette and its contents are folded into a parcel. We are generally offered a ‘complet’, which consists of egg, cheese and ham, and then finished off with a generous blob of yellow Breton butter. (Now and again we buy readymade galettes from the local shop and make them ourselves, but ours are not a patch on Marie’s, because she makes her galettes from scratch to her own recipe and the filling is added whilst the pancake is still cooking on the hot plate. )
The conversation at these mealtimes ALWAYS gets round to the children’s education and whether they are working hard. I suspect they are slightly worried by the concept of home education, but they are too polite to say so. However, we are so used to the same questions being asked time and time again that we now know how to make the right noises to keep people happy.
As usual (this is a fairly frequent occurrence as our dear neighbours are very sociable), we all ate too much and felt too fat to do much this afternoon.
Ah well, such is life in Brittany!
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