Between the last post I wrote in December, and now, I have done quite a bit of (lazy) travelling, during my two-week Christmas holidays, and during the more recent two-week “Winter Holiday” they have here in France that’s separate from the Christmas one. I don’t think I’ve ever had this much vacation or free time since I was in high school! Of course, I want to write about all the places I’ve visited, and show photos of all the interesting little things (rude graffiti included) that I’ve seen in the other French cities I’ve been to, but then I came back to Cahors, and jumped straight back into my job, and it should not be a neglected fact that travelling for two weeks straight is actually very tiring and can be stressful at times, and going back to work right away is going to ensure that you never seem to recover from feeling always under the weather, the threat of an illness enveloping you like fog, but never quite reaching your immune system.
Never mind that for now. In the effort to pursue what I’ve coined as “productive procrastination,” I recommenced work on my Humans of Cahors project instead, and continued to put off writing about said travels. I also struggled to make ends meet because I spent well beyond my means at Christmastime, the glamour of travelling tricking my brain into thinking that I could afford the glamour and prestige of expensive souvenirs, and this, coupled with the conscious thirst for a diet free of pasta-only dishes, and a new year’s resolution to continue to learn to cook, has resulted in my attempt at this moment to yet again, avoid writing about my travels. It’s a daunting task, to cover 3.5 weeks of photos, so instead, I thought I’d start with a show-and-tell of some of the ways I’ve carried out one of my new year’s resolutions thus far, i.e. cheap-at-home-eats. Maybe once I’ve done this, and found other ways to procrastinate “productively” (e.g. reading Jane Austen fanfiction like a fiend), I will finally begin posting about my travels ;)
The biweekly marché in Cahors is a wonderful, wonderful thing. This is an instance of one Saturday morning haul, fresh, local, seasonal, and colourful fruits and vegetables available only. Seriously, if anything comes from outside of the Lot department, where Cahors is located, it’s not considered “local.” That’s how local it gets. (It gets me loco. So does the absurd amount of dog poop piles in the cobblestoned environs of the marché. I may have just stumbled upon an explanation for the Lot river’s muddy waters.)
This was a moment worthy of a blurry iPhone snapshot: the first time I realized that everything on my plate was something I had prepared myself, from scratch : Roasted, herb seasoned Brussels sprouts and potatoes, a French Omelette with melted Emmental cheese, some shrimp sautéed with lemon and garlic. 
I don’t know how I got through the first 24 years of my life without knowing how to make pancakes, but I did. And now, I no longer have to live out the rest of my days without. If only they had unlimited stores of (real) maple syrup in France! I tried the “maple syrup” they sell at the Casino supermarkets: just don’t. Unless you happen to enjoy sweetened soy sauce, which is what it tastes like to me. Luckily, I have some thoughtful friends, who, as true Canadians, rose to the occasion and brought or sent me maple syrup to help me out of the sticky situation. :P 
French omelettes can never get old, they are versatile, like the arepas I chanced to eat one humid summer day at a pocket-sized Venezuelan restaurant in Montréal, and at the Ottawa home of a Colombian girl I befriended when I was studying French briefly in Trois-Rivières, Québec. With the arepas, a ground maize flatbread, you can have a topping or a filling – at the Venezuelan restaurant, it was presented with a filling; at the Colombian home, it was a eaten with a simpler topping, like egg and ham, usually for breakfast. Well, guess what!? You can roll up something yummy in a French omelette like it’s an eggy little taco shell, or you can roll up the omelette and lay a topping on it with a sauce, too! Let’s call it the French arepas…oh wait. It is a French “repas.”
I tried to incorporate as many vegetables as I could into my meals without resorting to eating only salads. Roasts and soups are some of my favourite ways to commit vegetable genocide. I am not sure if that was the best written description, but it is too late, I have already thought it anyways. Let us take that description and purée it into one of my velouté soups, shall we? 
Because I do not rent my own apartment, and am living in a spacious bedroom on the third floor of an enchantingly ancient house of stone and wooden beam construction (complete with a dark, creaky, spiralling staircase, metal window radiators, and wooden window shutters covered in peeling rust red paint [AND NO WINDOW SCREENS, why, France!?] that bang incessantly against the jutting stones of the walls on stormy, windy nights) that dates back to the Middle Ages (13th century!), I do not have my own bathroom or kitchen. Fortunately, my landlady has a beautifully, wonderfully equipped kitchen, and if I am alone in it, I am free to do or make whatever I want. However, she also enjoys cooking, and I feel like I am encroaching on her culinary territory when I try to prepare meals in her presence. This means that when or if (rarely), she happens to be away for a weekend, visiting relatives in other small and charming French cities, I spend a lot of time baking 50x the amount of baked goods that one person could realistically eat in one weekend. Also, I can sing along to Taylor Swift as loudly as I want while I bake and cook and be free from her innocuous French judgment of my methods or recipes, which, if questioned, are usually concluded to be “Canadian,” tsk tsk. Well, these were Earl Grey scones after all, nothing French about that! 
In the upper portion of this photo, one can see that I terminated my quest for quinoa – something so ubiquitous in yogi-hipster-health-conscious Vancouver, but somewhat uncommon in Cahors. There is a special organic foods shop called La Vie Claire and everything is sold at special organic food prices (read, expensive). In the bottom half, one can bear witness to the fact that I have struggled to stick to Canadian dietary standard requirements of “dark green vegetables” by habitually eating a head of broccoli in as many different ways as I can without exerting too much extra effort. 
There is a tea and spices stand at the Cahors marché, a table laden with neat rows of small canvas sacks, and these are filled with many varieties of teas en vrac, dried herbs, and loose spices, topped with slightly cracked wooden cups or ladles for scooping said teas and spices into plastic baggies. When I first started learning to cook last November, the first dinner dish I learned besides quiche lorraine, was a simple curry. At her current home in La Teste de Buch (near Bordeaux), my friend Nathalie taught me the recipe she had been taught by her former Indian roommate, and every so often, when it is chilly outside (even for a Canadian, yes; also, I am from Vancouver, it doesn’t get very cold there!!), I have a craving for a bit of savoury spice. I’ll vary the vegetables in the recipe, or switch between rice and quinoa, but I always use the same Colombo spice mix, and I always get it at this particular spice stand at the marché. 
Because the days were colder, I had no craving for chilled lettuce leaf salads, but I did miss the quinoa salads I used to always make at home in Vancouver. So I started making a series of different layered quinoa salads, even experimenting with mixing my own vinaigrette (dijon mustard, honey, lemon juice, salt, pepper, olive oil/sesame oil/nut oil!). It’s an easy way to eat a greater variety of vegetables in one dish – provided you actually end up with the salad on a dish. Here’s a helpful hint: when shaking up salad in plastic or glass container, make sure the lid is secure, unless you enjoy licking quinoa off the counter. 
While in my quinoa salad phase, I came across this recipe for a Wild Rice Salad (of course, I switch out the rice for quinoa from time to time)! Most amazingly, it can be eaten hot or cold, and uses the same vinaigrette as my quinoa salads. Actually, no, the best part is how it always ends up being a huge batch that can last me 4-5 meals. It is also savoury, sweet, tangy, and slightly spicy all at once, and I have already made this recipe on three different occasions. (The “occasion” being that I was hungry and needed to be fed.)
I also went back to cooking some pasta dishes after a decent interval of time had passed after my days of crazed carbohydrate gorging in Cinque Terre. It’s not so much the pasta, but the sauces that I care about. What an easy way to boastfully pretend that one is capable of many different dishes! Thekitchn.com provided me with an easy, peasy Lemon Pepper Caper Pasta Sauce recipe, that I probably made three times in the first week I attempted it, loading it with more ingredients each time in the effort to beef up the dish (without actual beef). Salmon and avocado are always perfect together, they are like the health-conscious, culinarily sophisticated PB & J of the West Coast, whose love will literally fortify your heart with omega-3s.
This is what I called my “I’m leaving town for 9 days (to go to Aix-en-Provence & Avignon) so I have to cook what I have left in the fridge,” kind of meal, or “Avocado & Mushroom Scrambled Eggs.”
And this! Well, this is a daily essential for me now, I’m apprehensive about how well I shall manage without it when I return to Canada. A fresh dose of espresso with a fine layer of crema swirling on top, in a little hand painted tasse that I picked up in Avignon, Provence! Not pictured: a too quickly consumed packet of Lotus Speculoos biscuits, so perfect for dipping in espresso that I do not envy Proust’s soggy little madeleine and cup of tea, though I worry about how I shall proceed with my recherche du temps perdu without these two cardinal goods in Vancouver…
At this point, I have become quite good at improvising a meal, I think: I had just returned from dreadfully rainy Avignon, and had barely any groceries nor money left. I did have some pesto rosso from Christmastime and capers left in the fridge, along with some creme fraiche two weeks past its expiry date, and spinach trofie pasta from Italy; and eggs are always relatively cheap, as are packets of jambon cru on special at the supermarket because they are about to go bad.
…which leads me to the, “I obviously just did a grocery run (because I took money out of my Canadian bank account) so I have more than just eggs and pasta” dish: The Return of the Evidently Economical Rice/Quinoa Salad with lardons, green beans, dried cranberries, red bell pepper, and honey mustard vinaigrette! I made this dish 4 nights ago. There is still some in the fridge. See what I mean?
And finally, the most recent dish of all, prepared for a Sunday night Skype date, 20 Minute Creamy Avocado Pasta, perfect for lazy cooks in a rush (induced by having been lazy all day long). I also have never had better luck with avocados than I have here, in France. They are always perfectly ripe and flavourful, and I even remade this sauce last night to coat two diced up chicken breasts (my first time cutting up and cooking meat in almost 8 years. Incidentally, it was the first time cutting up and cooking meat 8 years ago that had turned me towards the vegetarian way of life. What have you done to me, France!?).
It’s a dreary, rainy early evening at the end of February, usually always the dreariest of months no matter where you are living in the northern hemisphere. The Imitation Game (Version Originale) starts at the local cinema across the main street in 20 minutes. It’s a two minute cobblestoned walk from my front door. If I hurry, I can make it in time to gaze with unabashed absorption at Benedict Cumberbatch’s (sadly, now married) face for two hours. Bon (Ben??) appétit indeed!
Update: …Worth the walk in the rain. Especially since the rain can mask the tears on your face.
auds & ends 