Mange-tout

Hooray, I can eat again! Ok, so my appetite only went for about 6 days, but it seemed like a long time before I could eat solids. I would eat everything in sight, but as I got a final fitting for a bridesmaids dress yesterday I had better not go too mad in the next 3 weeks.

In celebration, it was of course only right to visit the market as per usual on a Sunday. These pictures will perhaps show why it is such a big part of the week for me. I hasten to add the market pictures are not my own work, but were taken by Melanie when she came out to visit a few weeks ago. First stop on the Friday night was for Kir Royals on board my favourite bar. Yes, on board…

We did the usual rounds of sights and of course culinary tours around Lyon, as well as taking the biking one stage further. Unfortunately during Melanie’s visit it rained, but it did mean that we managed to have bikes with baskets and umbrella’s! Probably not that safe, definitely not that sporty, possibly scores points on the being completely impractical but glamorous front though, particularly as my brolly is from Selfridges, so that’s ok then.

With Melanie’s help, I managed to get to grips with the night time setting on my camera and capture the picture I have been trying to take for 4 months, which is the Medical Museum on the river a few hundred metres from my apartment.

Back to the market…. and my favourite counter is of course, the cheese counter. Every week, the first stall we hunt for is “the cheese man” – if we haven’t found him after 15 mins or so, things get a bit panicky. There are of course loads of other cheese counters, and we could get incredibly good cheese from any of them, but somehow he beats them all… you can probably see why….

Now aubergines don’t feature heavily in the UK recipe collection as far as I am aware, but when you see them in such abundance here and with the stalls suggesting you buy 3 or 4 of them at a time I am nearly tempted to buy a load and improvise. However, it would also be sacrilegious to take such beautiful specimens and reduce them to the wilting mess of my vegetable drawer that would no doubt occur if I bought them with no plan of what to do. So far I have resisted. Any recipe ideas, gratefully received