Falafel at the market - yum!

Saturday, October 23, 2010 Day 115


I got up a bit late, then stalled as long as I could this morning hoping that rain would save me from walking the Peyrou, but no such luck; so finally at 11:00, we left for our exercise. From there we went to the Saturday Arceaux market. It was larger by half than it has been recently. There were mussel and oyster vendors, a second nut and spice vendor, and more produce than usual. It was lunchtime and there were several vendors selling prepared meals. For the first time, we saw a falafel stall, so we bought some snacked on them. Before we came to France, we didn’t even know what falafel were and now we are beginning to discover that they are quite delicious. I like these so much better than our first experience with them in Paris at a famous falafel house in the Marais section of Paris, where they were in a pita sandwich, as I recall, along with cabbage salad, cucumbers, fried eggplant and harissa – too much of a good thing, I think. The falafel got lost in all the other stuff. Here we just bought a dozen falafel and shared them. They were gone before we exited the market area! We bought some sausage for beans and a Christmas cactus for Anne, who is preparing us dinner on Monday.

We returned to the north African shop on Gambetta which sold dried beans, and Roger bought 500 grams of pinto beans. He paid less than 1.50€, which is about half what the grocery store wanted for them. We plan to cook them with the sausage for dinner tomorrow. I also picked up a package of Colombian mixed spices to experiment with, and a package of dried soup. It is getting to be soup weather around here.

The second time he played the high board, he won, so got the privilege of defending it, and he did so successfully a couple of times. Then he lost, so had to give it up. Later he played again, won again, then lost. He is getting the hang of this 5-minute chess stuff.