A very full Sunday

Last Sunday was just jam packed with activities! It was a really nice day too! What luck. We started with a stroll to our town center where the annual wine and cheese fair was on. We'd been for the previous 2 days already and really like it. It's a great fair, lots of booths around the mairie (town hall), which is the 'old' part of the town, with honest to goodness, ankle breaking cobblestones! Actually, it's really quite beautiful. Just havae to watch them cobblestones, especially with the stroller. Every year, the fair centers around a theme, and this year, we're guessing the theme is... Swiss cheese! 'coz everywhere we go, there were lots of swiss cheese! There was even a fondue stall this year. It was all very delicious, and 'smelly'.. as there were lots of stalls selling all different types of cheeses and dried sussages (mahmah would have fainted going through the fair! lol). There were also lots of stalls selling wine (most people go round tasting the wine to buy) and other specialties like foie gras, a couple of honey stalls (they sell differnet types of honey! I swear... there were flower honey, wild honey, tree honey, creamy honey, different type of honey from different trees and plants such as lavender, tileuil (sp?) etc) and one of my favorite stalls, a jam stall...with all kinds of yummy confitures / jams filled with chunky pieces (not runny, watery paste you get from the supermarket). They also have unique, not often found ingredients... my favorite is red tomato with onions. I know, it sounds weird for a jam, that's what I thought, and especially since I hate tomatoes, imagine my surprise when I discovered what the ingredients were after tasting it (we did a taste test many years ago (b4 children))! I bought a jar immediately! It's lovely as a chutney type, but I like it on bread / toast. Yes, so lots of stuff at the fair, but what we do, especially with the girls, is get there to... EAT. They've got lovely food at the fair, and if you get there early enough, you can find seats. So that's what we did on Sunday. We headed for my favorite aligot stall and placed an order. Aligot is basically mashed garlic potato mixed with melted cheese, normally a tomme. It's oh so delicious ... and heavy! So great for the winter (and not so good for the rather lovely sunny day, but hey! It's once a year). Bibou even got to stir the pot (pix of her stiring). I also headed off to get some yummy tartiflette... another heavy cheese dish, made from potatoes, bacon / ham, onion, cheese, creme fraiche and wine (the pix on the left is the HUGE pn of tartiflette). Oh and we got some sussages too. After that heavy meal, we really had to walk it all off!

We came home and everyone was ready for a little nap seeing what a heavy meal it was! After the nap, we met Dan and his family at the park.. another park in Sceaux. The kids had lots of fun just running round and round, their attention span is quite quite limited; they don't stay at any one structure for long, but they're always together.. chasing each other, and now, they seem to be fighting a lot! Though they do make up quite quickly too.

We had to rush back as we had Rebecca and her family over for a quick dinner (in between Rugby games!). I'd made beef rendang (in the slow cooker) and so that was ready when we came back home. We'd also recently go to chinatown and bought lots of chinese vegetables, so I cooked some shanghai bak choy (quick fry with garlic and soy sauce) and broad beans (with garlic, chai bo, and chili brown bean sauce). For once, I remembered to get a pix taken of the food before hey got all eaten up. We had a great time albiet short with everyone. Et viola, a jolly busy Sunday and we managed to get the girls into bed not too late!

Ooo, here's a clip of Bibou and Dan running around in the playgroud.