Tuesday, February 14, 2006

I'm In Heaven!

For various reasons, it's been about a week since I've bought a fresh baguette. Most recently, yesterday, all of the bakeries in our neighbourhood were closed. This resulted in the purchase of a bag of chips which were, unsurprisingly, not nearly as satisfying.

Tonight we're having risotto (I've managed to get control of the risotto tonight, I want to try a new recipe), so that obviously warrants the purchase of bread (it's the carbs with carbs on carbs diet. You should try it. It's great!). I'm not usually in the shops at this time (6:00pm), I like to go earlier in the day on my way home from work, and I was surprised to see how bare they were. My favorite bakery looked like it had been pillaged of all its tasty treats, and they couldn't get the baguette out of the oven fast enough. That meant that my bread was so warm, so delicious, so satisfying, that I felt I needed to share it with you.

I used to be blown away by how cheap the baguette was. Until I did some basic math and realized that we usually spend about 7 euros on bread a week. One euro here and there certainly doesn't seem like much, but realizing what the grand total is makes you wonder if it's really worth it (absolutely!). When we lived in Toronto, our bread purchases were limited to bags of pita bread that we would freeze for the odd occasion when there was nothing left for lunches except tuna sandwiches. I think we would have been hard pressed to spend $7 a month on bread in Canada. Maybe I'm exaggerating a little, but I'm still amazed at how quickly our diet has changed since coming here. I don't know if I can say it's changed for the better, because I think the term 'good diet' is very different in both countries, but we eat well, and always have, it just happens to be a different kind of 'well' here.

On that note, I'm off to get started on the risotto (and have another piece of bread. Hopefully there will be some left by the time Erik gets home...)

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