November 2023 Newsletter
Vietnamese 5-Spice Boeuf Bourguignon and Toulouse's hidden gems
To try:
Bleu de Sassenage
Every Taste of Toulouse tour is a gastronomic adventure. We collect baguette, charcuterie, and cheese to dine on as we sip wine, huddled around a barrel at the market’s wine bar. Unsurprisingly, this all goes down a treat and guests go back to their hotels or Airbnbs to sleep off their food-induced torpor. The cheese course is without a doubt the best part - we choose four with complementary textures and flavours, so everyone is introduced to something new. My new favourite and currently a regular on my cheeseboard is Bleu de Sassenage.
Blue cheese gets a bad rap, and my theory about that is because we try strong blue cheese before we’re ready. These cheeses are robust, spicy and almost medicinal, with the flavour and smell clinging to skin for days, yet if we knew more milder blue cheeses, we could build our tolerance. Bleu de Sassenage is such a blue cheese, chewy and incredibly creamy with enough salty earthiness to remind you that it is in fact blue. A subtly substantial addition to any cheeseboard.
To listen:
Ben Mazué
Ben has been the soundtrack to my life in France. As one of Gaylord’s favourite singers and songwriters, Ben’s voice often drifts out of the kitchen whenever Gaylord is cooking or washing up. He serenaded us in the car two summers ago as we drove along narrow country lanes and past endless meadows under the blazing sun. I will always associate his voice with the wild flowers of Ardèche.
This is one of my favourite songs of his - it’s a bittersweet blend of loss, longing and hope for the future (if you’re learning French, read the lyrics as you listen, I hear it’s a great learning method… and as my French is still mediocre, it’s one I should really do more of myself!). As for it being in French, well the reason I like Ben so much is - for me, someone who can barely hear lyrics in English let alone in another language - his music’s rhythm and melody. I routinely catch myself bobbing my head like some deranged pigeon.
The word ‘November’ could be the title of a poem about socks and clearing fallen leaves. It’s the cosiest month by far I think - I mean, stop me if I’m wrong but December is the most festive, January is evidently the bleakest, February is the surely-it’s-nearly-over, whereas November is the beginning of that winter hump, when we all still feel fairly positive about turning the heating on, filling hot water bottles, and slipping on an extra pair of socks. I write this from the armchair in my parents’ sitting room, a blanket slung over my legs and a fire roaring in the grate, as picturesque as a Dicken’s novel (aside from the electric gleam of the laptop). I will bottle this feeling of cosy tranquillity, storing it for late January when I need to wear gloves inside again.
November in Toulouse has been a month of feasting. And aging apparently, as Gaylord is now 32 and has a dad-car. It’s not quite a people carrier to take imaginary kids to football practice, but it is the kind of car that makes us look at each other in alarmed delight, certain someone will rap on the car windows, yelling, “Stop messing around in there! You’re not old enough for this vehicle!”
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But as for that feasting…
Thanksgiving
This month I celebrated my first Thanksgiving. There was a Thanksgiving seven years ago where my friend and I were hired as two very new and very nervous private chefs, who attempted to make mashed potatoes which turned into glue (which mashed potatoes has a tendency to do when you’re extremely nervous) and I burned my finger on spitting red hot caramel and I had to go to A&E when it got infected a few days later, so all in all, it wasn’t the best celebration of my life.
This Thanksgiving though had no culinary disasters, no nerves, no injuries. Instead it was a snug, intimate evening smelling of apple juice and cinnamon, a pot of which sat on the stove nursing slices of orange and a ladle, ready for dumping warm spiced juice into pint glasses of red wine. This was the theme of the night at Nikita and Rhody’s - a patchwork of dishes, crockery and chairs and of people all coming together to share a night of endless eating, appreciation for the past year and hopes for the next. And what a success it was - I left with a fat wedge of foil-wrapped pumpkin cake pressed into my hand by Nikita, and I even made a new friend! We did that thing where we exchanged numbers and everything.
As for that food - well, I’d heard on the grapevine about what goes down at Thanksgiving. There’s an extraordinary sweet-savoury hybrid creature of sweet potatoes topped with marshmallows that I can’t stop thinking about because I must try it one of these days, and I’ve learnt what a green bean casserole is too - it apparently involves cream of mushroom soup. There is also, more often than not, a turkey. However, this year’s Thanksgiving swept tradition aside, turfing it out with the rubbish, as this celebration was a tutorial on how to make Thanksgiving vegan.
The spread was vast, Nikita the principle chef, having dedicated most of the day to cooking and baking, churned out stuffing, cornbread, and some feisty green beans caught in a sultry tango with a generous helping of chilli. People gathered, bringing foil-wrapped dishes; soup, a cabbage pie, an extremely garlicky tzatziki that made me paranoid whenever someone sat next to me, an excess of potato, and of course, dessert, again most of which Nikita managed to conjure out of thin air because she’s magical like that. There was the aforementioned pumpkin cake, a divine crumbly slice of pecan pie, Polish knedle (fruit dumplings), apple crumble and apple pie, the fruit of which I rudely kept dolloping into my already brimming bowl. So, with the table positively groaning, legs buckling, under the weight of such a spread, the traditional turkey really wasn’t missed - in fact, I hardly registered it wasn’t there.
Stupefied by stuffing, we nursed mugs and tankards of red wine, lips stained purple. Rhody kept us entertained by bringing out his various musical instruments one after the other, even ending up with a melodica at one point, and this room of people from all over the world shared what we are all thankful for. I couldn’t remember the specifics even if I tried - I think I was on my third pint of wine by this stage - but we all agreed on one general theme: gratitude for finding new friends to make this city, foreign to us all, feel like home.
Toulouse’s Hidden Gems
Ok, so I’ve lived in this city for over two years now (not including that little hiccup called Covid).