Tag Archives: cooking

La vie quotidienne à Lyon.

Every morning in Lyon, we wake up later and later. In Croatia, I was merrily out of bed before 8 am pretty much every day; one morning I even trod down to the market a mile away at 6:30 am. All of that has slowly crumbled with the advent of late evenings in Lyon with wine and TV. Usually around 10 am or so, I stumble out of our bedroom alcove to find Steve already cheerfully programming away. For my part, I put on the kettle and make myself a cup of thé agrume (citrus tea), which helps me wake up a little. Sometime after communing with the Internet for an hour or two, I shower and make brunch.

This is exactly where I’m sitting now, with a cup of tea in the same mug!

For our first week or two, we were regularly downstairs in the morning, going for a ramble in the Parc de la Tête d’Or or down to Gare Part-Dieu to buy a newspaper. We perused the local shops and patisseries for a pain chocolat (my usual) or a croissant aux amandes (croissant with almonds), which is (and goes well with) Steve’s cup of tea. Now, that’s proven a little harder, but we still make our routine trips to the patisserie while shopping for dinner. Mealtimes are pretty simple. I usually whip up something like grilled zucchini sandwiches, or a thick soup with lentil and sausages, or a pasta dish, and we watch the Colbert Report before Steve does the washing up. The afternoons drift by while I practice watercolors, read and take notes on microeconomics, and write blog posts. Steve programs, always. And yes, we buy fresh baguettes every day. Continue reading La vie quotidienne à Lyon.

The foodie post.

Let’s be honest. You may have been waiting for me to talk about Thai food. You may not have been. Well, the (hypothetical) wait is over, because I love food, as many people know, and being able to taste different cuisines was a huge part of wanting to travel, so some thoughts, now that we’ve been here for almost two weeks. Call for take-out now because you’re going to be hungry by the time I’m done, or at the very least, don’t read this at work, because drooling in public can be a real embarrassment!!

First of all, the food has been EXCELLENT, by and large. Some restaurants I won’t be revisiting, but the dishes themselves are wonderful, bright and flavorful creations which have really captured my imagination and taste buds.  Years from now, I will still be dreaming about our first bowl of noodles when we got to Chiang Mai: tom yum seafood noodles. (I’m not crazy about the seafood part, but it worked.) I ordered really wide rice noodles, and it came all in a hot, steamy, tart broth that smelled like lime and lemongrass, and there were a few crunchy fried prawns and ground peanuts scattered on top. THE BEST. For 35 baht (~1 USD).

Tom yum seafood soup with rice noodles.

Continue reading The foodie post.

Five Things We’ve Been Up To

Since we’ve been up to a hodgepodge of things, which is too hard to pigeonhole into categories, just enjoy a run-down of five things we’ve been doing recently!

1. Still photography. One of the things that I really want to do is get better at photography; I like taking a lot of pictures of different things I find beautiful, but my technique is really just point-and-shoot. The rest is the gorgeous DSLR camera my mother gave me for my birthday two years ago. Some of it has turned out nicely. Some of it looks silly enough that I don’t even want to put it up on Flickr yet. Here, have one of the more mundane samples that I like somehow!

Our makeshift utensil jar.

Continue reading Five Things We’ve Been Up To