Villefranche-sur-mer Fall 2022 - 2 The Saturday Market

 Dear Friends,

Today was the last Saturday market for us for this stay.  We go to this market each Saturday to provision for the week ahead and to enjoy the ambience.  There are stands that sell fresh vegetables, cheeses, charcuterie, flowers, paella, roasted chickens, olive oil, tapenades of all sorts, flowers, clothes, jewelry, etc.   We are so used to going there that we forget to take pictures, so you will have to be content with the "after" pictures.  

In addition to the market itself, we take the opportunity to stock up on other necessities.  By the time we are done, we are laden down with supplies.  Fortunately, the market is at the l'Octroi level so we walk uphill to get there and then it is all downhill once we are loaded down.

Upon arrival at our apartment, I look like this.

The wine and milk are in the backpack, the fresh meat is in the small bag in front, the TP and fragile vegetables are in the maroon bag in front and everything else is in the white sack on the side.  Once inside the door, it is only 36 stairs to get to our apartment.  

I should be as strong as a mule and have calves like watermelons.  Here are photos of the goods from each of our stops.  The first stop was for fresh vegetables.

All that for just about 12 euros, and she threw in a little parsley to add taste and color to our meals.

Our next stop was the charcutier/fromager.  Today we just bought some ham because we bought way too much cheese last week.  We can't help ourselves because it all looks so good.

It is just sliced ham, but it is really good, and it comes with a big smile and an attempt to sell us multiple other things.  We have learned (sort of) not to fall for buying more than we need.  

Those were the only two stops at the market today.  Normally we would have bought a few roses or other cut flowers, but we forgot.

We went to the "Petit Casino" which is a chain of grocery stores.  There are two in Villefranche, both of which are quite small, but that is where we get necessities such as everyday wine, milk, eggs, TP, creme fraîche, etc.  Here are the results of this trip.

The white wine is one we often buy, but the red wine is a new one for us.  The name "La Chasse" means the hunt.  Unfortunately, it is also a word used to say flush the toilet - tirer la chasse.  In this case we hope it is referring to the hunt.

There is a wonderful artisan, organic baker who is open only on certain days, including market days.  He doesn't have baguettes, but he has many other wonderful bakery items.  His loaves of bread are too big for us to use up before they go bad.  He kindly cuts the loaf in two so that we have just what we need.

He told us the secret to keeping his bread fresh for several days.  You keep it in the brown bag he gives you, wrap it in a dish towel and keep it in the refrigerator.  While the crust gets quite hard after 4 days, the inside is still very good.

Next stop is Picard Surgeles.  It is an amazing chain of frozen food stores.  Everything that we have had from this store is great even though it is frozen.  We still prefer fresh, but we always need ice cream and frozen berries for breakfast.  Today we threw in a frozen provençal vegetable casserole.

We wish that Picard would expand to the US.

Our last stop today was the butcher.  He is closed Sunday afternoon and Mondays so we try to buy a couple of dinners from him on Saturday.  We like him and his meats, but we also often walk to Beaulieu (2 miles each way) to go to Les Halles a wonderful butcher there.  Today we got chicken breasts and a big pork chop.

We have a gas grill on our balcony, so we will grill these.  It makes my mouth water just thinking about it.

We love to eat out, but with produce and meats like these, staying home for dinner is really enjoyable.  Oh and in case you are wondering what we will do for the rest of the day.  Well, I will spend some time sitting on the balcony reading.

 Then we will take a walk on the beach and a swim in the ocean.  The high today is mid-70s, full sun and a slight breeze.

This is the view of the beach from our balcony.

Thanks for reading and please comment,

The Unabashed Liberal

Villefranche-sur-mer Fall 2022 - 1 Changes

 Dear Friends,

I can't believe we have been here for a week already.  After having been gone for seven months, we immediately felt at home in Villefranche again.  

There have been some changes.  Most of which are not for the better.  Our favorite boulangerie, Chez Marie Claire, has closed because Marie Claire has retired.  Unfortunately, we were not able to say goodbye.  Our wonderful memories of her creations and her personality will remain.  According to a small sign in the window as well as local gossip, a new boulangerie is coming that is not a chain.  This is very good news, if and when it happens.  

Another to retire is the local optician who was really great, both professionally and personally.  We got a chance to see him as he is still working with his replacement who also seems really nice and professional. 

Villefranche decided to upgrade the boats in its harbor which in my opinion has caused the harbor to lose some of its romance and charm.  Now there are fewer boats and close in the harbor they are all moored in a line.  Here are before and after pictures.

 Before

Today

Perhaps I am just showing how spoiled we are.

On the bright side, there is a new coffee shop, boulangerie, wine bar and deli just down the street that our apartment is on.  We have only tried the croissants and pain au chocolat both of which were great.  We will go there more to check out all they have to offer.  

Plus you never know when you will see something new.  Here is a spear fisher person going after octopus in the rocks along the shore just below our apartment.  You probably can't tell but those white things at his waist are several octopi that he has speared.

Of course a lot has stayed the same, so that our love for this place continues.

The full moons over the harbor as seen from our apartment.

Fortunately, it still rains occasionally just to break up the days on end of 60° lows, 75° highs and sunny or mostly sunny.  We take those days in stride.

Then there is the joy of having a wonderful meal outside.  Our favorite restaurant where we go the first and last nights that we are here as well as several times in between, is Le Serre,  It is a restaurant where the staff is fantastic, the ambience is local casual, the food is authentic, ranging from pizzas to starters and main courses of the day which are great.  We are so used to being there for wonderful dinners that we keep forgetting to take pictures.

The range of restaurants that we have enjoyed is very broad.  Here is a sampling so far this trip.

Spalato is quite a nice restaurant right on the quay that runs along the bay.  We had lunch there on the day we arrived.  

Aren't the plates great.  The wine glasses are not as big as they look in the photo.  

That is a huge serving of very fresh burrata on some wonderful fresh vegetables.  

Le Cosmo is a more casual restaurant but with good food and service.  You never go hungry here because even the salads are big.

Sometimes we will have our French lessons outside at a cafe.  La Baleine Joyeuse ("the merry whale") is one we frequent because it is close to our teacher's apartment, and they don't seem to mind if we sit there for several hours in the morning having just a coffee and sometimes a croissant.  One day last week we decided to stay for lunch.  I had mi-cuit thon (half cooked tuna).

Jane had a salad nicoise.

You would never guess that such food would come from this restaurant.

One of our favorite restaurants in Beaulieu sur mer, is La Maison de Beaulieu.  It was closed last winter for renovations.  It has reopened and is even better than before.  It is almost exactly a 2 mile walk from our apartment so we feel that we can eat freely when we get there as we will also have a 2 mile walk home.  Although in fairness we can take a bus so the walk is only about a half a mile.  While it is the most expensive of the restaurants in this series, the price to quality ratio is excellent.  You can see that in the presentation, and we certainly could taste it.  

Jane had a chicken caesar salad.  The Americanization of the name does not do it justice.

I had seared tuna again.  It is so great here.  Note the difference in presentation from the dish by the same name at La Baleine Joyeuse.  There is a significant price difference.

Since we walked all that way and because the waiter was very persuasive, we had a pavlova with fresh strawberries for dessert.  Just to prove we aren't complete degenerates, we skipped the lemoncello offered at the end of the meal.

Of course with all the wonderful places to buy fresh meats and vegetables, we do not have to go out to a restaurant for a great dinner.  Here is a sampling of meals that we made at home.

entrecôte

blanc de poulet

côte de porc

There are also two things that are eternal and never change.

The sea and one's need to swim in it.

And the dog poops (but at least they are artistically placed on the sidewalk).

Thanks for reading and please comment,

The Unabashed Liberal 

Villefranche-sur-mer 2022 - 6 A Dinner Party

 Dear Friends,

During the time that we have been coming to Villefranche, we have met many wonderful people whom we are lucky to call our friends.  Even though we have a healthy fear of COVID, we try to meet with these friends outside or in small groups.  The other day, we had a dinner party to which we invited 4 friends.  We had a wonderful time.  

One of the fun parts of having a dinner party is planning, buying the food for and cooking the dinner.  Readers of this blog may remember an ill-fated dinner party a couple of years ago that is now universally referred to as the flying chicken dinner party when I let the chicken provençal fly out of the oven and onto the floor.  That history is recorded here.  Since this was our first dinner party since the fly chicken dinner party, we wanted it to be successful.

After planning the meal, we headed to Nice to do the shopping.  Our first stop was the Cours Saleya.  It is a wonderful market in Nice, known for its produce as well as flowers.

The only problem is which of the many stands, you should buy from.  They are all fantastic.  If you try to figure out which one has the best tomatoes that day at the best price and then who has the best artichokes at the best price and then who has the best raspberries at the best price, you will go crazy.  Unlike the much smaller Saturday market in Villefranche where we go every Saturday and have our favorite vendors, we are just occasional visitors to Cours Saleya, so we have no favorite vendors.  You really cannot go wrong.

After we got all the produce we needed, we headed off to find cheeses for the cheese course.  We came upon a fromagerie that we think was fairly new because we had not seen it before.  

The owner was very welcoming and professional.  He took time with us, both by speaking French all the time and by explaining our different choices.  We told him we wanted three cheeses for a cheese course.  He suggested a creaming cow cheese (Saint Félicien fermier lait cru), a less creamy chèvre (Rouelle) and a hard cheese (comté).  We also got some roquefort too because you can't really stop in a cheese shop and not get some roquefort.  Here is a photo of the owner explaining our choices to us.

Our next stop was a wine shop.  There is plenty of wine for sale in Villefranche but no real wine shop.  So we stopped at a Nicolas shop in Nice.  It is a chain wine shop in France, but very good.

I know something about French wines, but I have no idea about which vineyard, etc.  The person who helped us was perfect, he understood what we wanted, didn't try to sell us anything grossly expensive and spoke french too.  We got some champagne that was bottled under the Nicolas name.  It was great.  We then got some Chablis and some red Burgundy.  Both were on sale which put them in our price range.  All of them were great.  It is so nice when the people helping you are trying to get you what you want and can afford.  

That concluded our shopping for Nice.  We were hungry, and it was close to lunch time, so we decided to have a quick lunch at Chez Papa, one of our favorites for lunch in Nice.  Unfortunately, it was closed; but as is often the case there is a suitable alternative nearby.   We saw Posto 17 just down the block and thought we would give it a try.

They weren't quite open yet, but the owner welcomed us.  The only menu for food was on the blackboard.  You can see the prices are quite reasonable.

Jane and I each ordered the rigatoni sauce tomate maison - burrata.  It was perfect for a quick lunch.  When Jane asked him what was in the homemade tomato sauce, he almost gave her the entire recipe.

There was a separate menu for drinks.  I only include it here because from time to time we come across translations or the use of English words that are not quite right.  If you look under Cocktails, the next to the last drink is "Sex on the Beatch".  We thought that was a unique spelling.

Jane finished with a noisette (espresso with a small amount (a nut) of milk).  At this restaurant it came with a small cookie which served to keep the drink warm - another cute touch.

We felt a little like pack horses as we made our way home.  When we arrived we were faced with the issue of where to put everything that we had acquired.

We found room for everything although the refrigerator was overflowing.

All of that shopping was on a Sunday.  The party was Monday night.  On Monday morning, we headed to Beaulieu to get the chicken.  Yes, we were trying chicken again, but this time it was chicken Lucia on the grill with less chance of flying chicken.  The final stop on for our shopping was at our favorite boulangerie, Chez Marie-Claire.  Chez Marie-Claire is not far from our apartment.  She has of course bread, baguettes and pastries.  But she also has wine, eggs, butter and sandwiches.  Here is a picture of Marie-Claire as she was packaging the cake we had bought for the party.

The cake was absolutely beautiful, but we forgot to take a picture of it.  The taste of the cake was even better than its beautiful presentation.  This picture of the last piece shows what a perfect cake it was.  

The crust is a light chocolate graham cracker.  The light brown filling is a chocolate pots de creme (only lighter than what we usually make), the next comes a thin layer of something like blueberry syrup that is the consistency of jam, followed by a layer of a light, fluffy layer of blueberry pots de creme and a top layer of blueberry icing.  The great thing was that all the calories had been removed.

We finished the meal with a small glass of "menthe".  The best way to describe what we refer to as menthe is to think of limoncello only made with mint.  Our favorite local restaurant here, Le Serre, offers limoncello after dinner, but sometimes if Marie has had a good crop of mint, Sylvie will turn it into menthe.  Fortunately for us Marie had a good crop of mint, so we were able to buy a bottle of menthe from her to serve at the dinner party.  While we made a pretty good dent in it we did not finish it off so we can have some for ourselves from time to time.

                                                       

In the end a good time was had by all, and thankfully our French lesson for Tuesday morning was cancelled.

Thanks for reading and please comment,

The Unabashed Liberal

For the chicken we went to our favorite butcher in Beaulieu.  He is a young man and takes his time with us and is a true butcher.  Unfortunately, I did not get a photo.

The last thing on our list was bread and dessert.  For that we had to go to our favorite baker in Villefranche.  We got a couple of baguettes for the cheese course and a beautiful chocolate and blueberry cake. 

Villefranche-sur-mer 2022 - 5 An Empty Harbor

 Dear Friends,

We have been coming to Villefranche-sur-mer in the winter since 2014.  The Rade de Villefranche (the bay) is the only well protected deep water harbor on the northern coast of the Mediterranean.  I love looking at the water, the boats and all the comings and goings.  The apartment that we rent is right on the water, but we are quite a bit above water level.  Even in January and February there are quite a few boats in the bay and lots of activity.  Here is a picture of the bay from January 2020.  

All these photos are taken from the balcony of our apartment.  You can understand why I like it here.  Here is a photo of the bay from early this year.

As you can see, there are still quite a few boats in the bay, many of them have been here for years.  On Monday, all of the boats were removed from the bay either under their own power or by the various maritime police groups.   Here is what that the bay looked like Monday afternoon.

I don't know why the authorities decided to clear the bay out.  I have always thought that there were a number of boats that were abandoned.  There were other boats with people living on them but that could never move under their own power.  There were other boats that were occupied by people who were living on them and fixing them up or at least keeping them in good condition.  I am quite sure that many of them were in violation of any number of regulations, including not paying whatever the fee is for anchoring in the bay.  

Regardless of the reason, on Monday morning early a group of six or seven maritime police vessels arrived and began a massive operation to clear the bay.

They brought with them a couple of private contractors to help with the operation.  In the photo below, the top circle is a maritime police boat and the two bottom circles contain the private contractors.  It is not hard to tell the difference.  You probably cannot tell from the picture that the cover on the private contractor's boat on the bottom left is covered with sea gull poop.

The operation was very efficiently done.  Seven boats were towed to a near by anchorage while they await being taken out of the water and put in a junk yard with the other three boats that have already been sent there.  In the photos below, they are towing boats away.  It was quite easy, they had big chain cutters and just cut the anchor rodes.  

They also made quick work of taking several boats out using a flat bed truck with a crane.  They don't bother spending any time carefully unrigging to take the mast down.  They just attach the mast to the crane and cut all the stays.  In the photo below the mast has just crashed into the water.  

They also don't have to spend any time worrying about marring the hull, so they just lay the boat on its side on the truck bed.

They got quite efficient at taking the boats out this way.  In the photo below they have just put one the truck and had two others waiting to go.  

At the end of the operation, there were still several boats left.  According to a Facebook post by Villefranche, the larger boats here will be taken away over the next week.  I don't know what will happen to the dinghies, some of which are completely disgusting.  One of the sail boats has a for sale sign on it.  It has solar panels and is fairly well maintained and can move on its own power.  The owner is on board.  I don't know how long he will be permitted to stay.  

A couple days later on a walk, I found many of the boats that had been removed.  The first photo is of the boats that were moved and awaiting haul out.  The second photo is the boats already in the junk yard.  

There were also a number of boats whose owners were on board.  They were told to leave.  In the photo below the double masted sailboat is being sent off by the authorities.  It was sad.  It is a nice boat, it has been in the bay for several years, and the owner has been working on it diligently.  

According to a Villefranche Facebook post, the operation removed all the boats that were illegally in the bay.  Apparently, all the boats in the bay were illegal in some way, hence the now empty bay.  That Facebook post also indicated that next week the authorities would start a cleaning of the bottom of the bay.  I am sure that there are many things on the bottom that will be of interest.  Plus after Monday's operation there are a bunch of anchors and anchor rodes.  I am looking forward to seeing how they clean the bottom. It may be like watching submarine races.  I will let you know.

I worry about the Rade de Villefranche.  It appears empty and lacks much of its former character.  I hope that the authorities have not ruined one of the many reasons that I love Villefranche just in the hopes of gaining more revenue or upgrading the boats that come to the bay.  We will see.  I will keep you posted.

Thanks for reading and please comment,

The Unabashed Liberal