Over the past few weeks large tents have been popping up all over Perigueux along with many posters and billboards advertising “Le Salon International du Livre Gourmand”. The fancy tents, late night security and the word Gourmand just screamed expensive to us, so we had almost written it off when someone told us it only cost 3 euros for the day. What a bargain! We scrapped our original plans for Friday (a lie in followed by a marathon of “The Killing” ) donned our cultural heads, and headed for the Cookbook Exposition/Food festival. The first tent was full of French cook books, anything you wanted to cook, they had a recipe for it. they were all beautifully illustrated and had wonderful graphics so of course I had to buy one! I was tempted to get one on Perigord meals, but realistically I wasn’t going to be cooking duck, snails and other fancy foods so instead opted for the easy french desserts one which I am so excited to try out! The second tent was full of local businesses selling and offering free samples of their wine, cheese, meat, bread, chocolate, etc. There were so many different sellers and the food was delicious! All of it was pretty expensive to actually buy, but walking around and sampling all the local delicacies was a great experience!
It turns out that the other tents are only open on Saturday and we wouldn’t get to see them as we were going to Rocamadour the next day so we headed back to Maeve’s to resume our original Friday plans and watched a good 5 episodes of The Killing – very intense! I have been eating so much less meat over here because both Steff and Meg are vegetarians which means when we cook together we tend to not bother cooking two different meals. So in true fake-veggy style for dinner that evening we tried out the Vegetarian Restaurant in Perigueux, and it was really good! My dinner came served in a little squash that looks like a baby pumpkin!
C'EST LA VIE 