Jeannine & Roger's French Cheese Odyssey

La Brousse - 25th June

What’s at La Brousse? not much, just a few oddballs out geocaching.

We set out early this morning to beat the heat and find a number of Puzzle Geocaches that I had solved before leaving NZ. There are 43 geocaches spread over an 11 kilometre circular track on bush and farmland near the town of La Brousse. We found the 6 we set out to do; it only took us 2½ hours, 4 muesli bars and ⅓ of a bottle of water.

Amazing views - it is interesting how green the fields are up on the plateaus given it is well over 30 degrees most days and there is no sign of irrigation in the paddocks.

Essence of France Photo Challenge No.27 - Country Life Despite public perception of French people being lazy workers, and always striking for reduce work hours, there are plenty of people in France who are extremely hard working.

Drive anywhere in France and you will see fields of crops, market gardens and smaller farms which produce and sell a lot of their own products on site or at the Saturday markets such as cheese, cold meats and vegetables. Go past any small acreage and you will see large vegetable patches being tended to by hand, normally with flowers growing alongside crops. Small farming communities still exist, with stone cottages centred around an old church with bells that ring, as they did in years past, to call the farmer in for meals.

Below are some of the gardens we saw in the middle of farmland today.

After a very long siesta we headed into town for tea and a reward drink for a long walk. Below are the French Blonde and the Scottish Red.

Cheese Experience No.65 - Cheese to eat with beer It’s a fallacy that you shouldn’t eat beer and cheese together. Just like white wine, beer has an acidity that perfectly complements the fat in cheese. Their effervescence rinses the palate, keeping the taste buds as in tune as possible. The best cheese to pair with a blonde (lager) beer, according to the internet, is a soft cow’s milk cheese, which happens to be the only type of cheese we have on hand. However our Faisselle Vache is so soft you could think it was unfinished.

This brings me to another fallacy, Little Miss Muffet was not eating unfinished cheese or curds and whey; she was in fact eating 16th century cottage cheese.

Cheese is made from curds that have had the whey drained off. Back to the nursery rhyme of Little Miss Muffet sitting on her tuffet - she represents Mary Queen of Scots and the spider that sat beside her was Presbyterian reformer John Knox who berated the Roman Catholic monarch about her religion; well that’s one theory. Given the amount of cheese eating Catholics in France the spider was lucky he didn’t live here.