First Ski Randonnée Of The Season

Quiet, deep and crisp and (mostly) even, with just the ski tracks of the previous skier ascending Aux Gets, in the Haute Savoie in the Portes du Soleil area.

The sky heavy with more snow clouds sweep in above us as we climb and the wind gathers strength keeping the prospect of more deep soft snow at bay, this little lot is likely to blow into drifts and change the conditions before our descent... but we have the whole of winter before us and hope that it cannot be as bad as last year.

Quenelle de Brochet

Lunch in Lyon last Sunday was at little place called "Café Du Soleil" at; 2, rue St Georges (Place de la Trinité) 69005 Lyon. We just stumbled upon them but from now on whenever I am there I'll call them first as we were lucky to get one of only two free tables. They only had laid about 13 or 14 tables and a rough guess would be for a total of about 50 people, but I digress. I had not realised before going in that their speciality would be quenelles, and specifically Quenelle de Brochet.

The photo above does it no justice whatsoever but it ate like a soufflé. And for fun I have linked above, an English language recipe for anyone competent enough to attempt. For myself, as much as I have loved discovering quenelles, I am cooking Queue de Boeuf, a simple recipe today.

You can't make omelettes without breaking eggs...

And so the old saying goes...

I cracked one egg and there were the two yolks; I cracked another and there were two more... I shall have to speak to my missus and find out where she shopped last weekend. Maybe we should stop using the farm next to that new Nuclear Power plant.

I cannot for the life of me reckon this is just a coincidence...

The omelette? Well with a little salt to assist a good whisk and some fresh ground pepper, on whole meal toast it was a good set up for the day; a five hour hike up around the crêtes from 1160m (the rough old car park) to about 1700m where we sat on the side of a ski slope and set up the camping gaz stove to boil water and add to a proper Japanese Pot-Noodles. Mountain tucker at the beginning of December needs a little more than a sandwich.

Lyon - a lesson

This past weekend has been a lesson in how one should not ASSUME things. One should check and go off and find out... and so it was assumed that the Fête des Lumière in Lyon was running from this weekend through to next weekend as the actual date of 8th December would fall during this week.

Rail tickets were bought, hotel was booked and off we went only for 'someone' to say she obviously thought that the 'lights' would be on for the whole week... Not so.

And so we decided to spend our time at the 11e Biennale de Lyon, subtitled "A Terrible Beauty Is Born", the oft repeated line from the poem 'Easter 1916' by W.B Yeats.

Mmmm. Difficult and inaccessible I would say our general reaction was.

The photograph above is of an installation that suggested a result of a collison of the moon and earth. Oh well. We had a good dinner that night in a Bouchon Lyonnais, so not all was bad.


But it gave us the chance to wander Lyon and look.

Next year, we shall book as far in advance as possible and make sure that we get there for the colours and the lights....