Market at St. Martin-de-la Brasque

When I was posting Saturday's news I forgot to say that we went to Fontjoyeuse to fill up our bottles with water as per instructions. It is a lovely hamlet and when we found the fountain we could immediately see why it is called Fontjoyeuse.

Water gushes joyfully forth from 2 spouts. This is called a lavoir. To the side of the pouring water are two troughs full of water in which, I assume, people used to wash clothes in the past. There is a sign saying no laundry there now. However, that is not the case in Cadenet where we were unable to get a photo of the lavoir because there were Muslim women washing clothes there. They objected very strongly when Jim attemped to take a photo!

We took a walk around - it took about 3 minutes!

Some pictures of Fontjoyeuse.

Sunday morning we went to the market in St. Martin de-la-Brasque. It is a small market with all local producers. We bought homemade melon jam, homemade tomato coulis and homemade pate. The old woman at that stall talked a mile a minute and I had to ask her to slow down. We had a great conversation about what locals like and what tourists like. Locals don't eat melon jam because they have too many melons - I thought that was the real reason for making jam.  We tried some Viognier wine at a local producer's stall but I did not really like it. However, I had not the courage to say I didn't like it so we bought a bottle - Jim will have to drink that! We bought a bottle of red wine at another producer's stall - a Caudois red. We had already tried it so we knew we liked it. There we had a conversation, in English, about the man's vineyard which is very small. We bought some coco blanc et rouge - they are fresh borlotti beans. The white ones had white pods and white beans and the red ones had mottled red pods and mottled to completely red beans. I asked the woman at the stall ((in French of course) how to prepare and cook them. She told me that they usually put them in cassoulet but I think she realised I was not going to make a cassoulet. So she told me to boil them and to make a sauce with garlic, tomatoes and parsley and to add sausages and the beans. I had already bought homemade sausages at another stall so I was all set. It took 45 minutes to cook the beans. Then I made the sauce adding basil which I had bought because it smelled so gorgeous and a shallot as well as the lots of garlic she had warned me to use. We had a wonderful feast!