Tea for two...or five

We headed to a tea house on the river for lunch today, a place we had walked by many times and admired. It always looked so crowded and a bit too... fragile... for our crowd, but we arrived a bit early today, and since the place was empty and the kids had just had a good play at the park, we decided to give it a try.

And we had one of the best meals so far in Ely. There were plain sandwiches (one cheese, one peanut butter) for Jack and Liv, scrambled eggs and ham for Kate, a Stilton (blue) cheese, pear, and walnut sandwich for me, and a pureed red pepper, sweet potato and tomato soup for John. A-mazing. All of it.

And all of the fine bone china in the place remained intact when we left. Also a-mazing.

We realized we have probably gone out to eat more in the last 20 days than we did our whole time in France (and if not more, we'd be well on track to more any day now). Part of it comes from living right in town, with so many tasty and not terribly expensive restaurants close by. Being in a small village in France, we had to have a certain amount of planning, and then had to take a car, to go anywhere aside from the kids' schools... so more often than not, we'd just stay home.

But another part of it comes from living in this unsettled, no-man's land that has made it hard to buy anything but perishables at the great grocery store. Put another way -- I can't commit to buying a jar of mayonaise. We'd only use a bit, and we're leaving in just a short while, so that nixes a lunchtime favorite, tuna fish. The same thing goes for some of my cooking favorites -- soy sauce, different vinegars, pickles, etc. So we are eating pretty simply, and with very fresh foods, and I love being able to walk up to the market if we run out of yogurt or bananas. But there are only so many peanut butter and jelly sandwichs you can have (and then Liv went and ordered one anyway for lunch today. We tried to talk her in to something else... alas).

So yes, I am looking forward to getting back to my own kitchen and to being able to buy stores for the pantry and know we will be rooted long enough to use them up. I can't wait to use my own knives again, the ones whose weight feels so familiar in my hand. And I miss some of the serving dishes, especially pottery that John's mom has made. I also miss the shape of my kitchen at home. It is weirdly difficult to cook in someone else's kitchen. We were at La Maison des Chaumes long enough for it to become comfortable, to know where to grab the wooden spoon and where to find the hotpad. I don't think we'll be here long enough to get to that level, and in the meantime, I keep opening up a drawer looking for silverware and finding instead saran wrap.

I know, being forced to eat out is not exactly a hardship -- in fact, we all enjoy it a lot, and the kids have been doing SO well in restaurants (it's almost like they're 8 and nearly 5-year-olds!). But the kitchen, which for someone who loves food and loves to cook, is the heart of the house. And I can't wait to be back in ours.

And now for some other photos of our time in town today. In the first one -- does it appear that Jack has grown A LOT in the last few days? Or is it just me? In the middle, you can see Katie found a cousin to her beloved Coconut Tree in Les Chaumes.