Hello again.

Dear Reader,

I haven’t forgotten you, I swear. It’s just that when your livelihood depends on whether nearly thirty children are wearing the appropriate footwear for wading in a stone-bottomed river, ensuring that those stirring boiling sugar don’t try to take a taste, and running back and forth amongst three kitchens while preparing evening meals, there isn’t much time for blogging. But I love you all (even though I don’t know many of you), and I love this blog, and I have a whole bunch of pictures and stories to tell, so as I wait for tortilla espagnole and poisson en papillote and flan to be finished cooking for our Spanish-themed evening tonight, I thought I’d drop by to say hello, and perhaps discuss bread, if you don’t mind.

I wrote the above beginning-of-a-blog-post over three weeks ago, and it never saw the light of bandwidth. Fellow bloggers know how it is… but either way, no matter how much I miss blogging, when it comes to getting back to it after weeks of absence, it’s hard to know where to start: do I go through the hundreds of photos I have from my fifth year in Paziols? Do I start with stories of bread and ceramics, of Cathars and châteaux? Or do I simply say…

… Hello, reader. It’s been awhile. And I have stories. And recipes. Oh, so many. But not today. Paziols will wait, and so will the handful of things I have saved up from May and June. Because I have something much more interesting to write about now: a backpacking trip with none other than the Sous-Chef. After turning 16 at the end of the last session, the Sous-Chef packed up her bag and (some would say crazily) followed me on a trip up the western coast of France. We began in Toulouse… and it is in the Ville Rose that I will begin to tell our stories of food, laughter and inside jokes…

… Tomorrow. I have a train to catch. Oh, how I love having a train to catch.