Just when we were getting into it...

It's mid-march and I'll be leaving Toulouse in a month.  A month!!  We finally got some of that southern france weather (the weather we came for) this weekend.  It was 19 and sunny.  yeah, I know.  Our landlord's mother, told us that this has been an unusually cold winter and that this 19 degrees business usually starts in February, but instead we were slogging through an extra rainy/cold winter.  But no complaints, we're going to make up for it this next month.  P and I went to lunch at Place St. Georges...or where the rich, beautiful and sunglasses clad french families go to dine.  *sigh, here in France, small children wear nicer clothes than I do - and by nicer I mean WAAY nicer,  like burberry trenchcoats and such.  

P got steak tartare (our first time here), and the thing came out as a raw hamburger mound with chopped up cornichons, onions and capers in it...AND a raw egg right on top.  I mean, we knew what we were getting, but it was still a sight for us non-raw-hamburger/egg-eating types.  It was a lot of raw beef and raw egg in one sitting, but we liked it and ate it all.  It comes with worsteshire sauce, mustard and tobasco sauce on the side - a nice lady sitting at the table next to us gave us instructions on how to eat and manage the thing.  Put the sauce on it, mix it through with the egg (much like one would prepare fresh hamburgers, only you don't throw it on the grill), then mound it onto bread and eat. 

When we're not pigging out on raw meat amidst beautiful french families, we're eating this:

Choucroute garni - it's an Alsatian specialty of saurkraut (warmed through) garnished with sausages, smoked meats and potatoes.  We walk by this stuff at the pig butcher stalls, but never tried it until last week.  We asked the lady to explain to us what to do and how to eat it and she packed up enough for a meal for the 2 of us.  In the picture we have: 2 types of sausages, a slice of smoked pork shoulder, some boiled potatoes and the choucroute.  Who knew a steaming mound of hot sour cabbage would be so good.  There's a butcher that specializes in choucroute garni and we're going to get stuff from there next time and see how the two meals compare.