Awesome Things in France - Bread

The bread in France is excellent. And comes in different versions. The most commonly thought of is the baguette. But there are flutes, campagnettes, brioches, croissants, and many others. 

Cutting bread is not something most people contemplate as an issue of the day. But we contemplate it much during our mass consumption of bread. Normal cutting boards have this problem if you cut lots of bread.

Crumbs Accumulate on top of the board

Here, the good designers at IKEA have come up with this bread cutting board with integrated knife storage. 

Crumbs captured under the surface of the board

One aspect of our massive bread consumption in France is that the boys are now allowed to use the bread knife. They have developed advanced bread cutting skills and have lost no fingers yet.

In our prior US based model of bread consumption, we ate many bagels. Our bagel consumption was so prevalent that we had basically given up buying sliced bread, opting to purchase dozens of bagels at Costco instead. This led to Will's invention of the leaning tower of bagel. This epic creation involves a bagel topped with scrambled eggs, a sausage patty, and acacado slices. The avacado slices give the bagel sandwich its leaning quality. 

We have tried to duplicate this food architecture here in France. Unfortunately it is difficult. The kids have determined that they don't care for the common preparation of sausage here. It is a bit too corse for their liking. The avocados never seem to be ripe at the time we like.\

And bagels!  They are difficult to acquire here.  If you buy them from the bread section of the grocery store, they aren't really bagels.  They resemble bagels in that they are round shaped bread with a hold in the middle.  We do have a few bagel stores around including Bagelstein and Brugger's.  Bagelstein tends to allow us to buy bagels on their own and take them home.  Brugger's initially told us that it was not possible and that we had to order individual bagel sandwiches, not plain bagels.  But finally, after asking a few times, Brugger's came up with this:

Take Bagels Home!?!

The first time I tried to order it, the bagel girl looked at me in confusion.  I had to point to the sign a bunch to get her to understand what I liked and say, "emporter a la maison" or something similar.  It was just not a concept that was common here.  

In actuality, we have given up, for the most part, on acquiring bagels and are quite happy with our massive campagnette consumption.  Plus, the bread delivery guy is kind of cute:)

Is that a campagnette in your jersey?