Beau Jackson

We had to go to Springfield this morning for yet another doctor appointment for me.  This time to a pulmonologist for a pre-sleep-study consultation.  There is the strong suspicion that I have sleep apnea and that it’s contributing to my seizures.  Woohoo!  But I’ll tell you about that another time because  that is NOT what this post is about.  This post is about fine French dining!  How’s that for a segue?

After the appointment, it was near lunch time so we stopped in at Panera Bread, which is a nice bakery/sandwich/soup/salad type cafe.  They’re all over the place – most likely you’ve seen them.  We had soup and some delicious bread, and Dominic had a gigantic cinnamon roll, and the girls had some pastries, and everybody shared with everyone else.  Somehow the subject of how French people eat in courses and such came up, and the kids all agreed they’d like to try that.  So we bought a couple of extra baguettes at Panera to bring home, and tonight we ate like the French.

We started with fruit – slices of apple and pear, and bunches of grapes (hey, not a whole lot of variety this late in the season!).  Wine was served – a Chardonnay in the “table wine” class, but nice all the same.  We even let the kids try some.  Theirs was predominantly water with a little splash of wine in it.  They were *still* not impressed.  lol

Course number two was baked brie with almond slivers on top, served with the aforementioned baguettes.  We haven’t had that in a long time, but let me tell you it’s fantastic!  I’m sure it did terrible things to my cholesterol levels, and it was worth it all.

The third course was soup.  We actually found the recipe on line for Panera’s Broccoli Cheese Soup, and I must say it’s a very close match.  Highly tasty.

For desert, we got all the ingredients for crepes, but everybody was full by that time so perhaps we’ll make crepes for breakfast tomorrow?

It’s nice to eat in a different manner once in a while.  Dinner was at a very leisurely pace – we spent over an hour at the table just talking about food and things.  I can see why the French enjoy dining this way.

We still haven’t gotten around to making hasenpfeffer yet, but perhaps tomorrow night we’ll extend our international dining experience to cover Germany.  Anybody know how the typical German family sits down to dinner together?