When I started the next chapter of my life, I was committed to live life as closely to a French person as I could. Up to today, I have been fairly good at living up to my commitment. I have had a few breaks mainly meeting ex-pats who are American or Canada and spending some time with them. That has happened much more this trip than previous trips.

I broke the idea completely today as I made chili for dinner. I had been having a craving for chili for almost two weeks and had been trying to resist it. I am not sure what brought it on – homesickness, the need for something comforting or the fact that there is a Mexican takeout in the ground floor of the building I live in. When I walk by it at night, I smell the smells of Mexican food. I have been nervous to try it as I am not sure about Mexican food in France.

I went to the grocery store in search of the ingredients to make a very simple chili recipe. It only requires onions, green peppers, ground beef, kidney beans, tomato sauce, and tomato juice and chili. It is not really true chili but it is simple to make and suits the needs. I bought the green pepper and the onion at the farmers market last week – I have been thinking about this for a while. The rest of the ingredients were bought at the Intermarche. It took me a little effort but good effort to figure out tomato sauce from the options in the canned tomato aisle. The ground meat, boeuf haché, was easy. The biggest issue was the chili powder. The store did not have what I would say was traditional chili powder. They had sweet chili powder but not hot chili powder. I did find a chili powder that is from France that was described as hot but not overpowering when I looked it up with Google. I was not sure how it would work out but the chili was good – maybe not exactly as I would have at home but still good.

The Piment d’Espelette AOP is a classified pepper (AOP). This shows how committed to categorization and regulation of food is in France. The AOP means that the peppers used in this spice has to been from a specific area of France and most likely has other requirements as well.

Making up for breaking my commitment to be totally France, I went to La Reserve for a pint of beer and reading before dinner. I want to take part in the cafe life before I succumbed to my desire for something from home.

I hope the craving has been satiated and I will be back to total French life again now.

Toulouse is known for its wind. The city is bracketed by mountains and at times, the wind comes off the Mediterranean and funnels into the valley. We had one of those incredibly windy days. The wind blew continuously at 20 miles an hour for almost the entire day. I could hear the trees in the courtyard whipping around in the wind most of the day. The nice (or interesting) thing is that the city is made of narrow streets with 3-4 store buildings lining the streets continuously so when you get away from the open stretches by the river and a few other places, the wind is blocked and you do not notice the wind. I was able to wander around the city for shopping and other just walking and the wind was not noticeable.