Farmer's Market GEX

One thing I absolutely love about living here is all the farmer's markets. Each weekend there are open air markets in GEX, Divonne-les-bannes, Thoiry, Geneva...go to almost any town and you'll find a section of the village roped off and hosting the stands of local producers. It's wonderful. We take Ally and a pocketful of Euros and we're on our way to some culinary delights. This morning we hopped in the car and went to GEX (the Thoiry and Divonne markets are on Sundays). I don't think that the GEX market is my favorite, but it's still wonderful. I took a bunch of photos with the hope that it will give a little taste of the atmosphere of these markets. The other good thing about these markets is we're forced to use French. It may not be good French and there's the possibility that we'll only say" un kilo de cerise, s'il vous plait" ( a kilo of cherries, please) yet on the other hand you could have a lovely conversation about sausages with a local vendor. you never know! Enough talk, here are the photos.







My favorite discovery today was the saucissons (the sausages). DH had Ally and I was wandering along looking at the stand full of sausages and I noticed one basket that was marked Myrtilles. The basket was full of these rather blueish looking encased sausages. Myrtilles are blueberries - I had just had to find out what this was all about. I politely asked the woman, "Mytrilles! commes la fruits?" (Blueberries! like the fruit?). Her reply was (I' m not going to do it in French because I can't really remember exactly what the French is but, heres' the gist) Yes and it's delicious. Would you like to try some? (un petit gout). My natural response was YES PLEASE! It was amazing. A little sweet a little salty and just a hint of blueberry. Amazing. whoever would have thought, blueberry sausage! The French, I guess.
I inquired as to how much they were - 4 Euros a piece, she said, but we have all these special deals and she pointed to the various signs hanging about explaining what I could get. I said I'd have to convince my husband, he had disappeared, but I'd be back. No doubt she thought I was just using that as an excuse to not buy anything. But we did, in fact, return. She let us taste as many sausages as we wanted till we settled on our choice for the mini lot: 3 sausages your choix plus 1 bottle of wine or a terrine of your choix (she also said we could choose a packet of olives if we prefered). Terrine comes in a squat glass jar and is like a pate type thing. You can spread it on bread. Of course, we went for the wine. Our choice of saucissons was: Myrtilles, fume, ail (blueberry, smokes, and garlic). Not too adventurous but we did taste the beaujoulais (wine flavored), deer... hmmmm..what else did we taste? oh, goat cheese. I can't remember what else. There was duck, bull, all sorts of crazy kinds. We'll have to try out some more another week.
Ally was so good while we tastes our sausage. The woman running the stand cut off 6 slices just for Ally. Quel gate! (how spoiled). Check out the photo of Ally staring longingly at the saucissons. All in all it was a great morning. We came away with fresh fruit, sausages, wine, and some fresh veggies. What more could we ask for?