Butter for dinner (I'm not kidding)

On to the coast - St. Malo. It's a beautiful walled city on the coast of Brittany, very popular with Parisiens for the weekend. There's no shortage of tourists here, but with beaches and castles, it's still nice. The walls of the city are like a giant medievil boardwalk, and you can scoot around with the beaches below you. Haven't gotten away from crepes or cider. Galettes to be more specific - hearty crepes made with buckwheat flour. Crepes and seafood are about the only thing you can eat in this town. It's famous for les huitres - oysters - which are harvested nearby. Sadly for me, it's not quite oyster season (months ending in R, don't forget) but people still eat them by the bucket load. The huitres plates - flat oysters are the real speciality, and aren't available until September. Oh well, it's still fresher than what I can get at home.

Which brings me to the butter. St. Malo has an artisanal butter maker in town - a shop that makes salted Breton butter the old fashioned way. Everyone in Brittany likes to remind you that Bretons are priveleged. Brittany only became part of France under certain agreements, mostly regarding taxes. Something about taxes and salt happened (I'm not sure what yet), or it has to do with the fact that fleur de sel also comes from Brittany - either way Bretons like their butter salted, which suits me just fine (as some of you know).

So, we set up a picnic on the city walls which look over the ocean, and had to pick up some of this butter. We got demi sel (half salted) and seaweed butter. Yep, butter with seaweed in it (photo left). They hack off a nice chunk for you and wrap it up. Also, we picked up a few local cheeses, fruit, cider, Sancerre, other goodies - for Toby's birthday. The food was great, but the butter, well, it was amazing. In fact, we basically forgot that it was butter and started pretending it was cheese. We probably ate two sticks of butter for dinner. When in Rome, I guess, but it was totally worth it. It was only a matter of time until I went for a purer version of croissant - which is, simply, butter. Next up - heart attack.

Dessert was also note-worthy - fraise de bois - the real wild strawberries. They're tiny, but wonderfully perfumed, like regular strawberries but better. Not a bad birthday cake if I do say so myself...