Lidl-land

Thwarted in our desire to support our local shops by the fact that they all seem close on a Monday afternoon (and at lunchtime, of course) we headed off to the recently opened local Lidl.

Lidls and Nettos are popping up all over the place in the south of France. Hopefully they won't take business from the local shops but the dreary Intermarché and Hyper U.

As in the UK, the Lidl experience was a strange mixture of the gross and the really quite interesting. Some pretty horrible cheap meat. A wide and well-priced range of cheese. Some astonishingly cheap Earl Grey tea at .89€ (66p) a pack, some even cheaper Ceylon tea at .55€ (41p) and a pack of espresso coffee at just .99 (74p). And that was by no means the cheapest

Still, nothing much for supper so on down the road to Hyper U which was larger and more depressing - a bit like Asda on a bad day. I did however manage to find some cheap steak (aiguillette) for €4.60 (£3.43) and some belly pork for 6.15€ (£4.59) to eat with beans tomorrow night when we're having our former next door neighbour over for supper.

Bavette - one of my favourite cuts in France (skirt in the UK) - seems to have disappeared off the shelves or have soared in price to around 18€ (£13.43) a kilo which I suppose isn't expensive for steak but galling when you could until comparatively recently buy it for about 12€. I think it's suffered the same fate as lamb shanks which used to be cheap too. Once telly chefs get hold of an ingredient the price invariably goes up. Food in France ain't what it used to be.