Where Next? Travel with Kristen and Carol
Where Next? Travel with Kristen and Carol
Languedoc Wine Region - Southern France - Travel with Steve Hoffman
What if a simple relocation could completely transform your life? Meet Steve Hoffman, who took his family from Minnesota to a small village in the Languedoc region of Southern France and discovered a world of cultural immersion and personal growth. Through a chance encounter with an Irishman, Steve and his family were gifted a six-month stay in a picturesque setting far from the beaten path. This episode shares Steve's incredible journey as he recounts how the adventure tested their adaptability, yet ultimately enriched their lives, especially when they joined the local grape harvest and immersed in the vibrant food and wine culture.
Get ready to explore the nuances of Mediterranean living, where Steve's family embraced the rhythm of village life, forming deep connections and discovering culinary delights. From savoring simple yet robust flavors like a baked white fish fillet in a tomato, onion, garlic, and olive sauce, to navigating daily life without a village butcher or fishmonger, we discuss how their immersion in local traditions reshaped their understanding of French cuisine. Steve also delves into his career transformation from tax preparation and real estate to food writing, inspired by this profound experience.
Join us as we reflect on how living in Languedoc was a turning point for their family, offering unique insights into the Mediterranean lifestyle. Steve shares stories of personal growth, his children's newfound proficiency in French, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their future plans. Discover how the enchanting charm of Southern France left a lasting imprint on their lives, fueling their passion for travel, food, and cultural exploration. With tales of village life and local music enriching the narrative, this episode is a testament to the beauty of embracing new experiences.
Map of Béziers
You can find Steve Hoffman's website here.
Steve's LinkedIn here.
Steve's Instagram here.
Steve's book - A Season for That: Lost and Found in the Other Southern France
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Hosts
Carol Springer: https://www.instagram.com/carol.work.life
Kristen: https://www.instagram.com/team_wake/
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Hi, welcome to our podcast when Next Travel with Kristen and Carol.
Speaker 2:I am Kristen and I am Carol.
Speaker 1:And we're two long-term friends with a passion for travel and adventure.
Speaker 2:Each episode, we interview people around the globe to help us decide where to go next. So today we have Steve Hoffman and he's going to talk about. You have to help me pronounce this, Steve Languedoc.
Speaker 3:Right Languedoc Yep Languedoc in southern southern france right in 2012. My family and I uh where we live in minnesota our kids, no kidding.
Speaker 2:Oh, my god, I know you grew up like really where you live, I think really close to where I went to high school.
Speaker 3:I went to irondale oh my god, I went to, yeah, what was then ramsey high school, so we would have been rivals. I've been a Francophile, french speaker, lover of France and the French language for most of my adulthood. And our kids went to St Paul French immersion school for grade school. And so, in 2012, as they were, as they were finishing their grade school careers, we decided, after all that work, getting them, you know, a French language education, we were going to go to France, put them in some local schools and have them kind of cement those language skills in actual French schools. We ended up picking the Languedoc for a number of reasons. First, it was warm and we were from Minnesota.
Speaker 3:We were going to be there for a fall semester and we wanted to be French-speaking, for obvious reasons, and we didn't think we could afford Provence or the Riviera. So we kind of somewhat randomly threw some electronic darts at a map of Southwest France and one email landed with an Irishman who wrote back to us right away whose house was big enough to house four of us for six months and he was willing to sign a lease. And so we went and stayed there for for six months. So Languedoc is, you know, the, it's Southern France, mediterranean France, so east of the Rhone.
Speaker 2:Okay, so back up you didn't go through like a structured school program or something. You just decided to hey, let's just find a place to live and then figure out how to go. Did you was there like an English speaking or or it was not at all French school?
Speaker 3:Correct there was. So it was. They went to local village schools. Our son was nine, Our daughter was 14.
Speaker 3:Again, they had had, you know, the French immersion. School is more than just French class, it's all of their curriculum for their elementary school education had been in French, other than a few required English nodes that helped them pass the standardized tests. So it wasn't quite as frying pan into the fire as it might sound, but it was very much a full immersion. So we were in a tiny 800 person village and very few people there spoke any English at all. Certainly almost none of the kids schoolmates spoke any English.
Speaker 3:We had traveled this way before, my wife and I. We had done this kind of a little bit by the seat of your pants kind of traveling, and we sort of enjoyed the adventure, the thrill of living by our wits a little bit. We probably overestimated our, our skills this time. We arrived in this tiny village and didn't really know what we had gotten ourselves into and it was very different from what we had expected and we were really challenging the kids kind of at the at the upper end of their capacities. But yes, to answer your question, it was that you know we had to formally unenroll them from school in the Twin Cities, we had to, you know, call ahead or email ahead and get them properly enrolled in the French school that they were going to be attending. But other than that, no, it was not done through any particular formalized program or, you know, exchange program.
Speaker 3:It was the Hoffman family from Minnesota plucks down in Autignac, france, and let's give this a try.
Speaker 1:And how big is La Colonna? I'm trying to find it on the map and I can't find it on the map. I keep looking and it keeps bringing me to like this Andorra, and yeah, so Andorra would be closer to the Spanish border.
Speaker 3:If you go from Andorra east to the Mediterranean and then follow that coast north, eventually it's going to kind of turn back toward the east. And we're about at that curve just about 50 minutes north of the Mediterranean, not far from Montpellier, or if you're looking at a map just very close to Béziers B-E-Z-I-E-R-S.
Speaker 1:Béziers. Okay, I see that on the map 30 minutes north of Béziers. And it makes sense. You said it was a really small town 800 people. Yes, yeah, oh my goodness, I can't even find it on the map.
Speaker 3:No, yeah, you would have to really zoom in to find our village, for sure.
Speaker 1:Okay, I zoomed into Béziers.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so yeah, if you look almost directly north of Béziers, if you're zoomed in far enough, you'll find a little town called Autignac, and that again was part of the plan. To the extent that there was a plan is we wanted to be somewhere, maybe a little bit out of the way, so that we could, you know, not just be another set of tourists and try to integrate a little more completely than you can do in a larger place or a place that is more, has more sort of the infrastructure in place to welcome tourists, because then you tend to also then get guided through touristy experiences, and we did definitely want to avoid that and definitely did avoid that almost more than we expected.
Speaker 2:But yes, so what if someone is like like Kristen and I? That's not a I can't remember what you call it the front? We don't speak French. Would, we survive there. Do people speak English there?
Speaker 3:There are. Yeah, so there's a lot. There are very few Americans who go there, but there are a lot of Brits.
Speaker 3:And so in most towns in this part of the world you could find an Anglophone community In something. In a town this small. It would be very hard to get by. I mean, it was really, I would say, you know, 99% French, but this is certainly a region that receives tourists. You know, it's the there's kind of two halves of the Languedoc, it's there's the plain, the Mediterranean plain, which they call the Bas Languedoc or the low Languedoc, and then there's a series of hills. The plain sort of runs north and ends up rising up into some foothills which eventually become the Massif Central, but that is called the Haut Languedoc or the High Languedoc, and that literally means simply just you know how far above sea level we're talking, or the high Languedoc, and that literally means simply just you know, you know how, how far above sea level we're talking, and so the plain is more or less at sea level.
Speaker 3:The high Languedoc is is up in the hills and kind of mini mountains and there's a lot of walking, hiking, a lot of natural beauty up in those hills. There's a lot of, you know, kind of pine forest and oak forest and some chestnut forests, lot of you know kind of pine forests and oak forests and some chestnut forests and you know some long, very Mediterranean kind of scrubby, rocky vistas. It's not as dramatic as Provence or the Riviera. That half of France is more dramatic, it's more. It's been more heavily touristed, in part because there is a little bit more natural beauty. It's more it's been more heavily touristed, in part because there is a little bit more natural beauty. I would say it's part of why the Languedoc is more reasonably priced, but there is still. You know, you're still very much in the Mediterranean and to a great extent it's the same climate between Provence to the east of the Rhone and Languedoc to the west.
Speaker 2:And so how far were you from the sea then?
Speaker 3:We were about 50 minutes north of the Mediterranean and about 50 minutes east of the Pyrenees.
Speaker 1:It looks like a lot of vineyards on the pictures that I'm seeing.
Speaker 3:It's the largest vineyard in the world, larger than Napa, yeah, significantly larger than Napa. Yeah, it's all vines. That is primarily what happens there. Yes, there is some tourism. Yes, there's other cities and jobs that we would recognize, but to a great extent the Languedoc is made up of vines, vineyards and wineries, and that's what they do the most of. They generate more wine than anywhere else in France.
Speaker 3:It's had a somewhat underappreciated reputation for a long time.
Speaker 3:Well, it was the right reputation. For a long time it was a place where you could grow a lot of grapes really cheaply, because it's a place that's made to grow grapes, and so for many years this was the place where you made kind of low alcohol, not very high quality wine for the army, and so it got a reputation as being what they called the lake of wine. I mean, he just there was just so much of it, but it wasn't all that good. And it's just kind of emerging from that reputation because the parcels are much more affordable than than in a great winemaking region. You know, in Bordeaux or Burgundy it can be a million dollars an acre, and here you can get a hectare for 15,000 to 20,000 euros, and so what that's allowed is some new winemakers to come in natural winemakers and organic winemakers, biodynamic winemakers, people experimenting a little bit and it's starting to get a new reputation as being a place of innovation. And the wine itself is just simply getting higher and higher quality, because there's so much demand for French wine.
Speaker 1:And I wondered also is it the quality of the soil, the quality of the grape or the vine?
Speaker 3:It's really the latitude. Primarily it's the climate. It's where grapes are meant to grow.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean the quality.
Speaker 3:The quality was always there because the quality really again Well, I mean the quality, the quality. The quality was always there because the quality really again comes from, yes, the land you know is this is this the kind of soil that would grow grapes, high quality grapes? The answer is yes. Okay, is this the kind of climate that can grow high quality grapes? The answer is absolutely the problem was correct, right, exactly it was.
Speaker 3:It was what were they being encouraged to do, and you know, for many years they were being encouraged to just simply make as much wine as you can, and when you do that, you're asking the vines to overproduce and to produce lots and lots of grapes, which means the quality, the amount of energy the vine can actually put into each individual cluster is much less and you get a faded kind of not very concentrated flavor to the wine. So it was really the method, exactly.
Speaker 2:Totally, if you're asked to do too much.
Speaker 3:You're not very good at what you do, right? So it's very much that way, and so, yeah, it was the methodology that had been lacking for a while, and now that is starting to turn around, got it? Oh, that's great. It's still a very working class blue collar place, and I think people think of wine regions, they think of Napa, which is kind of wine, Disney, you know.
Speaker 2:Oh well, so yeah.
Speaker 3:Okay, perfect. So, yeah, you know it's gotten very, very expensive. It's very heavily touristed. It's not a place where you see dusty guys and overalls walking up and down Napa, the streets of Napa City, that's. You know this place is still that it's still very much tied to the soil, to agriculture, to growing things, you know, on a on a commercial scale, and it was part of what we ended up loving about the place.
Speaker 3:Um, but as a, as part of our efforts to integrate into this little village, I ended up volunteering to pick grapes and then, was part of our efforts to integrate into this little village, I ended up volunteering to pick grapes and then, uh, was part of a wine, uh, picking a grape picking crew for much of the fall that we were there and then actually ended up working in one of the, the wineries, uh, that was in the village itself, made friends with a couple of winemakers who I'm I'm still friends with this to this day. So I I got a very ground level a of what it what it means to actually make wine and it's it's not very pretentious at that level. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I can imagine what an experience too, and I'm just curious what did you do and your family do professionally before, and how did you come to like leaving it all and this was very much a turning point in our lives.
Speaker 3:Again, I had been a French speaker, we had done a lot of traveling. I think we'd expected this to be another one of those trips. We were going to put the kids in school, we were going to be a little bit along for the ride and it would be another kind of nice trip that we could check. You know, check a little box. Yes, we visited this part of the world, yeah, and At some point it was clear that we had asked the kids to do something pretty difficult. And I'm the French speaker in the family. My wife does not speak French. We needed me to step up and kind of get over myself a little bit. I liked going to cafes and walking the streets and talking to people and we needed something more. And so there came a point during this trip where my wife, mary Jo, was basically like this isn't working, dude, you got to step up, you have to take us along into what it means to live in this place and partly you have to do this for these kids who are struggling and kind of need your help to become a part of things. So that was what led eventually.
Speaker 3:I tried to kind of cook my way into the culture. I did a lot of French. You know attempts at French cooking that were almost uniformly failures. That I chose, you know complicated kind of classic French dishes, and nobody in the family was all that interested and they didn't even really taste that good and I thought they looked great. But so at some point it was clear OK, we're in a place that's surrounded by vines, it was getting to be the time of the harvest. I looked around and said if we're going to get to know this place we should be where everybody else is, which is out in the vines. And that was really the turning point and at that point the whole place kind of opened up to us and we really became very deeply immersed in this village, in the kind of food and wine culture that was a part of just life in this place, you know, became really kind of close friends with several of our villagers who remain friends to this day, and left feeling as if we something really profound had changed.
Speaker 3:So I've just published a book in July of this year, a memoir of that six months and the memoir has been a 10 year effort to kind of reckon with what exactly did happen there. Why was it? Why did it feel so life-changing? More than just the average, I think. A lot of people go abroad and have what feel like life-changing experiences. This really did change the path of my entire life, and what it partly did is, you know, I had been a tax preparer and a real estate broker for most of my professional life, but had always loved books. Part of what I did when we were there was journal extensively, and that journal was the beginning of a food writing career. So I am now both a tax preparer and a food writer, which is an industry of one single person.
Speaker 1:A fun one. Hey, that's great, you don't have too much competition.
Speaker 3:Zero competition. And the nice thing about it is that tax preparation in the United States is obviously a very seasonal endeavor. You've got to turn in your tax return by April 15th, so I earn almost all of our income for the year in the first half of the year and that then buys me the creative freedom to write kind of what I want to write about in the second half of each year.
Speaker 1:That's great. A couple of questions. Did you anticipate that you? Was it planned that you were staying there for that six months, and then what months did you go?
Speaker 3:Yes, it was absolutely planned that we would be there. We wanted to be kind of stable for the kids, to kind of establish a home life in this new place, and that involved being in one place and we were there from basically late July into mid, mid January. So we got there for late summer. Kids started to go into school in September. They were done by the holidays. They actually went back to school for a couple of weeks in January and then we came back after just about six months.
Speaker 1:And then did they return then to the school in Minnesota.
Speaker 3:Correct. They went back, rejoined their classmates in Minnesota for the rest of that school year and then, after this trip, which is described in the book, we also did go back about four additional times to the same village, to the same house, because it felt like a second home. At that point, we were still renting, we didn't actually ever buy a place, but we had just felt as if it was a part of us and we were, we were a part of it, and so we went back and the kids went back to school each of those times. By the very last time, it was 2019. Our daughter was in college at that point.
Speaker 3:Our son went to high school in a local high school, in Bézier actually that time and then we got back in 2020 to COVID, which was, you know, was COVID, and then our son started school at NYU and so, first because of the pandemic and second because of the cost of paying for college, we have not been back since 2020. I kind of itching to get back, but in the meantime that I've been, I've been writing this book as well. So it's it's been a good time to not be traveling back and forth in some ways, but really, we really do miss it now.
Speaker 1:How old were your kids?
Speaker 3:Nine and 14. Joe was nine and our daughter was 14.
Speaker 1:Got it and do they?
Speaker 3:speak fluently. Joe speaks very close to fluently. Eva had gone to school and then gone to a couple of years of middle school, so I would say she's less fluent, but they could both. You know, they can both go to France and have conversations and get around and, and you know, not have to struggle very much.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and were you a foodie before and winery wines Like? Did you kind of like, oh, this is great Cause this fits what I am? Or did you become that after you know you'd?
Speaker 3:think that, yes, of course, but honestly no. I mean, I had loved food. You know, I'm I'm six, one, two, 50, and you only get there by loving food. But and I had loved wine in in the way that it connected me to France.
Speaker 3:I love France and French wine and French wine regions and you know talking about it, but I had not had that kind of deep love of wine where I would have left for this trip thinking, oh yeah, of course, what I'm going to go do is pick grapes and work in a winery. I really this was part of what happened in the six months was kind of a bottom-up education in Mediterranean cooking and Mediterranean wine, and I think I discovered something latent in myself that had been there for a long time but it kind of blossomed while we were here and then that did eventually lead to this food writing career, where I've, you know, written for, you know, the Washington Post and Food and Wine Magazine and so on, written a lot of articles about the food of France and then the food of the upper Midwest, where I'm from, the Great Lakes North.
Speaker 1:Well, that's great. And then you guys oh sorry, I'll stop.
Speaker 3:No, I said hot dish. Yeah, hot dish. Thank you very much. I really appreciate that. I literally did a talk. I wrote an article called what is Northern food which won a James Beard award. To celebrate the award, I did a talk in Minneapolis and the name of the talk was beyond hot dish. And a great, a great part of what I was trying to do with that article is to get us beyond the hot dish thing, but I can't. I have failed, of course, and now a Tim Walls is a vice presidential candidate.
Speaker 1:We're all going to be stuck with hot dish forever yeah, that's funny and then did your wife so you weren't working because you had tax season and that's you know, right as you. As you came back, did your wife leave her job or work, or so my my wife.
Speaker 3:We both had weird sort of left brain, right brain careers. I was again a language and literature major in college and then ended up going in because that, you know, that prepared me for zero actual jobs. I ended up going into real estate first and then tax preparation. Mary Jo is actually an aeronautical engineer, so she worked. She did aeronautical astronautical engineering at Honeywell for a number of years and about mid-career we kind of did the clapped each other's hands and jumped out of the ring and jumped into the ring. So she left when we were having trouble having our second child. We thought that the stress of the job might've been a part of that, so she stopped working and stayed at home for a number of years. After that I was Mr Mom with our first born daughter for about four years and then that's when I kind of went in heavily into being a real estate broker and eventually a tax preparer. So she didn't have to leave a job per se, but she was just beginning an art of photography career and part of what she did, what I did with this time, was start this journaling that led to a writing career.
Speaker 3:What Mary Jo was doing was she had started a project called Still and she basically posted a photo every day of nature, of some nature found near her and arranged on a white background. She would take a photo, post it every day, and so what she was doing, and that started on January 1st 2012. So it was early in the life of that project that we went to France and it was wonderful because it required her to go out and seek and gather from the surrounding countryside in order to take this photo every day. And so we ended up, you know, kind of learning really fast about a lot of the plants and animals and insects and creatures. Of course we had a nine-year-old boy, so there was lots of insects. That was really actually very much a part, you know, my French was a part of our integration into the village. But her actual creative practice was another entree into the village because we learned so much so quickly that we could talk to people about, you know, about the region and ask educated questions and by the way.
Speaker 3:That started on January 1st of 2020, 2012,. She has still never missed a single day. So she's now at image number I think, 4,650 something. Has never missed a day. It never skipped the Christmas, never skipped a, never had a sick day every single day. For now. You know what is it 12 plus years.
Speaker 2:Is that on Instagram or where is she posting?
Speaker 3:She's on Instagram and she's also. Her blog is called stillblognet S-T-I-L-L-B-L-O-G stillblognet, and that's her archive where she has posted those photos every day and they're stunningly beautiful. She also just published a book that is sort of the commemoration of those first 10 years of that project, with some essays talking about her kind of discoveries over the years, about the creative process and living a normal life and yet still having a creative outlet as well.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's great.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. No, she's amazing. She's far more interesting than I am.
Speaker 2:I'm not you should probably have her on instead of me. Well, I'd love to learn a little bit more about the region. Yeah, so like cost of living down there? Obviously you said it's less. How would you compare it to visiting in France? Is it going to be like half the price, Not half the price?
Speaker 3:It's still the Mediterranean, so there's still a certain amount of tourist pressure, but it is the second tourist region in France, or was as of recently. So what we discovered is that we could, essentially, other than the expenses of travel, car and housing, we could more or less transplant our American life over there, and our monthly burn rate, our monthly expenditure, was just about the same. So, for whatever that's worth, you could live there again, absent housing and transportation.
Speaker 2:Was that more expensive, the housing and transportation?
Speaker 3:No, I'm just saying like to get there and back like if you got that out of there. But daily life, once we are there and set up, was more or less the same as it is in the Twin Cities. So you know certainly less than some of you know, less than Paris, less than some of the. You know Lyon, some of the more expensive regions, but not you know. I would say not half the price, no, and that's just simply because there's too much tourist pressure, being that close to the sea. That it's not an abandoned region from. You know the very central part of France that people tend to visit less often, but it is very Mediterranean. So you know Mediterranean, the description, you know the definition of Mediterranean is really, at least in France, I think, everywhere is where olives grow. So if olives grow there, it's Mediterranean and if olives don't grow there, it's not.
Speaker 3:Oh, interesting and so there's a band of land within a certain distance of the Mediterranean, going all the way across the southern end of France, from the Spanish border up and over east to the Italian border, and wherever in that band of country there are olives grow, naturally that is considered the Mediterranean region. So it is still very much Mediterranean. It resembles Provence in many, many ways. It's hilly, rocky, full of vines, and then the wild land is called Garigue, g-a-r-r-i-g-u-e. So Garigue is the natural wild scrub land that grows kind of everywhere in the Mediterranean. It's what you think of, also like in the Greek, in the Greek islands or in Southern Italy. It's that kind of dry, prickly shrubby, low growing, very aromatic landscape.
Speaker 3:So it's where a lot of the herbs that that that became Southern French cuisine really come, you know, indigenously from this, from this wild scrubland. Wild thyme grows there, wild rosemary grows there, wild garlic grows there, olive trees grow there, wild fennel grows out in these hills, and so it's lots of very hot sunlight, very hot summers, long hot summers and then not cold but, you know, not really super warm winters. You get the winter winds that kind of come down the central part of the country, the Mistral that blows into Provence and Marseille that kind of cold, very heavy wind, and west, where we are, you get wind coming down off the Pyrenees it's called the Tramontane and so the winters can be blustery and chilly, in the sense of you're hovering above or maybe slightly below freezing during a lot of the middle of the winter in this region, and then summers will be, you know, mid 80s to mid 90s, and dry most days.
Speaker 1:There's not snow, I'm assuming because they're close to the.
Speaker 3:Every once in a while On the mountains, in the winter, on the mountaintops, you will, and you know, once every five years you'll get a dusting snow and then once every 50, you'll get a catastrophic snow and all the olive trees die and they got to start over. But yeah, it's very, it's very rare, very rare.
Speaker 3:It's still very temperate. Yeah, and it's called the Languedoc. Actually it's kind of an interesting story so long. In French means tongue, but it also means language.
Speaker 3:Previously, before France became France, the Languedoc and Provence were considered Occitania. They were considered that was where the Occitan language was spoken, and in the Occitan language the word for yes was occ. So, and in the language of the north of northern France the word for yes was oi, and so there were two countries in France before they were united. There's a Languedoc, whereas the language of oc meaning that was the place where in their language you said oc to say yes, and there was a Languedoc and oi evolved into oui, which is the French current way to say yes, which is the word oui. And so the Languedoc was the northern France, the Languedoc was the Southern France, and now they all speak French. Occitan was very heavily sort of censored at some point because they were, you know, the Catholic Church, didn't like that. They were doing their own thing and came in and kind of set things straight in a very violent and bloody way. But that is, that's the story behind the name. So Languedoc actually originally.
Speaker 1:Wow, thank you for sharing that. So it was a different language than the French language. It's just a variation, kind of like Texas. No, it was very different.
Speaker 3:You would. You would hear Occitane and you would not know that it was related to any other Romance language that surrounds it. It sounds a little bit it's got a, it's got a rhythm, a little bit like Spanish, but it does not sound like French at all. You wouldn't. You know none of us, you know I, as a more or less fluent French speaker, would hear Occitan. I wouldn't understand a single word. It was a very, very much a different language and now a little bit similar to. You know, in some places where a native or indigenous language has been eradicated by the forces that invaded or whatever, there is now very much an effort to rediscover and re-teach Occitan in the Languedoc region and in the schools there are opportunities to essentially do immersion schooling, like we did for our kids in France in French. So there's an effort to rediscover it, but it's, you know, it has been a minority language and more or less wiped out for a long time.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting. One last question what did your kids think when they came back and and like looking, reflecting back, I'm assuming I want to say, oh, it was the most like transition, transition or transformational for them. That's what you hope.
Speaker 3:Of course, and no, of course not. They didn't do that because they were adolescents. That's not what you do when you're in your teens. You take you, uh, you decide that you've been put upon and try to find all the ways that you've been victimized. So no, here's what I would say.
Speaker 3:They were very open-minded about going surprisingly so but they did feel as if this is something that had been imposed on them, and so, you know, there was a little bit of resistance and rebellion while we were there, and then, for when we were back during their teen years, there was a sort of yeah, okay, this is a part of who I am, but it wasn't. They didn't really celebrate it, but the fun thing has been watching now in their twenties. So my son is now 21. My daughter's 26. Suddenly, so many of the things that they love to do are very much rediscovering or picking back up the things that that they were first introduced to in a deep way in during that trip. So it's been very fun and of course, we try not to make too much out of that, right, just let it happen and be happy Right they came back.
Speaker 3:That's good enough, but, yeah, it's fun. Like my baby, they both really love to cook. My son's actually really into fermenting and my daughter is, you know, traveling the world right now. So, yeah, it definitely had an effect where, like I said, we're just happy to have them back.
Speaker 1:That's great. Thanks for sharing Cause that's. I feel the same way with kids and with experiences and yeah, they probably not a big fan, but then it shapes their future.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you always assume you've lost them during the teenage years. Right, it's like I'm never, they're gone. I'm never getting them back. I was. It was great while it lasted. They were really cute at age three, yeah Right, but I'm never getting them back. And then you know, they turned 20 and suddenly it's like oh yeah, mom and dad aren't that bad after all.
Speaker 1:That's good, good to know.
Speaker 3:I think we're yeah.
Speaker 1:I definitely had those years. I've got my daughter's 20 start tomorrow and then my son's 17 and a half. So, yeah, we're it's. It's come back a little bit, so I'm glad to see that for sure.
Speaker 2:And then what?
Speaker 1:about, so the weather? You said eighties, and then what's the temperature in the in the winter time?
Speaker 3:you know, maybe 40 ish plus or minus, flirting with, flirting with freezing, you know. And then you'll get days in January where the wind blows and it's, you know, it's 30, 30, 28,. You know, it can, it can get below freezing, but the summers are, you know this mid summer is is Todd, it's 85 to 90 plus degrees Most days, so what's the best time to go?
Speaker 3:The best time to go, I would say, would be well, it depends on how much of an eater you are. Uh, you know, there is. Some of the best parts of being there are being there during the produce seasons, especially like if you're, if you love fruit, like the stone fruit season in the Mediterranean is just so eye-openingly wonderful, because in Northern climates, you know, the sun can only bake so much sugar into into our fruit, and so we have great apples and pears and occasionally you can grow a peach up here, but even that is going to be kind of a tart fruit, you know. And then in the south, it's just, you have these peaches and apricots and nectarines and plums and obviously grapes, and you know. So if you really love summer produce, if you love tomatoes and you love the produce that would go into a ratatouille, for instance, then being there in mid to late summer is great, it's just you're going to be dealing with more crowds.
Speaker 3:I think it's probably most beautiful in the fall because everybody's out, they're all doing the grape harvest, the vines still have their leaves, they might even be starting to turn a little bit.
Speaker 3:It's warm, but not excessively hot. And also, you know, it's a time just after the harvest, where, if you're there, you know, like October into November, they then start also offering tastings of their wine, of that of you know, because now the work is behind them, now it's time to sell the wine, and so it's a great time to, you know, do a wine tour, and you can. The nice thing about it is that it's still so under, you know, under visited. To some extent it doesn't have that that just so much enormous amount of money that's flowing into this region, like a Bordeaux, where if you want to go taste some Bordeaux you've got to line up and make an appointment. You're standing across the counter from somebody who's just kind of feeding you wine. In the Languedoc, you can literally go to a village and walk into local wineries and often they'll just sit down and offer you their wines. It's a beautifully intimate place to discover wine, if wine is something you're interested in.
Speaker 2:That sounds really nice. That's great Discover wine.
Speaker 1:If wine is something you're interested in, that sounds really nice, that's great. And then what about activities that people do, and outdoors, or like what's a typical? What do people do in a daily life?
Speaker 3:A lot of the recreation. It either would be north or south from where we were. So it'd be north, in the hills, where they have a fairly extensive series of national parks and walking and hiking trails, and so there you know, you can walk for hundreds of miles in beautiful territory up in the hills, looking out over the Mediterranean plain. So I would say that's probably number one to the North and then much of the rest of it is to the South. So you know you can go fishing in the Mediterranean. You can go. You can rent, you know, motorized, either boats or like jet ski kinds of things. You can go.
Speaker 3:They do a lot of like kite sailing on the Mediterranean. There are also just tours of. There's a series of kind of saltwater lagoons that run along the coast, that are just inland from the coast but where they do a lot of raising of mussels, oysters and other shellfish. So you can go. You know you can go, like spend a day at the beach and then have dinner in one of those little towns where you'll get oysters that have just been grown. You know, in the, in the water that you're sitting next to, as you're, as you're sipping your, your rosé with your raw oysters. So that's what I would say. I think it's mostly tied to the South and the Mediterranean itself, or to the North, where there's a lot of hiking and kind of outdoors.
Speaker 1:And then I wonder did you rent out your house here in Minnesota and then use the fun you know like? How did you do that?
Speaker 3:We didn't ever rent it out. We had house sitters and in each of those cases we had a pet that they had to watch, so it was either a dog, or we also for a while, had six chickens, so we had to hire a house and chicken sitter and it was like we can't also then ask them to pay rent. So each time we you know, as we were, you know we would go every other year and each time we would spend the intervening year and a half basically trying to build up enough of a buffer that we could kind of cover our mortgage at home. And you know, we live on a lake so people like to stay here, so we didn't have to necessarily pay somebody to stay there, but we also didn't feel like we could charge rent. But yeah, each time part of the adventure or part of the difficulty of going there was finding someone to watch over the house, because they also had to watch over our animals.
Speaker 1:What lake are you on?
Speaker 3:We're on Turtle Lake in Shoreview, Minnesota.
Speaker 2:Okay, we have to go there all the time as a kid. Yeah, we have a public.
Speaker 3:We have a public beach right, Exactly the. Ramsey County beach. Yes, we're just around the corner to the South, right on the South end of Turtle Lake.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, you have a boat.
Speaker 3:I do so yeah, my son and I love to fish. So we go out whenever we can, yeah absolutely so.
Speaker 1:And what were typical meals? Breakfast, lunch, dinner. When did they?
Speaker 3:You know, every the French bakeries are subsidized by the government, so there's in almost any village you're going to find a boulangerie. So we would go quite often in the morning before school. My daughter would actually get up and go and she'd get a baguette and we'd get you know some kind of pastry and that would normally be lunch. It was really fun to have them in school because we learned a lot about French lunches as well. They had an hour and a half off for lunch every day and they would usually come home and so we would make a lunch and then quite often the lunch is the big meal of the day and then you would have a much lighter dinner and quite often that dinner would actually simply be an extension of a lunch and quite often that dinner would actually simply be an extension of a lunch. So you know, we would make you know a tomato and mozzarella pasta, or we would make you know a quiche, or we would make you know like a ham sandwich on a baguette with Swiss cheese and butter and then but we are unable really to get over our American tendency to make dinner the big meal of the day. The cool thing was we, because it was such a small village. There wasn't an actual butcher in town. There was not a fish monger in town. There was a small grocery store and a bakery. But we would get merchants who would drive their trucks through these little villages in the area. So we had a fisherman whose son would go out fishing and the next day, on Fridays, he would show up with fresh Mediterranean fish and seafood and that evening there's a shellfish monger who had come with mussels, clams and oysters. And so we started sort of timing our meals to the rhythm of when these merchants had were bringing their stuff in. And then there was also a butcher in the village next door.
Speaker 3:So a lot of grilling. They do a lot of grilling over vinewood. They harvest the vinewood, they do their pruning in the winter and then save that wood and that's what they tend to grill over. So a lot of grilling. Very simple food but very, very flavorful. Almost too flavorful at first for Minnesotans. You know it's a lot of garlic, a lot of anchovies. You know the seafood is strong. There's a lot of garlic, a lot of anchovies, the seafood is strong. There's a lot of oily fish like mackerel, and so it took some getting used to, but by the end it was like we'd been completely converted. We were just so completely in love with this food.
Speaker 3:My son discovered oysters and so we would get that once, or sometimes a couple of times a week. We'd have mussels in white wine sauce. On Saturday night we would go to the butcher and get some some chicken or pork or beef or something. We put the grill that on the grill. It's not what most people think of as French food. It's very simple, just good, really fresh ingredients, prepared simply, not the kind of cream and sauces and all that complication that you think of as French restaurant food. Yeah, it was very simple, kind like the Mediterranean diet Exactly it's very much the Mediterranean diet.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I'd like to do the rapid fire questions unless there's any other burning questions. Kristen.
Speaker 1:I can't think of any right now.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, so what is the um popular holiday tradition and were you there for any specific holidays?
Speaker 3:Yes, we were there for Christmas and actually Christmas is similar. It's a big family meal like we would have at Christmas, but the staple that everybody gets for Christmas in the South is oysters. So people order like two crates of raw oysters, and they would order them ahead of time and it arrived just in time for Christmas and that was what the family would share.
Speaker 2:Oh, very good, A funny story I remember I don't know if it was on our podcast, but we talked to someone in Japan and their Christmas tradition since Christmas is not really huge there, they would have Kentucky fried chicken, Like everyone had to like, order it ahead of time, Like sure sure I could not.
Speaker 3:I could not have found a Kentucky fried chicken where we were. I can promise that's good, All right.
Speaker 2:And what was the favorite? Since you look like we're cooking, what's your favorite dish to cook?
Speaker 3:That's what you've learned my favorite dish to cook was a fish, a very simple fish dish that my next door neighbor, nicole, who became one of our best friends she, her husband, and it's. It's a white fish filet in a tomato, onion, garlic and olive sauce. And so basically you put tomato, you know, you saute onions and garlic, tomato, white wine and olives, and then you just kind of slide the white fish filet in that and bake that for about 20 minutes and it just comes out sort of flaky and aromatic, and it's beautiful and very, very foolproof.
Speaker 3:Uh, so they've got a lot of types there, but it would be mackerel, or it'd be sea bass, kind of like a Branzino, or they also have hake, which is similar to a cod. Those would be the most common.
Speaker 2:Nice. I feel like cod is always so hard to make it taste good.
Speaker 3:I know, I know, yeah, right, right, right.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's great. And we were talking about how did you get around? What's the best way, like, or for someone like, say, kristen, I want to go for a month. Like, would we rent a car, do you get?
Speaker 3:a bus.
Speaker 2:Is there public transpo?
Speaker 3:No, there's public transportation in the in the bigger cities, but no, it's in the cities you walk, or in the villages you walk, and then to get between villages or from villages to larger cities or anywhere else you want to go, you really, you really need a vehicle. So we, we rented a car all the times that we went there.
Speaker 2:Okay, and they drive on the like Americans, or Yep On the right side of the road.
Speaker 3:Yes, okay, cool.
Speaker 2:All right, great. And then any specific music that you noticed was there.
Speaker 3:What kind of music do you listen to? We well, we love jazz, but it was not necessarily endemic to that place. There are two famous French singers who are from the Languedoc region. One is named Georges Brassens, who is from the village of Sete, S-E-T-E, and he's a mid sort of mid to late 20th century kind of folk singer just guitar and voice, but is also considered very much a poet, almost kind of like a Bob Dylan figure. And then there's a guy named Charles Trenet, t-r-e-n-e-t. He's from Narbonne and he is more that kind of chanson, the kind of crooner style of singing. So we would often put those on at night as I was cooking dinner, just to kind of set the atmosphere.
Speaker 2:Oh, so nice, All right. And then, what is the money? Called?
Speaker 3:Well, the Euro right, it's still Euros.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and closest place to surf is there what? Or water sports, what do they have? I don't doubt they'd have surfing in the Mediterranean.
Speaker 3:Like I said, I don't think they really surf in the Mediterranean because the swells don't get large enough, but I do think so. If you went east, from where we are across the Pyrenees, you could get in about five or six hours. You get to Biarritz, which is on the Atlantic coast, and there's very much a surfing culture in Biarritz, which is just north of the Spanish border, on the western coast of southern France.
Speaker 1:Okay, how do you spell it?
Speaker 3:Biarritz B-I-A-R-R-I-T-Z. Oh, I just found it. It was kind of similar to California in a way. It was sort of a hippie kind of bohemian place for a long time. And then you know, the money found it and now it's a little of both, similar to the sort of California you know, kind of like Carmel and Monterey, which would have been very 1960s hippie for a long time, now are full of money, but there is still an existing surf culture there as well.
Speaker 1:Like the Ritz Carlton.
Speaker 3:It rhymes with it but it's not related in any way. But I'm sure there's a lot of people who stayed at Ritz at the Ritz who also go to be a Ritz.
Speaker 2:Yeah, very nice.
Speaker 1:Oh, my gosh, my gosh, the pictures.
Speaker 2:I see lots of surf yeah, yeah, exactly beautiful place, yeah, yeah, yeah all right, and so what's the name of your book?
Speaker 3:it's called it's called a season for that lost and found in the other southern France the other southern France being meaning Languedoc instead of Provence, really and it's a memoir about our family's time there, about my sort of discovery of Mediterranean food and wine, but also about our family, about my long marriage with Mary Jo and about kind of this agonized father's agonized love for these two very different children and wondering if I'm parenting them right and wondering if we're doing the right thing here. So, yeah, it's a it's it's a very much a memoir. It's not just a travelogue, it's kind of very much about my life and this transition that happened in midlife as a part of being in this place.
Speaker 1:Sounds very cathartic and awesome and didn't you? Say you were a lit major as well. Correct, yeah, my daughter's actually starting at UC Santa Cruz weekend as a lit major oh terrific, yeah Well, I can hardly endorse it. Oh, that's great. And how wonderful that you full circle went back to.
Speaker 3:Very much so. This was, yeah, this writing was very much rediscovering an early love. Absolutely yeah, although the one thing I would say to your daughter, or to you on behalf of your daughter, is, even though it doesn't sound like it, my tax preparation career, I think, is as successful as it is, in part because of all that reading and writing and communication that I did as a liberal arts major. Because every career you got to be able to talk to people. You have to be able to write stuff, and I feel like to some extent, I'm almost better at this than a lot of people who just went into finance, because there's a human element to it that you can't just put on a green eye shade and look down at your computer screen. You got to be able to communicate with people. So, anyway, you know I don't most parents don't necessarily always wish that their kids will grow up and be art or literature majors, but I actually think it instills a kind of versatility that is actually really useful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, now I actually was an account, I worked for a CPA firm in accounting, did taxes, back taxes, and then Carol and I actually met in our mid twenties, I guess, or so doing placement of accounting and finance people.
Speaker 3:Oh my gosh. Oh, so we're. Yeah, we are all definitely on the same page here.
Speaker 2:That's great. Oh, that's so funny. And so do you have another book in mind?
Speaker 3:or yeah, yes, no, you sound like my agent, but yes, uh, I do um what's next?
Speaker 3:I can't. I don't know what I it's going to be another, uh, creative non-fiction book. It will be uh about. There will be france and food in it, inevitably, um, but it's uh. I you know it's going to be a continuation of the kind of the heart of this current book, which is trying to be in process, in mid struggle, as a middle aged person trying to figure out what, what it means to live a good life, and that will. That will be the core of it and I but I don't know what the specifics are yet I'm working on that right now.
Speaker 1:Very good, one quick question. I this is a huge passion of mine as well, actually, but I just journal and do things here and there. But I was curious did you take classes, just go straight cold turkey, start writing and then got an agent, or just curious what your process was?
Speaker 3:The articles you know, like food writing articles for newspapers and magazines came fairly naturally to me. But I think that was also carrying way back to all the reading I did when I was a language and literature major. I didn't do much writing. In the middle of my life I tried to write some poetry and short fiction, but it just didn't work. I didn't have enough authority or personal core, whatever it was you needed. So the short fiction, you know, the short articles came naturally. I could just sort of do them without much training.
Speaker 3:The process of writing a book was entirely different. It was a 10-year odyssey of writing a book and trying to teach myself to write a book at the same time, being in preschool and graduate school at the same time and it was just a long grind. I queried a ton of agents. I got lots of rejection. In the end it was winning the James Beard Award for that article that turned things around and it was in New York City when I was accepting the award that I met the guy who would become my agent and then the guy who would also become the editor of my book. That's a whole other episode. I could talk for an entire hour about the soul crushing.
Speaker 1:I'll text you. That's my other podcast Literally.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, I would love to talk more about that, but it was a long road, with lots of failure and lots of discovery and lots of needing to get rid of my own ego in order to get where I needed to be.
Speaker 1:That's amazing.
Speaker 2:Thank you for sharing that. Do you have any social channels you want to share?
Speaker 3:Yeah, for sure, the best place to both buy my book and just sort of read some of my other writings on food and travel would be my website, which is wwwsjrhoffmancom. That's as in Stephen John Raymond Hoffmancom there's a link to the book, there's a link to my newsletter, and then there's also my other writings. And then I'm also active on social media, primarily Instagram, and that handle is also at SJR Hoffman. Stephen John Hoffman.
Speaker 2:Cool Okay great. Thank you, we'll put all those in the show notes so people can easily find them Fantastic and thank you so much.
Speaker 3:Yeah, this has been a joy. I love it. Thank you for having me on. I've enjoyed every minute of it. Thank you so much, okay, thank you Really inspiring too.
Speaker 1:I'm like, Ooh, where do I want to go? Where next Right.
Speaker 3:Right, exactly Always yeah.
Speaker 2:Thanks again, yep, bye. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the podcast, can you please take a second and do a quick follow of the show and rate us in your podcast app, and, if you have a minute, we would really appreciate a review. Following and rating is the best way to support us. If you're on Instagram, let's connect. We're at where next podcast. Thanks again. Thank you.
