October 20, 2024 • 50 mins
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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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Hi, welcome to our podcast when Next Travel with
Kristen and Carol.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I am Kristen and I am Carol.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
And we're two long-term friends with a passion
for travel and adventure.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Each episode, we interview people around the
globe to help us decide where togo next.
So today we have Steve Hoffmanand he's going to talk about.
You have to help me pronouncethis, Steve Languedoc.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Right Languedoc Yep Languedoc in southern southern
france right in 2012.
My family and I uh where welive in minnesota our kids, no
kidding.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Oh, my god, I know you grew up like really where
you live, I think really closeto where I went to high school.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
I went to irondale oh my god, I went to, yeah, what
was then ramsey high school, sowe would have been rivals.
I've been a Francophile, frenchspeaker, lover of France and
the French language for most ofmy adulthood.
And our kids went to St PaulFrench immersion school for
grade school.
And so, in 2012, as they were,as they were finishing their
(01:18):
grade school careers, we decided, after all that work, getting
them, you know, a Frenchlanguage education, we were
going to go to France, put themin some local schools and have
them kind of cement thoselanguage skills in actual French
schools.
We ended up picking theLanguedoc for a number of
reasons.
First, it was warm and we werefrom Minnesota.
(01:39):
We were going to be there for afall semester and we wanted to
be French-speaking, for obviousreasons, and we didn't think we
could afford Provence or theRiviera.
So we kind of somewhat randomlythrew some electronic darts at
a map of Southwest France andone email landed with an
Irishman who wrote back to usright away whose house was big
(02:01):
enough to house four of us forsix months and he was willing to
sign a lease.
And so we went and stayed therefor for six months.
So Languedoc is, you know, the,it's Southern France,
mediterranean France, so east ofthe Rhone.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Okay, so back up you didn't go through like a
structured school program orsomething.
You just decided to hey, let'sjust find a place to live and
then figure out how to go.
Did you was there like anEnglish speaking or or it was
not at all French school?
Speaker 3 (02:32):
Correct there was.
So it was.
They went to local villageschools.
Our son was nine, Our daughterwas 14.
Again, they had had, you know,the French immersion.
School is more than just Frenchclass, it's all of their
curriculum for their elementaryschool education had been in
French, other than a fewrequired English nodes that
helped them pass thestandardized tests.
(02:53):
So it wasn't quite as fryingpan into the fire as it might
sound, but it was very much afull immersion.
So we were in a tiny 800 personvillage and very few people
there spoke any English at all.
Certainly almost none of thekids schoolmates spoke any
English.
We had traveled this way before,my wife and I.
(03:13):
We had done this kind of alittle bit by the seat of your
pants kind of traveling, and wesort of enjoyed the adventure,
the thrill of living by our witsa little bit.
We probably overestimated our,our skills this time.
We arrived in this tiny villageand didn't really know what we
had gotten ourselves into and itwas very different from what we
had expected and we were reallychallenging the kids kind of at
(03:36):
the at the upper end of theircapacities.
But yes, to answer yourquestion, it was that you know
we had to formally unenroll themfrom school in the Twin Cities,
we had to, you know, call aheador email ahead and get them
properly enrolled in the Frenchschool that they were going to
be attending.
But other than that, no, it wasnot done through any particular
(03:58):
formalized program or, you know, exchange program.
It was the Hoffman family fromMinnesota plucks down in
Autignac, france, and let's givethis a try.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
And how big is La Colonna?
I'm trying to find it on themap and I can't find it on the
map.
I keep looking and it keepsbringing me to like this Andorra
, and yeah, so Andorra would becloser to the Spanish border.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
If you go from Andorra east to the
Mediterranean and then followthat coast north, eventually
it's going to kind of turn backtoward the east.
And we're about at that curvejust about 50 minutes north of
the Mediterranean, not far fromMontpellier, or if you're
(04:43):
looking at a map just very closeto Béziers B-E-Z-I-E-R-S.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Béziers.
Okay, I see that on the map 30minutes north of Béziers.
And it makes sense.
You said it was a really smalltown 800 people.
Yes, yeah, oh my goodness, Ican't even find it on the map.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
No, yeah, you would have to really zoom in to find
our village, for sure.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Okay, I zoomed into Béziers.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
Yeah, so yeah, if you look almost directly north of
Béziers, if you're zoomed in farenough, you'll find a little
town called Autignac, and thatagain was part of the plan.
To the extent that there was aplan is we wanted to be
somewhere, maybe a little bitout of the way, so that we could
, you know, not just be anotherset of tourists and try to
(05:31):
integrate a little morecompletely than you can do in a
larger place or a place that ismore, has more sort of the
infrastructure in place towelcome tourists, because then
you tend to also then get guidedthrough touristy experiences,
and we did definitely want toavoid that and definitely did
avoid that almost more than weexpected.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
But yes, so what if someone is like like Kristen and
I?
That's not a I can't rememberwhat you call it the front?
We don't speak French.
Would, we survive there.
Do people speak English there?
Speaker 3 (05:58):
There are.
Yeah, so there's a lot.
There are very few Americanswho go there, but there are a
lot of Brits.
And so in most towns in thispart of the world you could find
an Anglophone community Insomething.
In a town this small.
It would be very hard to get by.
I mean, it was really, I wouldsay, you know, 99% French, but
this is certainly a region thatreceives tourists.
(06:19):
You know, it's the there's kindof two halves of the Languedoc,
it's there's the plain, theMediterranean plain, which they
call the Bas Languedoc or thelow Languedoc, and then there's
a series of hills.
The plain sort of runs northand ends up rising up into some
foothills which eventuallybecome the Massif Central, but
that is called the HautLanguedoc or the High Languedoc,
(06:40):
and that literally means simplyjust you know how far above sea
level we're talking, or thehigh Languedoc, and that
literally means simply just youknow, you know how, how far
above sea level we're talking,and so the plain is more or less
at sea level.
The high Languedoc is is up inthe hills and kind of mini
mountains and there's a lot ofwalking, hiking, a lot of
natural beauty up in those hills.
(07:01):
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 somechestnut forests and you know
some long, very Mediterraneankind of scrubby, rocky vistas.
It's not as dramatic asProvence or the Riviera.
That half of France is moredramatic, it's more.
It's been more heavilytouristed, in part because there
(07:23):
is a little bit more naturalbeauty.
It's more it's been moreheavily touristed, in part
because there is a little bitmore natural beauty.
I would say it's part of whythe Languedoc is more reasonably
priced, but there is still.
You know, you're still verymuch in the Mediterranean and to
a great extent it's the sameclimate between Provence to the
east of the Rhone and Languedocto the west.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
And so how far were you from the sea then?
Speaker 3 (07:41):
We were about 50 minutes north of the
Mediterranean and about 50minutes east of the Pyrenees.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
It looks like a lot of vineyards on the pictures
that I'm seeing.
Speaker 3 (07:54):
It's the largest vineyard in the world, larger
than Napa, yeah, significantlylarger than Napa.
Yeah, it's all vines.
That is primarily what happensthere.
Yes, there is some tourism.
Yes, there's other cities andjobs that we would recognize,
but to a great extent theLanguedoc is made up of vines,
(08:14):
vineyards and wineries, andthat's what they do the most of.
They generate more wine thananywhere else in France.
It's had a somewhatunderappreciated reputation for
a long time.
Well, it was the rightreputation.
For a long time it was a placewhere you could grow a lot of
grapes really cheaply, becauseit's a place that's made to grow
(08:35):
grapes, and so for many yearsthis was the place where you
made kind of low alcohol, notvery high quality wine for the
army, and so it got a reputationas being what they called the
lake of wine.
I mean, he just there was justso much of it, but it wasn't all
that good.
And it's just kind of emergingfrom that reputation because the
parcels are much moreaffordable than than in a great
(08:59):
winemaking region.
You know, in Bordeaux orBurgundy it can be a million
dollars an acre, and here youcan get a hectare for 15,000 to
20,000 euros, and so what that'sallowed is some new winemakers
to come in natural winemakersand organic winemakers,
biodynamic winemakers, peopleexperimenting a little bit and
(09:19):
it's starting to get a newreputation as being a place of
innovation.
And the wine itself is justsimply getting higher and higher
quality, because there's somuch demand for French wine.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
And I wondered also is it the quality of the soil,
the quality of the grape or thevine?
Speaker 3 (09:36):
It's really the latitude.
Primarily it's the climate.
It's where grapes are meant togrow.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Well, I mean the quality.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
The quality was always there because the quality
really again Well, I mean thequality, the quality.
The quality was always therebecause the quality really again
comes from, yes, the land youknow is this is this the kind of
soil that would grow grapes,high quality grapes?
The answer is yes.
Okay, is this the kind ofclimate that can grow high
quality grapes?
The answer is absolutely theproblem was correct, right,
exactly it was.
It was what were they beingencouraged to do, and you know,
(10:08):
for many years they were beingencouraged to just simply make
as much wine as you can, andwhen you do that, you're asking
the vines to overproduce and toproduce lots and lots of grapes,
which means the quality, theamount of energy the vine can
actually put into eachindividual cluster is much less
and you get a faded kind of notvery concentrated flavor to the
(10:29):
wine.
So it was really the method,exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Totally, if you're asked to do too much.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
You're not very good at what you do, right?
So it's very much that way, andso, yeah, it was the
methodology that had beenlacking for a while, and now
that is starting to turn around,got it?
Oh, that's great.
It's still a very working classblue collar place, and I think
people think of wine regions,they think of Napa, which is
kind of wine, Disney, you know.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Oh well, so yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
Okay, perfect.
So, yeah, you know it's gottenvery, very expensive.
It's very heavily touristed.
It's not a place where you seedusty guys and overalls walking
up and down Napa, the streets ofNapa City, that's.
You know this place is stillthat it's still very much tied
to the soil, to agriculture, togrowing things, you know, on a
(11:15):
on a commercial scale, and itwas part of what we ended up
loving about the place.
Um, but as a, as part of ourefforts to integrate into this
little village, I ended upvolunteering to pick grapes and
then, was part of our efforts tointegrate into this little
village, I ended up volunteeringto pick grapes and then, uh,
was part of a wine, uh, pickinga grape picking crew for much of
the fall that we were there andthen actually ended up working
in one of the, the wineries, uh,that was in the village itself,
(11:36):
made friends with a couple ofwinemakers who I'm I'm still
friends with this to this day.
So I I got a very ground levela of what it what it means to
actually make wine and it's it'snot very pretentious at that
level.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
I can imagine what an experience too, and I'm just
curious what did you do and yourfamily do professionally before
, and how did you come to likeleaving it all and this was very
much a turning point in ourlives.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
Again, I had been a French speaker, we had done a
lot of traveling.
I think we'd expected this tobe another one of those trips.
We were going to put the kidsin school, we were going to be a
little bit along for the rideand it would be another kind of
nice trip that we could check.
You know, check a little box.
Yes, we visited this part ofthe world, yeah, and At some
point it was clear that we hadasked the kids to do something
(12:24):
pretty difficult.
And I'm the French speaker inthe family.
My wife does not speak French.
We needed me to step up andkind of get over myself a little
bit.
I liked going to cafes andwalking the streets and talking
to people and we neededsomething more.
And so there came a pointduring this trip where my wife,
mary Jo, was basically like thisisn't working, dude, you got to
(12:45):
step up, you have to take usalong into what it means to live
in this place and partly youhave to do this for these kids
who are struggling and kind ofneed your help to become a part
of things.
So that was what led eventually.
I tried to kind of cook my wayinto the culture.
I did a lot of French.
You know attempts at Frenchcooking that were almost
(13:06):
uniformly failures.
That I chose, you knowcomplicated kind of classic
French dishes, and nobody in thefamily was all that interested
and they didn't even reallytaste that good and I thought
they looked great.
But so at some point it wasclear OK, we're in a place
that's surrounded by vines, itwas getting to be the time of
the harvest.
I looked around and said ifwe're going to get to know this
place we should be whereeverybody else is, which is out
(13:27):
in the vines.
And that was really the turningpoint and at that point the
whole place kind of opened up tous and we really became very
deeply immersed in this village,in the kind of food and wine
culture that was a part of justlife in this place, you know,
became really kind of closefriends with several of our
villagers who remain friends tothis day, and left feeling as if
(13:50):
we something really profoundhad changed.
So I've just published a book inJuly of this year, a memoir of
that six months and the memoirhas been a 10 year effort to
kind of reckon with what exactlydid happen there.
Why was it?
Why did it feel solife-changing?
More than just the average, Ithink.
(14:11):
A lot of people go abroad andhave what feel like
life-changing experiences.
This really did change the pathof my entire life, and what it
partly did is, you know, I hadbeen a tax preparer and a real
estate broker for most of myprofessional life, but had
always loved books.
Part of what I did when we werethere was journal extensively,
and that journal was thebeginning of a food writing
(14:33):
career.
So I am now both a tax preparerand a food writer, which is an
industry of one single person.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
A fun one.
Hey, that's great, you don'thave too much competition.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Zero competition.
And the nice thing about it isthat tax preparation in the
United States is obviously avery seasonal endeavor.
You've got to turn in your taxreturn by April 15th, so I earn
almost all of our income for theyear in the first half of the
year and that then buys me thecreative freedom to write kind
of what I want to write about inthe second half of each year.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
That's great.
A couple of questions.
Did you anticipate that you?
Was it planned that you werestaying there for that six
months, and then what months didyou go?
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Yes, it was absolutely planned that we would
be there.
We wanted to be kind of stablefor the kids, to kind of
establish a home life in thisnew place, and that involved
being in one place and we werethere from basically late July
into mid, mid January.
So we got there for late summer.
Kids started to go into schoolin September.
(15:37):
They were done by the holidays.
They actually went back toschool for a couple of weeks in
January and then we came backafter just about six months.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
And then did they return then to the school in
Minnesota.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Correct.
They went back, rejoined theirclassmates in Minnesota for the
rest of that school year andthen, after this trip, which is
described in the book, we alsodid go back about four
additional times to the samevillage, to the same house,
because it felt like a secondhome.
At that point, we were stillrenting, we didn't actually ever
buy a place, but we had justfelt as if it was a part of us
(16:07):
and we were, we were a part ofit, and so we went back and the
kids went back to school each ofthose times.
By the very last time, it was2019.
Our daughter was in college atthat point.
Our son went to high school in alocal high school, in Bézier
actually that time and then wegot back in 2020 to COVID, which
was, you know, was COVID, andthen our son started school at
(16:32):
NYU and so, first because of thepandemic 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 thisbook as well.
So it's it's been a good timeto not be traveling back and
forth in some ways, but really,we really do miss it now.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
How old were your kids?
Speaker 3 (16:52):
Nine and 14.
Joe was nine and our daughterwas 14.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
Got it and do they?
Speaker 3 (16:56):
speak fluently.
Joe speaks very close tofluently.
Eva had gone to school and thengone to a couple of years of
middle school, so I would sayshe's less fluent, but they
could both.
You know, they can both go toFrance and have conversations
and get around and, and you know, not have to struggle very much
.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Yeah, and were you a foodie before and winery wines
Like?
Did you kind of like, oh, thisis great Cause this fits what I
am?
Or did you become that afteryou know you'd?
Speaker 3 (17:22):
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 inthe way that it connected me to
France.
I love France and French wineand French wine regions and you
know talking about it, but I hadnot had that kind of deep love
of wine where I would have leftfor this trip thinking, oh yeah,
(17:45):
of course, what I'm going to godo is pick grapes and work in a
winery.
I really this was part of whathappened in the six months was
kind of a bottom-up education inMediterranean cooking and
Mediterranean wine, and I thinkI discovered something latent in
myself that had been there fora long time but it kind of
blossomed while we were here andthen that did eventually lead
(18:10):
to this food writing career,where I've, you know, written
for, you know, the WashingtonPost and Food and Wine Magazine
and so on, written a lot ofarticles about the food of
France and then the food of theupper Midwest, where I'm from,
the Great Lakes North.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Well, that's great.
And then you guys oh sorry,I'll stop.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
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 whatis Northern food which won a
James Beard award.
To celebrate the award, I did atalk in Minneapolis and the
name of the talk was beyond hotdish.
And a great, a great part ofwhat I was trying to do with
(18:47):
that article is to get us beyondthe hot dish thing, but I can't
.
I have failed, of course, andnow a Tim Walls is a vice
presidential candidate.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
We're all going to be stuck with hot dish forever
yeah, that's funny and then didyour wife so you weren't working
because you had tax season andthat's you know, right as you.
As you came back, did your wifeleave her job or work, or so my
my wife.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
We both had weird sort of left brain, right brain
careers.
I was again a language andliterature major in college and
then ended up going in becausethat, you know, that prepared me
for zero actual jobs.
I ended up going into realestate first and then tax
preparation.
Mary Jo is actually anaeronautical engineer, so she
worked.
She did aeronauticalastronautical engineering at
Honeywell for a number of yearsand about mid-career we kind of
(19:34):
did the clapped each other'shands and jumped out of the ring
and jumped into the ring.
So she left when we were havingtrouble having our second child
.
We thought that the stress ofthe job might've been a part of
that, so she stopped working andstayed at home for a number of
years.
After that I was Mr Mom withour first born daughter for
about four years and then that'swhen I kind of went in heavily
(19:54):
into being a real estate brokerand eventually a tax preparer.
So she didn't have to leave ajob per se, but she was just
beginning an art of photographycareer and part of what she did,
what I did with this time, wasstart this journaling that led
to a writing career.
What Mary Jo was doing was shehad started a project called
Still and she basically posted aphoto every day of nature, of
(20:18):
some nature found near her andarranged on a white background.
She would take a photo, post itevery day, and so what she was
doing, and that started onJanuary 1st 2012.
So it was early in the life ofthat project that we went to
France and it was wonderfulbecause it required her to go
out and seek and gather from thesurrounding countryside in
(20:40):
order to take this photo everyday.
And so we ended up, you know,kind of learning really fast
about a lot of the plants andanimals and insects and
creatures.
Of course we had anine-year-old boy, so there was
lots of insects.
That was really actually verymuch a part, you know, my French
was a part of our integrationinto the village.
But her actual creativepractice was another entree into
(21:01):
the village because we learnedso much so quickly that we could
talk to people about, you know,about the region and ask
educated questions and by theway.
That started on January 1st of2020, 2012,.
She has still never missed asingle day.
So she's now at image number Ithink, 4,650 something.
Has never missed a day.
It never skipped the Christmas,never skipped a, never had a
(21:22):
sick day every single day.
For now.
You know what is it 12 plusyears.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Is that on Instagram or where is she posting?
Speaker 3 (21:29):
She's on Instagram and she's also.
Her blog is called stillblognetS-T-I-L-L-B-L-O-G stillblognet,
and that's her archive whereshe has posted those photos
every day and they're stunninglybeautiful.
She also just published a bookthat is sort of the
commemoration of those first 10years of that project, with some
(21:50):
essays talking about her kindof discoveries over the years,
about the creative process andliving a normal life and yet
still having a creative outletas well.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
Oh, that's great.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
Yeah, yeah.
No, she's amazing.
She's far more interesting thanI am.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
I'm not you should probably have her on instead of
me.
Well, I'd love to learn alittle bit more about the region
.
Yeah, so like cost of livingdown there?
Obviously you said it's less.
How would you compare it tovisiting in France?
Is it going to be like half theprice, Not half the price?
Speaker 3 (22:21):
It's still the Mediterranean, so there's still
a certain amount of touristpressure, but it is the second
tourist region in France, or wasas of recently.
So what we discovered is thatwe could, essentially, other
than the expenses of travel, carand housing, we could more or
less transplant our Americanlife over there, and our monthly
(22:43):
burn rate, our monthlyexpenditure, was just about the
same.
So, for whatever that's worth,you could live there again,
absent housing andtransportation.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Was that more expensive, the housing and
transportation?
Speaker 3 (22:59):
No, I'm just saying like to get there and back like
if you got that out of there.
But daily life, once we arethere and set up, was more or
less the same as it is in theTwin Cities.
So you know certainly less thansome of you know, less than
Paris, less than some of the.
You know Lyon, some of the moreexpensive regions, but not you
know.
I would say not half the price,no, and that's just simply
because there's too much touristpressure, being that close to
(23:19):
the sea.
That it's not an abandonedregion from.
You know the very central partof France that people tend to
visit less often, but it is veryMediterranean.
So you know Mediterranean, thedescription, you know the
definition of Mediterranean isreally, at least in France, I
think, everywhere is whereolives grow.
So if olives grow there, it'sMediterranean and if olives
don't grow there, it's not.
(23:40):
Oh, interesting and so there's aband of land within a certain
distance of the Mediterranean,going all the way across the
southern end of France, from theSpanish border up and over east
to the Italian border, andwherever in that band of country
there are olives grow,naturally that is considered the
Mediterranean region.
(24:01):
So it is still very muchMediterranean.
It resembles Provence in many,many ways.
It's hilly, rocky, full ofvines, and then the wild land is
called Garigue, g-a-r-r-i-g-u-e.
So Garigue is the natural wildscrub land that grows kind of
everywhere in the Mediterranean.
It's what you think of, alsolike in the Greek, in the Greek
(24:24):
islands or in Southern Italy.
It's that kind of dry, pricklyshrubby, low growing, very
aromatic landscape.
So it's where a lot of the herbsthat that that became Southern
French cuisine really come, youknow, indigenously from this,
from this wild scrubland.
Wild thyme grows there, wildrosemary grows there, wild
(24:47):
garlic grows there, olive treesgrow there, wild fennel grows
out in these hills, and so it'slots of very hot sunlight, very
hot summers, long hot summersand then not cold but, you know,
not really super warm winters.
You get the winter winds thatkind of come down the central
(25:07):
part of the country, the Mistralthat blows into Provence and
Marseille that kind of cold,very heavy wind, and west, where
we are, you get wind comingdown off the Pyrenees it's
called the Tramontane and so thewinters can be blustery and
chilly, in the sense of you'rehovering above or maybe slightly
below freezing during a lot ofthe middle of the winter in this
(25:31):
region, and then summers willbe, you know, mid 80s to mid 90s
, and dry most days.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
There's not snow, I'm assuming because they're close
to the.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
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 snowand then once every 50, you'll
get a catastrophic snow and allthe olive trees die and they got
to start over.
But yeah, it's very, it's veryrare, very rare.
It's still very temperate.
Yeah, and it's called theLanguedoc.
Actually it's kind of aninteresting story so long.
(26:01):
In French means tongue, but italso means language.
Previously, before France becameFrance, the Languedoc and
Provence were consideredOccitania.
They were considered that waswhere the Occitan language was
spoken, and in the Occitanlanguage the word for yes was
occ.
So, and in the language of thenorth of northern France the
(26:23):
word for yes was oi, and sothere were two countries in
France before they were united.
There's a Languedoc, whereasthe language of oc meaning that
was the place where in theirlanguage you said oc to say yes,
and there was a Languedoc andoi evolved into oui, which is
the French current way to sayyes, which is the word oui.
(26:44):
And so the Languedoc was thenorthern France, the Languedoc
was the Southern France, and nowthey all speak French.
Occitan was very heavily sortof censored at some point
because they were, you know, theCatholic Church, didn't like
that.
They were doing their own thingand came in and kind of set
things straight in a veryviolent and bloody way.
But that is, that's the storybehind the name.
(27:06):
So Languedoc actuallyoriginally.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Wow, thank you for sharing that.
So it was a different languagethan the French language.
It's just a variation, kind oflike Texas.
No, it was very different.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
You would.
You would hear Occitane and youwould not know that it was
related to any other Romancelanguage that surrounds it.
It sounds a little bit it's gota, it's got a rhythm, a little
bit like Spanish, but it doesnot sound like French at all.
You wouldn't.
(27:39):
You know none of us, you know I, as a more or less fluent
French speaker, would hearOccitan.
I wouldn't understand a singleword.
It was a very, very much adifferent language and now a
little bit similar to.
You know, in some places wherea native or indigenous language
has been eradicated by theforces that invaded or whatever,
there is now very much aneffort to rediscover and
re-teach Occitan in theLanguedoc region and in the
schools there are opportunitiesto essentially do immersion
(28:01):
schooling, like we did for ourkids in France in French.
So there's an effort torediscover it, but it's, you
know, it has been a minoritylanguage and more or less wiped
out for a long time.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Oh, interesting.
One last question what did yourkids think when they came back
and and like looking, reflectingback, I'm assuming I want to
say, oh, it was the most liketransition, transition or
transformational for them.
That's what you hope.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
Of course, and no, of course not.
They didn't do that becausethey were adolescents.
That's not what you do whenyou're in your teens.
You take you, uh, you decidethat you've been put upon and
try to find all the ways thatyou've been victimized.
So no, here's what I would say.
They were very open-minded aboutgoing surprisingly so but they
did feel as if this is somethingthat had been imposed on them,
and so, you know, there was alittle bit of resistance and
(28:48):
rebellion while we were there,and then, for when we were back
during their teen years, therewas a sort of yeah, okay, this
is a part of who I am, but itwasn'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 thingsthat they love to do are very
much rediscovering or pickingback up the things that that
(29:11):
they were first introduced to ina deep way in during that trip.
So it's been very fun and ofcourse, we try not to make too
much out of that, right, justlet it happen and be happy Right
they came back.
That's good enough, but, yeah,it's fun.
Like my baby, they both reallylove to cook.
My son's actually really intofermenting and my daughter is,
you know, traveling the worldright now.
(29:31):
So, yeah, it definitely had aneffect where, like I said, we're
just happy to have them back.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
That's great.
Thanks for sharing Cause that's.
I feel the same way with kidsand with experiences and yeah,
they probably not a big fan, butthen it shapes their future.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
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 agethree, yeah Right, but I'm never
getting them back.
And then you know, they turned20 and suddenly it's like oh
yeah, mom and dad aren't thatbad after all.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
That's good, good to know.
Speaker 3 (30:04):
I think we're yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
I definitely had those years.
I've got my daughter's 20 starttomorrow and then my son's 17
and a half.
So, yeah, we're it's.
It's come back a little bit, soI'm glad to see that for sure.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
And then what?
Speaker 1 (30:19):
about, so the weather ?
You said eighties, and thenwhat's the temperature in the in
the winter time?
Speaker 3 (30:24):
you know, maybe 40 ish plus or minus, flirting with
, flirting with freezing, youknow.
And then you'll get days inJanuary where the wind blows and
it's, you know, it's 30, 30,28,.
You know, it can, it can getbelow freezing, but the summers
are, you know this mid summer isis Todd, it's 85 to 90 plus
degrees Most days, so what's thebest time to go?
(30:46):
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 beingthere are being there during
the produce seasons, especiallylike if you're, if you love
fruit, like the stone fruitseason in the Mediterranean is
just so eye-openingly wonderful,because in Northern climates,
(31:09):
you know, the sun can only bakeso much sugar into into our
fruit, and so we have greatapples and pears and
occasionally you can grow apeach up here, but even that is
going to be kind of a tart fruit, you know.
And then in the south, it'sjust, you have these peaches and
apricots and nectarines andplums and obviously grapes, and
(31:30):
you know.
So if you really love summerproduce, if you love tomatoes
and you love the produce thatwould go into a ratatouille, for
instance, then being there inmid to late summer is great,
it's just you're going to bedealing with more crowds.
I think it's probably mostbeautiful in the fall because
everybody's out, they're alldoing the grape harvest, the
(31:50):
vines still have their leaves,they might even be starting to
turn a little bit.
It's warm, but not excessivelyhot.
And also, you know, it's a timejust after the harvest, where,
if you're there, you know, likeOctober into November, they then
start also offering tastings oftheir wine, of that of you know
(32:11):
, because now the work is behindthem, now it's time to sell the
wine, and so it's a great timeto, you know, do a wine tour,
and you can.
The nice thing about it is thatit's still so under, you know,
under visited.
To some extent it doesn't havethat that just so much enormous
amount of money that's flowinginto this region, like a
Bordeaux, where if you want togo taste some Bordeaux you've
(32:32):
got to line up and make anappointment.
You're standing across thecounter from somebody who's just
kind of feeding you wine.
In the Languedoc, you canliterally go to a village and
walk into local wineries andoften they'll just sit down and
offer you their wines.
It's a beautifully intimateplace to discover wine, if wine
(32:52):
is something you're interestedin.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
That sounds really nice.
That's great Discover wine.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
If wine is something you're interested in, that
sounds really nice, that's great.
And then what about activitiesthat people do, and outdoors, or
like what's a typical?
What do people do in a dailylife?
Speaker 3 (33:08):
A lot of the recreation.
It either would be north orsouth from where we were.
So it'd be north, in the hills,where they have a fairly
extensive series of nationalparks and walking and hiking
trails, and so there you know,you can walk for hundreds of
miles in beautiful territory upin the hills, looking out over
the Mediterranean plain.
So I would say that's probablynumber one to the North and then
much of the rest of it is tothe South.
So you know you can go fishingin the Mediterranean.
(33:30):
You can go.
You can rent, you know,motorized, either boats or like
jet ski kinds of things.
You can go.
They do a lot of like kitesailing on the Mediterranean.
There are also just tours of.
There's a series of kind ofsaltwater lagoons that run along
the coast, that are just inlandfrom the coast but where they
(33:51):
do a lot of raising of mussels,oysters and other shellfish.
So you can go.
You know you can go, like spenda day at the beach and then
have dinner in one of thoselittle towns where you'll get
oysters that have just beengrown.
You know, in the, in the waterthat 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 theSouth and the Mediterranean
(34:14):
itself, or to the North, wherethere's a lot of hiking and kind
of outdoors.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
And then I wonder did you rent out your house here in
Minnesota and then use the funyou know like?
How did you do that?
Speaker 3 (34:26):
We didn't ever rent it out.
We had house sitters and ineach of those cases we had a pet
that they had to watch, so itwas either a dog, or we also for
a while, had six chickens, sowe had to hire a house and
chicken sitter and it was likewe can't also then ask them to
pay rent.
So each time we you know, as wewere, you know we would go
(34:47):
every other year and each timewe would spend the intervening
year and a half basically tryingto build up enough of a buffer
that we could kind of cover ourmortgage at home.
And you know, we live on a lakeso people like to stay here, so
we didn't have to necessarilypay somebody to stay there, but
we also didn't feel like wecould charge rent.
But yeah, each time part of theadventure or part of the
(35:08):
difficulty of going there wasfinding someone to watch over
the house, because they also hadto watch over our animals.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
What lake are you on?
Speaker 3 (35:15):
We're on Turtle Lake in Shoreview, Minnesota.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
Okay, we have to go there all the time as a kid.
Yeah, we have a public.
Speaker 3 (35:21):
We have a public beach right, Exactly the.
Ramsey County beach.
Yes, we're just around thecorner to the South, right on
the South end of Turtle Lake.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
Oh my gosh, you have a boat.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
I do so yeah, my son and I love to fish.
So we go out whenever we can,yeah absolutely so.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
And what were typical meals?
Breakfast, lunch, dinner.
When did they?
Speaker 3 (35:39):
You know, every the French bakeries are subsidized
by the government, so there's inalmost any village you're going
to find a boulangerie.
So we would go quite often inthe morning before school.
My daughter would actually getup and go and she'd get a
baguette and we'd get you knowsome kind of pastry and that
would normally be lunch.
It was really fun to have themin school because we learned a
lot about French lunches as well.
(36:00):
They had an hour and a half offfor lunch every day and they
would usually come home and sowe would make a lunch and then
quite often the lunch is the bigmeal of the day and then you
would have a much lighter dinnerand quite often that dinner
would actually simply be anextension of a lunch and quite
often that dinner would actuallysimply be an extension of a
lunch.
So you know, we would make youknow a tomato and mozzarella
pasta, or we would make you knowa quiche, or we would make you
(36:24):
know like a ham sandwich on abaguette with Swiss cheese and
butter and then but we areunable really to get over our
American tendency to make dinnerthe big meal of the day.
The cool thing was we, becauseit was such a small village.
There wasn't an actual butcherin town.
There was not a fish monger intown.
There was a small grocery storeand a bakery.
(36:45):
But we would get merchants whowould drive their trucks through
these little villages in thearea.
So we had a fisherman whose sonwould go out fishing and the
next day, on Fridays, he wouldshow up with fresh Mediterranean
fish and seafood and thatevening there's a shellfish
monger who had come with mussels, clams and oysters.
And so we started sort oftiming our meals to the rhythm
(37:08):
of when these merchants had werebringing their stuff in.
And then there was also abutcher in the village next door
.
So a lot of grilling.
They do a lot of grilling overvinewood.
They harvest the vinewood, theydo their pruning in the winter
and then save that wood andthat's what they tend to grill
over.
So a lot of grilling.
Very simple food but very, veryflavorful.
Almost too flavorful at firstfor Minnesotans.
(37:30):
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 lotof anchovies, the seafood is
strong.
There's a lot of oily fish likemackerel, and so it took some
getting used to, but by the endit was like we'd been completely
converted.
We were just so completely inlove with this food.
My son discovered oysters and sowe would get that once, or
sometimes a couple of times aweek.
We'd have mussels in white winesauce.
(37:52):
On Saturday night we would goto the butcher and get some some
chicken or pork or beef orsomething.
We put the grill that on thegrill.
It's not what most people thinkof as French food.
It's very simple, just good,really fresh ingredients,
prepared simply, not the kind ofcream and sauces and all that
complication that you think ofas French restaurant food.
(38:14):
Yeah, it was very simple, kindlike the Mediterranean diet
Exactly it's very much theMediterranean diet.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
Absolutely.
I'd like to do the rapid firequestions unless there's any
other burning questions.
Kristen.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
I can't think of any right now.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
Okay, yeah, so what is the um popular holiday
tradition and were you there forany specific holidays?
Speaker 3 (38:33):
Yes, we were there for Christmas and actually
Christmas is similar.
It's a big family meal like wewould have at Christmas, but the
staple that everybody gets forChristmas in the South is
oysters.
So people order like two cratesof raw oysters, and they would
order them ahead of time and itarrived just in time for
(38:54):
Christmas and that was what thefamily would share.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
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 Christmastradition since Christmas is not
really huge there, they wouldhave Kentucky fried chicken,
Like everyone had to like, orderit ahead of time, Like sure
sure I could not.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
I could not have found a Kentucky fried chicken
where we were.
I can promise that's good, Allright.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
And what was the favorite?
Since you look like we'recooking, what's your favorite
dish to cook?
Speaker 3 (39:24):
That's what you've learned my favorite dish to cook
was a fish, a very simple fishdish that my next door neighbor,
nicole, who became one of ourbest friends she, her husband,
and it's.
It's a white fish filet in atomato, onion, garlic and olive
sauce.
And so basically you put tomato, you know, you saute onions and
garlic, tomato, white wine andolives, and then you just kind
(39:52):
of slide the white fish filet inthat and bake that for about 20
minutes and it just comes outsort of flaky and aromatic, and
it's beautiful and very, veryfoolproof.
Uh, so they've got a lot oftypes there, but it would be
mackerel, or it'd be sea bass,kind of like a Branzino, or they
also have hake, which issimilar to a cod.
Those would be the most common.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Nice.
I feel like cod is always sohard to make it taste good.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
I know, I know, yeah, right, right, right.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Oh, that's great.
And we were talking about howdid you get around?
What's the best way, like, orfor someone like, say, kristen,
I want to go for a month.
Like, would we rent a car, doyou get?
Speaker 3 (40:25):
a bus.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
Is there public transpo?
Speaker 3 (40:27):
No, there's public transportation in the in the
bigger cities, but no, it's inthe cities you walk, or in the
villages you walk, and then toget between villages or from
villages to larger cities oranywhere else you want to go,
you really, you really need avehicle.
So we, we rented a car all thetimes that we went there.
Speaker 2 (40:44):
Okay, and they drive on the like Americans, or Yep On
the right side of the road.
Speaker 3 (40:48):
Yes, okay, cool.
Speaker 2 (40:49):
All right, great.
And then any specific musicthat you noticed was there.
Speaker 3 (41:00):
What kind of music do you listen to?
We well, we love jazz, but itwas not necessarily endemic to
that place.
There are two famous Frenchsingers 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 ofmid to late 20th century kind
of folk singer just guitar andvoice, but is also considered
very much a poet, almost kind oflike a Bob Dylan figure.
And then there's a guy namedCharles Trenet, t-r-e-n-e-t.
He's from Narbonne and he ismore that kind of chanson, the
(41:24):
kind of crooner style of singing.
So we would often put those onat night as I was cooking dinner
, just to kind of set theatmosphere.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Oh, so nice, All right.
And then, what is the money?
Called?
Speaker 3 (41:35):
Well, the Euro right, it's still Euros.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
Yeah, and closest place to surf is there what?
Or water sports, what do theyhave?
I don't doubt they'd havesurfing in the Mediterranean.
Speaker 3 (41:45):
Like I said, I don't think they really surf in the
Mediterranean because the swellsdon't get large enough, but I
do think so.
If you went east, from where weare across the Pyrenees, you
could get in about five or sixhours.
You get to Biarritz, which ison the Atlantic coast, and
there's very much a surfingculture in Biarritz, which is
just north of the Spanish border, on the western coast of
(42:08):
southern France.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
Okay, how do you spell it?
Speaker 3 (42:11):
Biarritz B-I-A-R-R-I-T-Z.
Oh, I just found it.
It was kind of similar toCalifornia in a way.
It was sort of a hippie kind ofbohemian place for a long time.
And then you know, the moneyfound it and now it's a little
of both, similar to the sort ofCalifornia you know, kind of
(42:33):
like Carmel and Monterey, whichwould have been very 1960s
hippie for a long time, now arefull of money, but there is
still an existing surf culturethere as well.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
Like the Ritz Carlton .
Speaker 3 (42:44):
It rhymes with it but it's not related in any way.
But I'm sure there's a lot ofpeople who stayed at Ritz at the
Ritz who also go to be a Ritz.
Speaker 2 (42:51):
Yeah, very nice.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Oh, my gosh, my gosh, the pictures.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
I see lots of surf yeah, yeah, exactly beautiful
place, yeah, yeah, yeah allright, and so what's the name of
your book?
Speaker 3 (43:02):
it's called it's called a season for that lost
and found in the other southernFrance the other southern France
being meaning Languedoc insteadof Provence, really and it's a
memoir about our family's timethere, about my sort of
discovery of Mediterranean foodand wine, but also about our
family, about my long marriagewith Mary Jo and about kind of
(43:23):
this agonized father's agonizedlove for these two very
different children and wonderingif I'm parenting them right and
wondering if we're doing theright thing here.
So, yeah, it's a it's it's avery much a memoir.
It's not just a travelogue,it's kind of very much about my
life and this transition thathappened in midlife as a part of
being in this place.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Sounds very cathartic and awesome and didn't you?
Say you were a lit major aswell.
Correct, yeah, my daughter'sactually starting at UC Santa
Cruz weekend as a lit major ohterrific, yeah Well, I can
hardly endorse it.
Oh, that's great.
And how wonderful that you fullcircle went back to.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
Very much so.
This was, yeah, this writingwas very much rediscovering an
early love.
Absolutely yeah, although theone thing I would say to your
daughter, or to you on behalf ofyour daughter, is, even though
it doesn't sound like it, my taxpreparation career, I think, is
as successful as it is, in partbecause of all that reading and
writing and communication thatI did as a liberal arts major.
Because every career you got tobe able to talk to people.
(44:26):
You have to be able to writestuff, and I feel like to some
extent, I'm almost better atthis than a lot of people who
just went into finance, becausethere's a human element to it
that you can't just put on agreen eye shade and look down at
your computer screen.
You got to be able tocommunicate with people.
So, anyway, you know I don'tmost parents don't necessarily
always wish that their kids willgrow up and be art or
(44:47):
literature majors, but Iactually think it instills a
kind of versatility that isactually really useful.
Speaker 1 (44:53):
Yeah, now I actually was an account, I worked for a
CPA firm in accounting, didtaxes, back taxes, and then
Carol and I actually met in ourmid twenties, I guess, or so
doing placement of accountingand finance people.
Speaker 3 (45:07):
Oh my gosh.
Oh, so we're.
Yeah, we are all definitely onthe same page here.
Speaker 2 (45:12):
That's great.
Oh, that's so funny.
And so do you have another bookin mind?
Speaker 3 (45:15):
or yeah, yes, no, you sound like my agent, but yes,
uh, I do um what's next?
I can't.
I don't know what I it's goingto be another, uh, creative
non-fiction book.
It will be uh about.
There will be france and foodin it, inevitably, um, but it's
uh.
I you know it's going to be acontinuation of the kind of the
(45:37):
heart of this current book,which is trying to be in process
, in mid struggle, as a middleaged person trying to figure out
what, what it means to live agood life, and that will.
That will be the core of it andI but I don't know what the
specifics are yet I'm working onthat right now.
Speaker 1 (45:53):
Very good, one quick question.
I this is a huge passion ofmine as well, actually, but I
just journal and do things hereand there.
But I was curious did you takeclasses, just go straight cold
turkey, start writing and thengot an agent, or just curious
what your process was?
Speaker 3 (46:10):
The articles you know , like food writing articles for
newspapers and magazines camefairly naturally to me.
But I think that was alsocarrying way back to all the
reading I did when I was alanguage and literature major.
I didn't do much writing.
In the middle of my life Itried to write some poetry and
short fiction, but it justdidn't work.
I didn't have enough authorityor personal core, whatever it
was you needed.
So the short fiction, you know,the short articles came
(46:33):
naturally.
I could just sort of do themwithout much training.
The process of writing a bookwas entirely different.
It was a 10-year odyssey ofwriting a book and trying to
teach myself to write a book atthe same time, being in
preschool and graduate school atthe 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 theJames Beard Award for that
(46:53):
article that turned thingsaround and it was in New York
City when I was accepting theaward that I met the guy who
would become my agent and thenthe guy who would also become
the editor of my book.
That's a whole other episode.
I could talk for an entire hourabout the soul crushing.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
I'll text you.
That's my other podcastLiterally.
Speaker 3 (47:14):
Yeah, no, I would love to talk more about that,
but it was a long road, withlots of failure and lots of
discovery and lots of needing toget rid of my own ego in order
to get where I needed to be.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
Thank you for sharing that.
Do you have any social channelsyou want to share?
Speaker 3 (47:31):
Yeah, for sure, the best place to both buy my book
and just sort of read some of myother writings on food and
travel would be my website,which is wwwsjrhoffmancom.
That's as in Stephen JohnRaymond Hoffmancom there's a
link to the book, there's a linkto my newsletter, and then
there's also my other writings.
And then I'm also active onsocial media, primarily
(47:53):
Instagram, and that handle isalso at SJR Hoffman.
Stephen John Hoffman.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
Cool Okay great.
Thank you, we'll put all thosein the show notes so people can
easily find them Fantastic andthank you so much.
Speaker 3 (48:08):
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, thankyou Really inspiring too.
Speaker 1 (48:14):
I'm like, Ooh, where do I want to go?
Where next Right.
Speaker 3 (48:18):
Right, exactly Always yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
Thanks again, yep, bye.
Thanks for listening.
If you enjoyed the podcast, canyou please take a second and do
a quick follow of the show andrate us in your podcast app, and
, if you have a minute, we wouldreally appreciate a review.
Following and rating is thebest way to support us.
If you're on Instagram, let'sconnect.
We're at where next podcast.
(48:45):
Thanks again.
Thank you.
Hi, welcome to our podcast when Next Travel with
Kristen and Carol.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I am Kristen and I am Carol.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
And we're two long-term friends with a passion
for travel and adventure.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Each episode, we interview people around the
globe to help us decide where togo next.
So today we have Steve Hoffmanand he's going to talk about.
You have to help me pronouncethis, Steve Languedoc.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Right Languedoc Yep Languedoc in southern southern
france right in 2012.
My family and I uh where welive in minnesota our kids, no
kidding.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Oh, my god, I know you grew up like really where
you live, I think really closeto where I went to high school.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
I went to irondale oh my god, I went to, yeah, what
was then ramsey high school, sowe would have been rivals.
I've been a Francophile, frenchspeaker, lover of France and
the French language for most ofmy adulthood.
And our kids went to St PaulFrench immersion school for
grade school.
And so, in 2012, as they were,as they were finishing their
(01:18):
grade school careers, we decided, after all that work, getting
them, you know, a Frenchlanguage education, we were
going to go to France, put themin some local schools and have
them kind of cement thoselanguage skills in actual French
schools.
We ended up picking theLanguedoc for a number of
reasons.
First, it was warm and we werefrom Minnesota.
(01:39):
We were going to be there for afall semester and we wanted to
be French-speaking, for obviousreasons, and we didn't think we
could afford Provence or theRiviera.
So we kind of somewhat randomlythrew some electronic darts at
a map of Southwest France andone email landed with an
Irishman who wrote back to usright away whose house was big
(02:01):
enough to house four of us forsix months and he was willing to
sign a lease.
And so we went and stayed therefor for six months.
So Languedoc is, you know, the,it's Southern France,
mediterranean France, so east ofthe Rhone.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Okay, so back up you didn't go through like a
structured school program orsomething.
You just decided to hey, let'sjust find a place to live and
then figure out how to go.
Did you was there like anEnglish speaking or or it was
not at all French school?
Speaker 3 (02:32):
Correct there was.
So it was.
They went to local villageschools.
Our son was nine, Our daughterwas 14.
Again, they had had, you know,the French immersion.
School is more than just Frenchclass, it's all of their
curriculum for their elementaryschool education had been in
French, other than a fewrequired English nodes that
helped them pass thestandardized tests.
(02:53):
So it wasn't quite as fryingpan into the fire as it might
sound, but it was very much afull immersion.
So we were in a tiny 800 personvillage and very few people
there spoke any English at all.
Certainly almost none of thekids schoolmates spoke any
English.
We had traveled this way before,my wife and I.
(03:13):
We had done this kind of alittle bit by the seat of your
pants kind of traveling, and wesort of enjoyed the adventure,
the thrill of living by our witsa little bit.
We probably overestimated our,our skills this time.
We arrived in this tiny villageand didn't really know what we
had gotten ourselves into and itwas very different from what we
had expected and we were reallychallenging the kids kind of at
(03:36):
the at the upper end of theircapacities.
But yes, to answer yourquestion, it was that you know
we had to formally unenroll themfrom school in the Twin Cities,
we had to, you know, call aheador email ahead and get them
properly enrolled in the Frenchschool that they were going to
be attending.
But other than that, no, it wasnot done through any particular
(03:58):
formalized program or, you know, exchange program.
It was the Hoffman family fromMinnesota plucks down in
Autignac, france, and let's givethis a try.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
And how big is La Colonna?
I'm trying to find it on themap and I can't find it on the
map.
I keep looking and it keepsbringing me to like this Andorra
, and yeah, so Andorra would becloser to the Spanish border.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
If you go from Andorra east to the
Mediterranean and then followthat coast north, eventually
it's going to kind of turn backtoward the east.
And we're about at that curvejust about 50 minutes north of
the Mediterranean, not far fromMontpellier, or if you're
(04:43):
looking at a map just very closeto Béziers B-E-Z-I-E-R-S.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Béziers.
Okay, I see that on the map 30minutes north of Béziers.
And it makes sense.
You said it was a really smalltown 800 people.
Yes, yeah, oh my goodness, Ican't even find it on the map.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
No, yeah, you would have to really zoom in to find
our village, for sure.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Okay, I zoomed into Béziers.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
Yeah, so yeah, if you look almost directly north of
Béziers, if you're zoomed in farenough, you'll find a little
town called Autignac, and thatagain was part of the plan.
To the extent that there was aplan is we wanted to be
somewhere, maybe a little bitout of the way, so that we could
, you know, not just be anotherset of tourists and try to
(05:31):
integrate a little morecompletely than you can do in a
larger place or a place that ismore, has more sort of the
infrastructure in place towelcome tourists, because then
you tend to also then get guidedthrough touristy experiences,
and we did definitely want toavoid that and definitely did
avoid that almost more than weexpected.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
But yes, so what if someone is like like Kristen and
I?
That's not a I can't rememberwhat you call it the front?
We don't speak French.
Would, we survive there.
Do people speak English there?
Speaker 3 (05:58):
There are.
Yeah, so there's a lot.
There are very few Americanswho go there, but there are a
lot of Brits.
And so in most towns in thispart of the world you could find
an Anglophone community Insomething.
In a town this small.
It would be very hard to get by.
I mean, it was really, I wouldsay, you know, 99% French, but
this is certainly a region thatreceives tourists.
(06:19):
You know, it's the there's kindof two halves of the Languedoc,
it's there's the plain, theMediterranean plain, which they
call the Bas Languedoc or thelow Languedoc, and then there's
a series of hills.
The plain sort of runs northand ends up rising up into some
foothills which eventuallybecome the Massif Central, but
that is called the HautLanguedoc or the High Languedoc,
(06:40):
and that literally means simplyjust you know how far above sea
level we're talking, or thehigh Languedoc, and that
literally means simply just youknow, you know how, how far
above sea level we're talking,and so the plain is more or less
at sea level.
The high Languedoc is is up inthe hills and kind of mini
mountains and there's a lot ofwalking, hiking, a lot of
natural beauty up in those hills.
(07:01):
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 somechestnut forests and you know
some long, very Mediterraneankind of scrubby, rocky vistas.
It's not as dramatic asProvence or the Riviera.
That half of France is moredramatic, it's more.
It's been more heavilytouristed, in part because there
(07:23):
is a little bit more naturalbeauty.
It's more it's been moreheavily touristed, in part
because there is a little bitmore natural beauty.
I would say it's part of whythe Languedoc is more reasonably
priced, but there is still.
You know, you're still verymuch in the Mediterranean and to
a great extent it's the sameclimate between Provence to the
east of the Rhone and Languedocto the west.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
And so how far were you from the sea then?
Speaker 3 (07:41):
We were about 50 minutes north of the
Mediterranean and about 50minutes east of the Pyrenees.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
It looks like a lot of vineyards on the pictures
that I'm seeing.
Speaker 3 (07:54):
It's the largest vineyard in the world, larger
than Napa, yeah, significantlylarger than Napa.
Yeah, it's all vines.
That is primarily what happensthere.
Yes, there is some tourism.
Yes, there's other cities andjobs that we would recognize,
but to a great extent theLanguedoc is made up of vines,
(08:14):
vineyards and wineries, andthat's what they do the most of.
They generate more wine thananywhere else in France.
It's had a somewhatunderappreciated reputation for
a long time.
Well, it was the rightreputation.
For a long time it was a placewhere you could grow a lot of
grapes really cheaply, becauseit's a place that's made to grow
(08:35):
grapes, and so for many yearsthis was the place where you
made kind of low alcohol, notvery high quality wine for the
army, and so it got a reputationas being what they called the
lake of wine.
I mean, he just there was justso much of it, but it wasn't all
that good.
And it's just kind of emergingfrom that reputation because the
parcels are much moreaffordable than than in a great
(08:59):
winemaking region.
You know, in Bordeaux orBurgundy it can be a million
dollars an acre, and here youcan get a hectare for 15,000 to
20,000 euros, and so what that'sallowed is some new winemakers
to come in natural winemakersand organic winemakers,
biodynamic winemakers, peopleexperimenting a little bit and
(09:19):
it's starting to get a newreputation as being a place of
innovation.
And the wine itself is justsimply getting higher and higher
quality, because there's somuch demand for French wine.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
And I wondered also is it the quality of the soil,
the quality of the grape or thevine?
Speaker 3 (09:36):
It's really the latitude.
Primarily it's the climate.
It's where grapes are meant togrow.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Well, I mean the quality.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
The quality was always there because the quality
really again Well, I mean thequality, the quality.
The quality was always therebecause the quality really again
comes from, yes, the land youknow is this is this the kind of
soil that would grow grapes,high quality grapes?
The answer is yes.
Okay, is this the kind ofclimate that can grow high
quality grapes?
The answer is absolutely theproblem was correct, right,
exactly it was.
It was what were they beingencouraged to do, and you know,
(10:08):
for many years they were beingencouraged to just simply make
as much wine as you can, andwhen you do that, you're asking
the vines to overproduce and toproduce lots and lots of grapes,
which means the quality, theamount of energy the vine can
actually put into eachindividual cluster is much less
and you get a faded kind of notvery concentrated flavor to the
(10:29):
wine.
So it was really the method,exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Totally, if you're asked to do too much.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
You're not very good at what you do, right?
So it's very much that way, andso, yeah, it was the
methodology that had beenlacking for a while, and now
that is starting to turn around,got it?
Oh, that's great.
It's still a very working classblue collar place, and I think
people think of wine regions,they think of Napa, which is
kind of wine, Disney, you know.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Oh well, so yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
Okay, perfect.
So, yeah, you know it's gottenvery, very expensive.
It's very heavily touristed.
It's not a place where you seedusty guys and overalls walking
up and down Napa, the streets ofNapa City, that's.
You know this place is stillthat it's still very much tied
to the soil, to agriculture, togrowing things, you know, on a
(11:15):
on a commercial scale, and itwas part of what we ended up
loving about the place.
Um, but as a, as part of ourefforts to integrate into this
little village, I ended upvolunteering to pick grapes and
then, was part of our efforts tointegrate into this little
village, I ended up volunteeringto pick grapes and then, uh,
was part of a wine, uh, pickinga grape picking crew for much of
the fall that we were there andthen actually ended up working
in one of the, the wineries, uh,that was in the village itself,
(11:36):
made friends with a couple ofwinemakers who I'm I'm still
friends with this to this day.
So I I got a very ground levela of what it what it means to
actually make wine and it's it'snot very pretentious at that
level.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
I can imagine what an experience too, and I'm just
curious what did you do and yourfamily do professionally before
, and how did you come to likeleaving it all and this was very
much a turning point in ourlives.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
Again, I had been a French speaker, we had done a
lot of traveling.
I think we'd expected this tobe another one of those trips.
We were going to put the kidsin school, we were going to be a
little bit along for the rideand it would be another kind of
nice trip that we could check.
You know, check a little box.
Yes, we visited this part ofthe world, yeah, and At some
point it was clear that we hadasked the kids to do something
(12:24):
pretty difficult.
And I'm the French speaker inthe family.
My wife does not speak French.
We needed me to step up andkind of get over myself a little
bit.
I liked going to cafes andwalking the streets and talking
to people and we neededsomething more.
And so there came a pointduring this trip where my wife,
mary Jo, was basically like thisisn't working, dude, you got to
(12:45):
step up, you have to take usalong into what it means to live
in this place and partly youhave to do this for these kids
who are struggling and kind ofneed your help to become a part
of things.
So that was what led eventually.
I tried to kind of cook my wayinto the culture.
I did a lot of French.
You know attempts at Frenchcooking that were almost
(13:06):
uniformly failures.
That I chose, you knowcomplicated kind of classic
French dishes, and nobody in thefamily was all that interested
and they didn't even reallytaste that good and I thought
they looked great.
But so at some point it wasclear OK, we're in a place
that's surrounded by vines, itwas getting to be the time of
the harvest.
I looked around and said ifwe're going to get to know this
place we should be whereeverybody else is, which is out
(13:27):
in the vines.
And that was really the turningpoint and at that point the
whole place kind of opened up tous and we really became very
deeply immersed in this village,in the kind of food and wine
culture that was a part of justlife in this place, you know,
became really kind of closefriends with several of our
villagers who remain friends tothis day, and left feeling as if
(13:50):
we something really profoundhad changed.
So I've just published a book inJuly of this year, a memoir of
that six months and the memoirhas been a 10 year effort to
kind of reckon with what exactlydid happen there.
Why was it?
Why did it feel solife-changing?
More than just the average, Ithink.
(14:11):
A lot of people go abroad andhave what feel like
life-changing experiences.
This really did change the pathof my entire life, and what it
partly did is, you know, I hadbeen a tax preparer and a real
estate broker for most of myprofessional life, but had
always loved books.
Part of what I did when we werethere was journal extensively,
and that journal was thebeginning of a food writing
(14:33):
career.
So I am now both a tax preparerand a food writer, which is an
industry of one single person.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
A fun one.
Hey, that's great, you don'thave too much competition.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Zero competition.
And the nice thing about it isthat tax preparation in the
United States is obviously avery seasonal endeavor.
You've got to turn in your taxreturn by April 15th, so I earn
almost all of our income for theyear in the first half of the
year and that then buys me thecreative freedom to write kind
of what I want to write about inthe second half of each year.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
That's great.
A couple of questions.
Did you anticipate that you?
Was it planned that you werestaying there for that six
months, and then what months didyou go?
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Yes, it was absolutely planned that we would
be there.
We wanted to be kind of stablefor the kids, to kind of
establish a home life in thisnew place, and that involved
being in one place and we werethere from basically late July
into mid, mid January.
So we got there for late summer.
Kids started to go into schoolin September.
(15:37):
They were done by the holidays.
They actually went back toschool for a couple of weeks in
January and then we came backafter just about six months.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
And then did they return then to the school in
Minnesota.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Correct.
They went back, rejoined theirclassmates in Minnesota for the
rest of that school year andthen, after this trip, which is
described in the book, we alsodid go back about four
additional times to the samevillage, to the same house,
because it felt like a secondhome.
At that point, we were stillrenting, we didn't actually ever
buy a place, but we had justfelt as if it was a part of us
(16:07):
and we were, we were a part ofit, and so we went back and the
kids went back to school each ofthose times.
By the very last time, it was2019.
Our daughter was in college atthat point.
Our son went to high school in alocal high school, in Bézier
actually that time and then wegot back in 2020 to COVID, which
was, you know, was COVID, andthen our son started school at
(16:32):
NYU and so, first because of thepandemic 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 thisbook as well.
So it's it's been a good timeto not be traveling back and
forth in some ways, but really,we really do miss it now.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
How old were your kids?
Speaker 3 (16:52):
Nine and 14.
Joe was nine and our daughterwas 14.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
Got it and do they?
Speaker 3 (16:56):
speak fluently.
Joe speaks very close tofluently.
Eva had gone to school and thengone to a couple of years of
middle school, so I would sayshe's less fluent, but they
could both.
You know, they can both go toFrance and have conversations
and get around and, and you know, not have to struggle very much
.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Yeah, and were you a foodie before and winery wines
Like?
Did you kind of like, oh, thisis great Cause this fits what I
am?
Or did you become that afteryou know you'd?
Speaker 3 (17:22):
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 inthe way that it connected me to
France.
I love France and French wineand French wine regions and you
know talking about it, but I hadnot had that kind of deep love
of wine where I would have leftfor this trip thinking, oh yeah,
(17:45):
of course, what I'm going to godo is pick grapes and work in a
winery.
I really this was part of whathappened in the six months was
kind of a bottom-up education inMediterranean cooking and
Mediterranean wine, and I thinkI discovered something latent in
myself that had been there fora long time but it kind of
blossomed while we were here andthen that did eventually lead
(18:10):
to this food writing career,where I've, you know, written
for, you know, the WashingtonPost and Food and Wine Magazine
and so on, written a lot ofarticles about the food of
France and then the food of theupper Midwest, where I'm from,
the Great Lakes North.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Well, that's great.
And then you guys oh sorry,I'll stop.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
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 whatis Northern food which won a
James Beard award.
To celebrate the award, I did atalk in Minneapolis and the
name of the talk was beyond hotdish.
And a great, a great part ofwhat I was trying to do with
(18:47):
that article is to get us beyondthe hot dish thing, but I can't
.
I have failed, of course, andnow a Tim Walls is a vice
presidential candidate.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
We're all going to be stuck with hot dish forever
yeah, that's funny and then didyour wife so you weren't working
because you had tax season andthat's you know, right as you.
As you came back, did your wifeleave her job or work, or so my
my wife.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
We both had weird sort of left brain, right brain
careers.
I was again a language andliterature major in college and
then ended up going in becausethat, you know, that prepared me
for zero actual jobs.
I ended up going into realestate first and then tax
preparation.
Mary Jo is actually anaeronautical engineer, so she
worked.
She did aeronauticalastronautical engineering at
Honeywell for a number of yearsand about mid-career we kind of
(19:34):
did the clapped each other'shands and jumped out of the ring
and jumped into the ring.
So she left when we were havingtrouble having our second child
.
We thought that the stress ofthe job might've been a part of
that, so she stopped working andstayed at home for a number of
years.
After that I was Mr Mom withour first born daughter for
about four years and then that'swhen I kind of went in heavily
(19:54):
into being a real estate brokerand eventually a tax preparer.
So she didn't have to leave ajob per se, but she was just
beginning an art of photographycareer and part of what she did,
what I did with this time, wasstart this journaling that led
to a writing career.
What Mary Jo was doing was shehad started a project called
Still and she basically posted aphoto every day of nature, of
(20:18):
some nature found near her andarranged on a white background.
She would take a photo, post itevery day, and so what she was
doing, and that started onJanuary 1st 2012.
So it was early in the life ofthat project that we went to
France and it was wonderfulbecause it required her to go
out and seek and gather from thesurrounding countryside in
(20:40):
order to take this photo everyday.
And so we ended up, you know,kind of learning really fast
about a lot of the plants andanimals and insects and
creatures.
Of course we had anine-year-old boy, so there was
lots of insects.
That was really actually verymuch a part, you know, my French
was a part of our integrationinto the village.
But her actual creativepractice was another entree into
(21:01):
the village because we learnedso much so quickly that we could
talk to people about, you know,about the region and ask
educated questions and by theway.
That started on January 1st of2020, 2012,.
She has still never missed asingle day.
So she's now at image number Ithink, 4,650 something.
Has never missed a day.
It never skipped the Christmas,never skipped a, never had a
(21:22):
sick day every single day.
For now.
You know what is it 12 plusyears.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Is that on Instagram or where is she posting?
Speaker 3 (21:29):
She's on Instagram and she's also.
Her blog is called stillblognetS-T-I-L-L-B-L-O-G stillblognet,
and that's her archive whereshe has posted those photos
every day and they're stunninglybeautiful.
She also just published a bookthat is sort of the
commemoration of those first 10years of that project, with some
(21:50):
essays talking about her kindof discoveries over the years,
about the creative process andliving a normal life and yet
still having a creative outletas well.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
Oh, that's great.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
Yeah, yeah.
No, she's amazing.
She's far more interesting thanI am.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
I'm not you should probably have her on instead of
me.
Well, I'd love to learn alittle bit more about the region
.
Yeah, so like cost of livingdown there?
Obviously you said it's less.
How would you compare it tovisiting in France?
Is it going to be like half theprice, Not half the price?
Speaker 3 (22:21):
It's still the Mediterranean, so there's still
a certain amount of touristpressure, but it is the second
tourist region in France, or wasas of recently.
So what we discovered is thatwe could, essentially, other
than the expenses of travel, carand housing, we could more or
less transplant our Americanlife over there, and our monthly
(22:43):
burn rate, our monthlyexpenditure, was just about the
same.
So, for whatever that's worth,you could live there again,
absent housing andtransportation.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Was that more expensive, the housing and
transportation?
Speaker 3 (22:59):
No, I'm just saying like to get there and back like
if you got that out of there.
But daily life, once we arethere and set up, was more or
less the same as it is in theTwin Cities.
So you know certainly less thansome of you know, less than
Paris, less than some of the.
You know Lyon, some of the moreexpensive regions, but not you
know.
I would say not half the price,no, and that's just simply
because there's too much touristpressure, being that close to
(23:19):
the sea.
That it's not an abandonedregion from.
You know the very central partof France that people tend to
visit less often, but it is veryMediterranean.
So you know Mediterranean, thedescription, you know the
definition of Mediterranean isreally, at least in France, I
think, everywhere is whereolives grow.
So if olives grow there, it'sMediterranean and if olives
don't grow there, it's not.
(23:40):
Oh, interesting and so there's aband of land within a certain
distance of the Mediterranean,going all the way across the
southern end of France, from theSpanish border up and over east
to the Italian border, andwherever in that band of country
there are olives grow,naturally that is considered the
Mediterranean region.
(24:01):
So it is still very muchMediterranean.
It resembles Provence in many,many ways.
It's hilly, rocky, full ofvines, and then the wild land is
called Garigue, g-a-r-r-i-g-u-e.
So Garigue is the natural wildscrub land that grows kind of
everywhere in the Mediterranean.
It's what you think of, alsolike in the Greek, in the Greek
(24:24):
islands or in Southern Italy.
It's that kind of dry, pricklyshrubby, low growing, very
aromatic landscape.
So it's where a lot of the herbsthat that that became Southern
French cuisine really come, youknow, indigenously from this,
from this wild scrubland.
Wild thyme grows there, wildrosemary grows there, wild
(24:47):
garlic grows there, olive treesgrow there, wild fennel grows
out in these hills, and so it'slots of very hot sunlight, very
hot summers, long hot summersand then not cold but, you know,
not really super warm winters.
You get the winter winds thatkind of come down the central
(25:07):
part of the country, the Mistralthat blows into Provence and
Marseille that kind of cold,very heavy wind, and west, where
we are, you get wind comingdown off the Pyrenees it's
called the Tramontane and so thewinters can be blustery and
chilly, in the sense of you'rehovering above or maybe slightly
below freezing during a lot ofthe middle of the winter in this
(25:31):
region, and then summers willbe, you know, mid 80s to mid 90s
, and dry most days.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
There's not snow, I'm assuming because they're close
to the.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
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 snowand then once every 50, you'll
get a catastrophic snow and allthe olive trees die and they got
to start over.
But yeah, it's very, it's veryrare, very rare.
It's still very temperate.
Yeah, and it's called theLanguedoc.
Actually it's kind of aninteresting story so long.
(26:01):
In French means tongue, but italso means language.
Previously, before France becameFrance, the Languedoc and
Provence were consideredOccitania.
They were considered that waswhere the Occitan language was
spoken, and in the Occitanlanguage the word for yes was
occ.
So, and in the language of thenorth of northern France the
(26:23):
word for yes was oi, and sothere were two countries in
France before they were united.
There's a Languedoc, whereasthe language of oc meaning that
was the place where in theirlanguage you said oc to say yes,
and there was a Languedoc andoi evolved into oui, which is
the French current way to sayyes, which is the word oui.
(26:44):
And so the Languedoc was thenorthern France, the Languedoc
was the Southern France, and nowthey all speak French.
Occitan was very heavily sortof censored at some point
because they were, you know, theCatholic Church, didn't like
that.
They were doing their own thingand came in and kind of set
things straight in a veryviolent and bloody way.
But that is, that's the storybehind the name.
(27:06):
So Languedoc actuallyoriginally.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Wow, thank you for sharing that.
So it was a different languagethan the French language.
It's just a variation, kind oflike Texas.
No, it was very different.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
You would.
You would hear Occitane and youwould not know that it was
related to any other Romancelanguage that surrounds it.
It sounds a little bit it's gota, it's got a rhythm, a little
bit like Spanish, but it doesnot sound like French at all.
You wouldn't.
(27:39):
You know none of us, you know I, as a more or less fluent
French speaker, would hearOccitan.
I wouldn't understand a singleword.
It was a very, very much adifferent language and now a
little bit similar to.
You know, in some places wherea native or indigenous language
has been eradicated by theforces that invaded or whatever,
there is now very much aneffort to rediscover and
re-teach Occitan in theLanguedoc region and in the
schools there are opportunitiesto essentially do immersion
(28:01):
schooling, like we did for ourkids in France in French.
So there's an effort torediscover it, but it's, you
know, it has been a minoritylanguage and more or less wiped
out for a long time.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Oh, interesting.
One last question what did yourkids think when they came back
and and like looking, reflectingback, I'm assuming I want to
say, oh, it was the most liketransition, transition or
transformational for them.
That's what you hope.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
Of course, and no, of course not.
They didn't do that becausethey were adolescents.
That's not what you do whenyou're in your teens.
You take you, uh, you decidethat you've been put upon and
try to find all the ways thatyou've been victimized.
So no, here's what I would say.
They were very open-minded aboutgoing surprisingly so but they
did feel as if this is somethingthat had been imposed on them,
and so, you know, there was alittle bit of resistance and
(28:48):
rebellion while we were there,and then, for when we were back
during their teen years, therewas a sort of yeah, okay, this
is a part of who I am, but itwasn'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 thingsthat they love to do are very
much rediscovering or pickingback up the things that that
(29:11):
they were first introduced to ina deep way in during that trip.
So it's been very fun and ofcourse, we try not to make too
much out of that, right, justlet it happen and be happy Right
they came back.
That's good enough, but, yeah,it's fun.
Like my baby, they both reallylove to cook.
My son's actually really intofermenting and my daughter is,
you know, traveling the worldright now.
(29:31):
So, yeah, it definitely had aneffect where, like I said, we're
just happy to have them back.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
That's great.
Thanks for sharing Cause that's.
I feel the same way with kidsand with experiences and yeah,
they probably not a big fan, butthen it shapes their future.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
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 agethree, yeah Right, but I'm never
getting them back.
And then you know, they turned20 and suddenly it's like oh
yeah, mom and dad aren't thatbad after all.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
That's good, good to know.
Speaker 3 (30:04):
I think we're yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
I definitely had those years.
I've got my daughter's 20 starttomorrow and then my son's 17
and a half.
So, yeah, we're it's.
It's come back a little bit, soI'm glad to see that for sure.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
And then what?
Speaker 1 (30:19):
about, so the weather ?
You said eighties, and thenwhat's the temperature in the in
the winter time?
Speaker 3 (30:24):
you know, maybe 40 ish plus or minus, flirting with
, flirting with freezing, youknow.
And then you'll get days inJanuary where the wind blows and
it's, you know, it's 30, 30,28,.
You know, it can, it can getbelow freezing, but the summers
are, you know this mid summer isis Todd, it's 85 to 90 plus
degrees Most days, so what's thebest time to go?
(30:46):
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 beingthere are being there during
the produce seasons, especiallylike if you're, if you love
fruit, like the stone fruitseason in the Mediterranean is
just so eye-openingly wonderful,because in Northern climates,
(31:09):
you know, the sun can only bakeso much sugar into into our
fruit, and so we have greatapples and pears and
occasionally you can grow apeach up here, but even that is
going to be kind of a tart fruit, you know.
And then in the south, it'sjust, you have these peaches and
apricots and nectarines andplums and obviously grapes, and
(31:30):
you know.
So if you really love summerproduce, if you love tomatoes
and you love the produce thatwould go into a ratatouille, for
instance, then being there inmid to late summer is great,
it's just you're going to bedealing with more crowds.
I think it's probably mostbeautiful in the fall because
everybody's out, they're alldoing the grape harvest, the
(31:50):
vines still have their leaves,they might even be starting to
turn a little bit.
It's warm, but not excessivelyhot.
And also, you know, it's a timejust after the harvest, where,
if you're there, you know, likeOctober into November, they then
start also offering tastings oftheir wine, of that of you know
(32:11):
, because now the work is behindthem, now it's time to sell the
wine, and so it's a great timeto, you know, do a wine tour,
and you can.
The nice thing about it is thatit's still so under, you know,
under visited.
To some extent it doesn't havethat that just so much enormous
amount of money that's flowinginto this region, like a
Bordeaux, where if you want togo taste some Bordeaux you've
(32:32):
got to line up and make anappointment.
You're standing across thecounter from somebody who's just
kind of feeding you wine.
In the Languedoc, you canliterally go to a village and
walk into local wineries andoften they'll just sit down and
offer you their wines.
It's a beautifully intimateplace to discover wine, if wine
(32:52):
is something you're interestedin.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
That sounds really nice.
That's great Discover wine.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
If wine is something you're interested in, that
sounds really nice, that's great.
And then what about activitiesthat people do, and outdoors, or
like what's a typical?
What do people do in a dailylife?
Speaker 3 (33:08):
A lot of the recreation.
It either would be north orsouth from where we were.
So it'd be north, in the hills,where they have a fairly
extensive series of nationalparks and walking and hiking
trails, and so there you know,you can walk for hundreds of
miles in beautiful territory upin the hills, looking out over
the Mediterranean plain.
So I would say that's probablynumber one to the North and then
much of the rest of it is tothe South.
So you know you can go fishingin the Mediterranean.
(33:30):
You can go.
You can rent, you know,motorized, either boats or like
jet ski kinds of things.
You can go.
They do a lot of like kitesailing on the Mediterranean.
There are also just tours of.
There's a series of kind ofsaltwater lagoons that run along
the coast, that are just inlandfrom the coast but where they
(33:51):
do a lot of raising of mussels,oysters and other shellfish.
So you can go.
You know you can go, like spenda day at the beach and then
have dinner in one of thoselittle towns where you'll get
oysters that have just beengrown.
You know, in the, in the waterthat 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 theSouth and the Mediterranean
(34:14):
itself, or to the North, wherethere's a lot of hiking and kind
of outdoors.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
And then I wonder did you rent out your house here in
Minnesota and then use the funyou know like?
How did you do that?
Speaker 3 (34:26):
We didn't ever rent it out.
We had house sitters and ineach of those cases we had a pet
that they had to watch, so itwas either a dog, or we also for
a while, had six chickens, sowe had to hire a house and
chicken sitter and it was likewe can't also then ask them to
pay rent.
So each time we you know, as wewere, you know we would go
(34:47):
every other year and each timewe would spend the intervening
year and a half basically tryingto build up enough of a buffer
that we could kind of cover ourmortgage at home.
And you know, we live on a lakeso people like to stay here, so
we didn't have to necessarilypay somebody to stay there, but
we also didn't feel like wecould charge rent.
But yeah, each time part of theadventure or part of the
(35:08):
difficulty of going there wasfinding someone to watch over
the house, because they also hadto watch over our animals.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
What lake are you on?
Speaker 3 (35:15):
We're on Turtle Lake in Shoreview, Minnesota.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
Okay, we have to go there all the time as a kid.
Yeah, we have a public.
Speaker 3 (35:21):
We have a public beach right, Exactly the.
Ramsey County beach.
Yes, we're just around thecorner to the South, right on
the South end of Turtle Lake.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
Oh my gosh, you have a boat.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
I do so yeah, my son and I love to fish.
So we go out whenever we can,yeah absolutely so.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
And what were typical meals?
Breakfast, lunch, dinner.
When did they?
Speaker 3 (35:39):
You know, every the French bakeries are subsidized
by the government, so there's inalmost any village you're going
to find a boulangerie.
So we would go quite often inthe morning before school.
My daughter would actually getup and go and she'd get a
baguette and we'd get you knowsome kind of pastry and that
would normally be lunch.
It was really fun to have themin school because we learned a
lot about French lunches as well.
(36:00):
They had an hour and a half offfor lunch every day and they
would usually come home and sowe would make a lunch and then
quite often the lunch is the bigmeal of the day and then you
would have a much lighter dinnerand quite often that dinner
would actually simply be anextension of a lunch and quite
often that dinner would actuallysimply be an extension of a
lunch.
So you know, we would make youknow a tomato and mozzarella
pasta, or we would make you knowa quiche, or we would make you
(36:24):
know like a ham sandwich on abaguette with Swiss cheese and
butter and then but we areunable really to get over our
American tendency to make dinnerthe big meal of the day.
The cool thing was we, becauseit was such a small village.
There wasn't an actual butcherin town.
There was not a fish monger intown.
There was a small grocery storeand a bakery.
(36:45):
But we would get merchants whowould drive their trucks through
these little villages in thearea.
So we had a fisherman whose sonwould go out fishing and the
next day, on Fridays, he wouldshow up with fresh Mediterranean
fish and seafood and thatevening there's a shellfish
monger who had come with mussels, clams and oysters.
And so we started sort oftiming our meals to the rhythm
(37:08):
of when these merchants had werebringing their stuff in.
And then there was also abutcher in the village next door
.
So a lot of grilling.
They do a lot of grilling overvinewood.
They harvest the vinewood, theydo their pruning in the winter
and then save that wood andthat's what they tend to grill
over.
So a lot of grilling.
Very simple food but very, veryflavorful.
Almost too flavorful at firstfor Minnesotans.
(37:30):
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 lotof anchovies, the seafood is
strong.
There's a lot of oily fish likemackerel, and so it took some
getting used to, but by the endit was like we'd been completely
converted.
We were just so completely inlove with this food.
My son discovered oysters and sowe would get that once, or
sometimes a couple of times aweek.
We'd have mussels in white winesauce.
(37:52):
On Saturday night we would goto the butcher and get some some
chicken or pork or beef orsomething.
We put the grill that on thegrill.
It's not what most people thinkof as French food.
It's very simple, just good,really fresh ingredients,
prepared simply, not the kind ofcream and sauces and all that
complication that you think ofas French restaurant food.
(38:14):
Yeah, it was very simple, kindlike the Mediterranean diet
Exactly it's very much theMediterranean diet.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
Absolutely.
I'd like to do the rapid firequestions unless there's any
other burning questions.
Kristen.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
I can't think of any right now.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
Okay, yeah, so what is the um popular holiday
tradition and were you there forany specific holidays?
Speaker 3 (38:33):
Yes, we were there for Christmas and actually
Christmas is similar.
It's a big family meal like wewould have at Christmas, but the
staple that everybody gets forChristmas in the South is
oysters.
So people order like two cratesof raw oysters, and they would
order them ahead of time and itarrived just in time for
(38:54):
Christmas and that was what thefamily would share.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
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 Christmastradition since Christmas is not
really huge there, they wouldhave Kentucky fried chicken,
Like everyone had to like, orderit ahead of time, Like sure
sure I could not.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
I could not have found a Kentucky fried chicken
where we were.
I can promise that's good, Allright.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
And what was the favorite?
Since you look like we'recooking, what's your favorite
dish to cook?
Speaker 3 (39:24):
That's what you've learned my favorite dish to cook
was a fish, a very simple fishdish that my next door neighbor,
nicole, who became one of ourbest friends she, her husband,
and it's.
It's a white fish filet in atomato, onion, garlic and olive
sauce.
And so basically you put tomato, you know, you saute onions and
garlic, tomato, white wine andolives, and then you just kind
(39:52):
of slide the white fish filet inthat and bake that for about 20
minutes and it just comes outsort of flaky and aromatic, and
it's beautiful and very, veryfoolproof.
Uh, so they've got a lot oftypes there, but it would be
mackerel, or it'd be sea bass,kind of like a Branzino, or they
also have hake, which issimilar to a cod.
Those would be the most common.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Nice.
I feel like cod is always sohard to make it taste good.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
I know, I know, yeah, right, right, right.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Oh, that's great.
And we were talking about howdid you get around?
What's the best way, like, orfor someone like, say, kristen,
I want to go for a month.
Like, would we rent a car, doyou get?
Speaker 3 (40:25):
a bus.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
Is there public transpo?
Speaker 3 (40:27):
No, there's public transportation in the in the
bigger cities, but no, it's inthe cities you walk, or in the
villages you walk, and then toget between villages or from
villages to larger cities oranywhere else you want to go,
you really, you really need avehicle.
So we, we rented a car all thetimes that we went there.
Speaker 2 (40:44):
Okay, and they drive on the like Americans, or Yep On
the right side of the road.
Speaker 3 (40:48):
Yes, okay, cool.
Speaker 2 (40:49):
All right, great.
And then any specific musicthat you noticed was there.
Speaker 3 (41:00):
What kind of music do you listen to?
We well, we love jazz, but itwas not necessarily endemic to
that place.
There are two famous Frenchsingers 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 ofmid to late 20th century kind
of folk singer just guitar andvoice, but is also considered
very much a poet, almost kind oflike a Bob Dylan figure.
And then there's a guy namedCharles Trenet, t-r-e-n-e-t.
He's from Narbonne and he ismore that kind of chanson, the
(41:24):
kind of crooner style of singing.
So we would often put those onat night as I was cooking dinner
, just to kind of set theatmosphere.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Oh, so nice, All right.
And then, what is the money?
Called?
Speaker 3 (41:35):
Well, the Euro right, it's still Euros.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
Yeah, and closest place to surf is there what?
Or water sports, what do theyhave?
I don't doubt they'd havesurfing in the Mediterranean.
Speaker 3 (41:45):
Like I said, I don't think they really surf in the
Mediterranean because the swellsdon't get large enough, but I
do think so.
If you went east, from where weare across the Pyrenees, you
could get in about five or sixhours.
You get to Biarritz, which ison the Atlantic coast, and
there's very much a surfingculture in Biarritz, which is
just north of the Spanish border, on the western coast of
(42:08):
southern France.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
Okay, how do you spell it?
Speaker 3 (42:11):
Biarritz B-I-A-R-R-I-T-Z.
Oh, I just found it.
It was kind of similar toCalifornia in a way.
It was sort of a hippie kind ofbohemian place for a long time.
And then you know, the moneyfound it and now it's a little
of both, similar to the sort ofCalifornia you know, kind of
(42:33):
like Carmel and Monterey, whichwould have been very 1960s
hippie for a long time, now arefull of money, but there is
still an existing surf culturethere as well.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
Like the Ritz Carlton .
Speaker 3 (42:44):
It rhymes with it but it's not related in any way.
But I'm sure there's a lot ofpeople who stayed at Ritz at the
Ritz who also go to be a Ritz.
Speaker 2 (42:51):
Yeah, very nice.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Oh, my gosh, my gosh, the pictures.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
I see lots of surf yeah, yeah, exactly beautiful
place, yeah, yeah, yeah allright, and so what's the name of
your book?
Speaker 3 (43:02):
it's called it's called a season for that lost
and found in the other southernFrance the other southern France
being meaning Languedoc insteadof Provence, really and it's a
memoir about our family's timethere, about my sort of
discovery of Mediterranean foodand wine, but also about our
family, about my long marriagewith Mary Jo and about kind of
(43:23):
this agonized father's agonizedlove for these two very
different children and wonderingif I'm parenting them right and
wondering if we're doing theright thing here.
So, yeah, it's a it's it's avery much a memoir.
It's not just a travelogue,it's kind of very much about my
life and this transition thathappened in midlife as a part of
being in this place.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Sounds very cathartic and awesome and didn't you?
Say you were a lit major aswell.
Correct, yeah, my daughter'sactually starting at UC Santa
Cruz weekend as a lit major ohterrific, yeah Well, I can
hardly endorse it.
Oh, that's great.
And how wonderful that you fullcircle went back to.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
Very much so.
This was, yeah, this writingwas very much rediscovering an
early love.
Absolutely yeah, although theone thing I would say to your
daughter, or to you on behalf ofyour daughter, is, even though
it doesn't sound like it, my taxpreparation career, I think, is
as successful as it is, in partbecause of all that reading and
writing and communication thatI did as a liberal arts major.
Because every career you got tobe able to talk to people.
(44:26):
You have to be able to writestuff, and I feel like to some
extent, I'm almost better atthis than a lot of people who
just went into finance, becausethere's a human element to it
that you can't just put on agreen eye shade and look down at
your computer screen.
You got to be able tocommunicate with people.
So, anyway, you know I don'tmost parents don't necessarily
always wish that their kids willgrow up and be art or
(44:47):
literature majors, but Iactually think it instills a
kind of versatility that isactually really useful.
Speaker 1 (44:53):
Yeah, now I actually was an account, I worked for a
CPA firm in accounting, didtaxes, back taxes, and then
Carol and I actually met in ourmid twenties, I guess, or so
doing placement of accountingand finance people.
Speaker 3 (45:07):
Oh my gosh.
Oh, so we're.
Yeah, we are all definitely onthe same page here.
Speaker 2 (45:12):
That's great.
Oh, that's so funny.
And so do you have another bookin mind?
Speaker 3 (45:15):
or yeah, yes, no, you sound like my agent, but yes,
uh, I do um what's next?
I can't.
I don't know what I it's goingto be another, uh, creative
non-fiction book.
It will be uh about.
There will be france and foodin it, inevitably, um, but it's
uh.
I you know it's going to be acontinuation of the kind of the
(45:37):
heart of this current book,which is trying to be in process
, in mid struggle, as a middleaged person trying to figure out
what, what it means to live agood life, and that will.
That will be the core of it andI but I don't know what the
specifics are yet I'm working onthat right now.
Speaker 1 (45:53):
Very good, one quick question.
I this is a huge passion ofmine as well, actually, but I
just journal and do things hereand there.
But I was curious did you takeclasses, just go straight cold
turkey, start writing and thengot an agent, or just curious
what your process was?
Speaker 3 (46:10):
The articles you know , like food writing articles for
newspapers and magazines camefairly naturally to me.
But I think that was alsocarrying way back to all the
reading I did when I was alanguage and literature major.
I didn't do much writing.
In the middle of my life Itried to write some poetry and
short fiction, but it justdidn't work.
I didn't have enough authorityor personal core, whatever it
was you needed.
So the short fiction, you know,the short articles came
(46:33):
naturally.
I could just sort of do themwithout much training.
The process of writing a bookwas entirely different.
It was a 10-year odyssey ofwriting a book and trying to
teach myself to write a book atthe same time, being in
preschool and graduate school atthe 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 theJames Beard Award for that
(46:53):
article that turned thingsaround and it was in New York
City when I was accepting theaward that I met the guy who
would become my agent and thenthe guy who would also become
the editor of my book.
That's a whole other episode.
I could talk for an entire hourabout the soul crushing.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
I'll text you.
That's my other podcastLiterally.
Speaker 3 (47:14):
Yeah, no, I would love to talk more about that,
but it was a long road, withlots of failure and lots of
discovery and lots of needing toget rid of my own ego in order
to get where I needed to be.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
Thank you for sharing that.
Do you have any social channelsyou want to share?
Speaker 3 (47:31):
Yeah, for sure, the best place to both buy my book
and just sort of read some of myother writings on food and
travel would be my website,which is wwwsjrhoffmancom.
That's as in Stephen JohnRaymond Hoffmancom there's a
link to the book, there's a linkto my newsletter, and then
there's also my other writings.
And then I'm also active onsocial media, primarily
(47:53):
Instagram, and that handle isalso at SJR Hoffman.
Stephen John Hoffman.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
Cool Okay great.
Thank you, we'll put all thosein the show notes so people can
easily find them Fantastic andthank you so much.
Speaker 3 (48:08):
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, thankyou Really inspiring too.
Speaker 1 (48:14):
I'm like, Ooh, where do I want to go?
Where next Right.
Speaker 3 (48:18):
Right, exactly Always yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
Thanks again, yep, bye.
Thanks for listening.
If you enjoyed the podcast, canyou please take a second and do
a quick follow of the show andrate us in your podcast app, and
, if you have a minute, we wouldreally appreciate a review.
Following and rating is thebest way to support us.
If you're on Instagram, let'sconnect.
We're at where next podcast.
(48:45):
Thanks again.
Thank you.
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