Swiss snow and daily bread

Switzerland has a great variety of bread, and it is delicious. We eat a mere 49kg of bread per person in a year, compared to 150 in neighboring France and Italy. Bakeries (one for every 2,500 people) are part of daily life and pre-sliced supermarket bread with preservatives is usually reserved for emergencies. I think the Swiss, who eat a lot of potatoes, prefer quality to quantity where bread is concerned. Maki, who lives in Zurich and writes about food from the perspective of a Japanese person raised partly in the US and the UK, now living in Switzerland, believes the Swiss have a healthy diet and sensibly end sociable meals with a bit of exercise.

Sunday was a beautiful Alpine day, with more blue skies, good snow and icicles dripping only if you stood under them. Corrugated roof icicles are special because they grow more horizontally than vertically.

Sunday afternoon at our house, people coming in from hiking, skiing and snowboarding had taillaud from one of my favorite bakeries, across from the ice skating rink in Crans-Montana. This is a Neuchatel specialty, but it's just as easy to eat in the Valaisan mountains.