Fete du Nautisme

This weekend is the annual nautical festival here, and for weeks now, we've been watching the local water jousting team practice.  Yep, its jousting from boats, with really heavy poles - the pole is held vertical until nearing the opponent, when it is lowered to horizontal position and held in place as the boats steer toward each other.  We've been timing the jousters in that horizontal pole position, most can only hold it there for 7 to 10 seconds.  It is a sport here in France, and we are of course rooting for our local Roanne Joust club.  The events were supposed to start this morning, and after nearly weeks of perfect weather, its raining les chats et les cheins (cats and dogs).  So we don't know if we'll see any events today.

We've taken a few photos of the practice sessions from the back deck, and will have a great view tomorrow when the weather clears (we hope) and the teams can compete.  In the meantime, the port association will have a tent tomorrow afternoon with videos of the barging life, and free food for  visitors to the port.  We've been asked to prepare something unique to our home country and region.  Of course, coming from the desert southwest, we thought first of guacamole and chips, but have settled on doing a southwestern 7 layer dip.  So the challenge began yesterday - how to find those foods here in France.
The supermarkets have a selection of "Old El Paso" taco, fajita and burrito kits, but no refried beans, no canned diced chilies, no cheddar or jack cheese, or sour cream.  But we went to our wonderful Grand Frais market, and found a shipment of green chili peppers had just arrived - country of origin - Morocco.   The cheese counter had a nice orange cheese on the tasting table, and it tasted a lot like cheddar to us.  For sour cream, we picked up what the French call "creme fraische."  I found a recipe to make refried beans from kidney beans, so we picked up a couple of cans, but then found a beautiful bag of dried beans, haricots coco roses, which look quite like pintos.  So, back to the boat to do a test recipe.
We roasted the chilies on the BBQ, and the port smelled like Santa Fe, Tucson and even Denver in the fall, when you can find Hatch chilies being roasted in big tumbling chili roasters.  The Moroccan chilies were a little hotter than Hatch chilies, but tasted great.  I soaked the coco roses overnight, cooked them this morning, and they look and taste like pintos.  I jazzed them up with some spices and refried them, so layer one is done.  Layer two is the shredded Minolette Jeune cheese, followed by diced Moroccan chilies, a layer of diced avocado, next a layer of diced tomato, a layer of diced green onions, creme fraische, and finally the dish is topped with sliced black olives.  We found some bags of good  lightly salted corn tortilla chips and tested the dip.  Its really, really tasty!!  So back to the store for more ingredients.  I may make a couple of plates with roasted red peppers as this part of France is not known for hot spicy foods (and we can save more of the Moroccan chilies for ourselves)!