I am falling in love with the Alsace region of France. The names of the Alsatian towns are utterly impossible to even attempt to pronounce correctly but I do know that Flammenkueche is not called by it’s Alsatian name but by the French name Tarte Flambée (riddle me that!). We’ll get to that later. It’s this delicious flat pizza with creme fraiche and bacon and awesomeness that is cooked to crisp perfection. Ok fine, we’ll cover it now.

For close to a month I was looking forward to going down to Strasbourg for the weekend to visit the Christmas Markets in Stras but also I had a slightly side motivation to see if I could talk the Frenchman into visiting a market in a small town too. This happened to be rather easy. While he was in the kitchen preparing apero (aka the French Happy Hour. He’s the king of aperos. I should do a post on that.) me and the other French couple that was visiting decided a small town was totally the plan for the following day. Decision made! 🙂

We’ve visited a couple of small towns around Strasbourg when I’ve visited before and picking one to go to for a Christmas Market was relatively easy. We had driven through Ribeauvillé a couple of weeks prior and loved it even more than the neighboring town called Riquewihr that we had set out to see. A long windy main street cuts through the town with lots of stalls along the way and down the side streets there were different themed sections. Obernai was a close second and highly recommended too.

We happened to catch the last weekend of the Medieval Christmas Market. I see you thinking Medieval… hooky Medieval Times Festival, awful costumes and fake swords. Let me stop you right there. ok yes there were costumes but as you see in the pictures they weren’t over the top and a bit more authentic- more let’s get in the spirit, less I’m using this opportunity to show my inner Medieval goddess with corsets and ribbons (I guess?).

The food stations were by far my favorite… no surprise there. A take on Tarte Flambée made not on a thin pizza-like crust but on thick cut pieces of rustic bread for a tartine version. There were two epic production sites of this.

There was homemade apple bread to go with hand pressed apple cider that was quite the production and getting snapped up just as quickly as it was pressed and heated with warm spices.

Soup being heated on a fire pit. Escargot in white wine and mussels. I tried roasted chestnuts for the first time! Which were good but a lot of work to eat as you had to crack each shell and peel it away to get to the warm meat.

We even ran into a herd of sheep randomly? And some donkeys 🙂 So pretty much it was a blast.

Like really awesome. Small village, sheep, good cider and a Christmas Market.

As we were leaving this was the view of the village through the vineyards. Mist in the background and cute colorful houses.

Merry Christmas everyone!