April in Paris, and beyond
I just got back from a two-week hiatus in France, riding high-speed trains, gasping at the spring lettuces, radishes and artichokes in outdoor markets, cooking with a feisty Parisian in her apartment kitchen, and generally eating ridiculous quantities of crepes and foie gras and mini tarts, yogurt flavored with chestnut cream and yogurt flavored with rose and rhubarb, crusty little baguettes filled with Comte and rosette, goat cheese and pesto, roasted tomatoes and curried chicken. We did a lot of walking, too.
I can’t say that I still use any of the organic chemistry I took in college, but I did gain a lot of wonderful friends, including one who has split her years since graduation between North Carolina and the sweet southern French city of Montpellier. She’s there again this year, teaching English to French high school students, but she’s coming back in early May. So the Dinner Beau and I have been scheming and saving away for a trip to visit her since last fall, even as the dollar continued to fall, fall, fall against the euro.
We planned a whirlwind trip from Paris to Lyon (a city that fathered cutting edge culinary invention and my favorite, old-fashioned regional cuisine heavily based on pig) to Montpellier (smack in the largest wine-growing area in the world, the Languedoc-Roussillon region) and Marseille (spiritual home of the spicy fish stew, bouillabaisse). And while I understand that when many people visit France, and particularly, Paris, that they want to see this:
I was more interested in this:
And this:
And this:
Ooo, la, la, le fromage.
OK, the Eiffel Tower is beautiful (but caused uproar when it was built in 1889. Parisians wanted it to come down.)...so here’s another gratuitous shot from its bristly under regions at night:
In any case, I’m going to try to post a few entries on Dishing it Out over the next few weeks about my food adventures in France. I’ve returned, but I’m even more obsessed (not just with the food, but the whole French way - on the advice of a British man we met in Montpellier, I’m currently reading Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong, an ethological peek into French ways and customs by two Canadian journalists. It attempts to explain among many other things why the French have such strong ties to regional food, why they view cutting in line as something of a national sport and why they don’t generally pick up after their dogs when they do number two on a busy, pedestrian-filled sidewalk. Fascinating!).
