Berry Crumble

Today's exciting food purchase: frozen raspberries.  Berries were a freezer staple for us in the States, but I pretty much had to quit smoothies cold turkey when we moved here. It's hard to keep smoothie ingredients on hand when your freezer looks like this:

But after a few weeks of battling a craving for frozen raspberries, I broke down and paid 5 euro 5 centimes for a 600 gram bag. Most of them are going into crumble for dessert tonight when our upstairs neighbor comes over for dinner. "Crumble" is really big here. Hoping it will help us substitute some fruit into our dessert rotation, we bought a box of instant crumble topping. It actually says on the side: "CRUMBLE. Son nom vient de l'anglais, 'crumble', qui signifie 'émietter'." It's name comes from the English word "crumble," which means "crumble." My evidence of the fact that the French have a crumble obsession is that there are two crumble dishes on the menu here at McDonalds, which is my food trend barometer. You can get an apple chocolate crumble, or, instead of your chocolate sundae with nuts, a sundae with carmely chestnut goop and crumble topping. Hang on, let me go take a sip of my "red fruit crumble" flavored tea, a product from Twinings especially for the French market, and pull my raspberry crumble out of the oven.

The instant crumble mix was a bit of a flop and this all looks like a dish of baked raspberries covered with cereal dust. Hopefully it will be as good as it smells instead of as bad as it looks.

As for the rest of the raspberries . . . maybe I'll just eat them frozen.