Pause plaint: Complaining break

I would like to take a moment to complain.


Our beautiful new apartment has:

termites eating the exposed ceiling beams (noisily: did you know termites can make a crunching sound?)

mosquitoes (yes, in March)

high humidity, causing salt to crystallize on walls

sewage smell coming up through plumbing

dust crumbling off the exposed-stone walls and ceiling of the bedroom

a scorpion (now dead, thanks to my very brave friend Lynn)

not enough windows.

Let me add to my complaint. The customer service representative I talked to on the phone today had:

an extremely thick Corsican accent.

Now let me force myself to see the bright side:

Once you finally forget that you're paying 50 cents a minute to call customer service, because instead of being free, it's charged at a HIGHER rate to get help over the phone in France, and once you figure out what the customer service representative is actually saying, a Corsican accent is really cute. It sounds a bit like someone trying to speak French and eat marbles at the same time. I think I will learn to talk like that and see if people think I'm Corsican. Then I will go there and go to the beach. I hear it's beautiful.

And I really love our new apartment. That's the reason it pains me when it seems like it’s going to fall apart. It’s got gorgeous pickled-pine parquet floors, it’s all recently re-painted and re-tiled, brand new appliances (including a WASHING MACHINE), the bathroom vanity is adorable, all fresh and modern looking…we don’t have to climb up onto a ledge to get into the shower, we have a REAL BED, not a loft, with a brand new mattress...

And it's. . . get this. . . two rooms. I am not kidding. Sometimes I go into the bedroom and just kindof look around in awe and wonder if I'm dreaming. A real bedroom. And I no longer lie awake at night with Josh's elbow in my ribs, wishing we weren’t sleeping in a bed just a bit bigger than a twin-sized. It’s just that now I lie awake wondering if the ceiling is going to collapse.

Breakfast for Appetizers and Appetizers for Breakfast

I haven't been blogging because I've been . . . not here. I went back to the US for a couple of months to be with my family for awhile, but now I'm back, in a new apartment (pictures to follow), studying my brains out (well, really procrastinating my brains out) and cooking up a storm. This week I've made three versions of my new favorite recipe: Savoury cake.


Savoury cake!?!? yup, it's a really popular aperitif, or "shnick-shnack," as my mother in law would describe something served at a coffee table with a pre-dinner cocktail. If you're invited over for dinner around here, the pre-dinner spread is likely to include:
salted nuts
olives
thinly sliced sausages
thin crispy breadsticks

we've also been served something called "paté en croûte" which is translated as "paté in crust." That's exactly what it is--basically, a loaf pan with a pie crust tucked inside, filled with paté and baked, and then sliced like bread. SO GOOD. But so bad for you.

There are also French appetizer items that seem to veer into the world of breakfast foods. At one dinner in Paris last week, we were served, as an appetizer, poached eggs over toast and sautéed mushrooms with bordelaise sauce. Breakfast for appetizers? Weird, but delicious.

And then there's the world of appetizer flavors in non-appetizer packages: herbed or cheese crackers that are really the texture of shortbread or chocolate chip cookies and vegetable crumbles, even molten broccoli cake with a center of melted cheese sauce.

And then there's cake salé, savory cake: your basic cake recipe, hold the sugar, and add omelet ingredients. Voilà, a cross between a cracker and an omelet. Perfect for French appetizers or American breakfast.


So, here's my basic recipe:

Preheat oven to 350. Grease loaf pan.

Sift together in a bowl:
2 cups of flour
2 teaspoons baking powder

Add 5 eggs (remember, this is breakfast for a week) and 2 tablespoons olive oil (or canola). Mix until it's a uniform batter.

Add "toppings":
2/3 cup cheese
1 1/2 cups something else (veggies, diced ham, bacon, etc.)

Stir, pour in loaf pan and bake for 45 minutes. Let cool, slice generously, and enjoy as a snack, breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner, appetizer. . . it's a pretty versatile dish.

So far I've made ham and green olive (the classic provençal version), bacon and mushroom (the classic hobbit version) and spinach, goat cheese, herbs and tomato. That's my favorite so far. I used tomato concentrate in a tube (try the Italian aisle of the grocery store) and swirled it in for a marbled effect that didn't work as well as I hoped but is still yummy.

I know my love affair with this recipe is too passionate to last very long, but I'm not sure what can take the place of savoury cake in my pantry and fridge. It takes about 10 minutes to prep, needs no supervision while baking. I can throw a piece in a baggie and have breakfast-to-go; I can keep it in my backpack (being careful not to squish it) for an after-school snack before work, we can eat it for a quick no-dishes-necessary lunch... plus, packed full of spinach, or made with 3 eggs and 4 egg whites...it's a pretty healthy way to get some protein (and we'd eat that much cheese anyway). Are you daring enough to try a cake that isn't for dessert? Let me know if you manage to break free of your coffee cake ideals and fall in love with this breakfast bad boy.

More cheese

Hm, I think I will procrastinate cleaning the bathroom and reading El Burlador de Sevilla by writing another blog post.

The lanquetot has stunked up our fridge to the point that anything that was refridgerated for more than 30 minutes smells like lanquetot. This is not bad. It just means, according to the French, that the lanquetot has "character." And character, chez les fromages, is a positive attribute.

So, when I pulled out my lunch at work the other day and someone across the room said, "Wow, I can smell that cheese you're eating," no one was surprised when I told them that there was no cheese in my lunch, this particular cheese had only sat next to my lunch. I told them about our plan to eat our way around the country's dairy products and that started a delightful conversation about everyone's stinky cheese preferences. "Oh, you should try such-and such! I'll bring you a sliver." "Oh, no, don't give her that, it would be mean to give that to a foreigner." And then another teacher, who is a young mother, sighed and confessed that she loves cheese so much that it was the only thing she missed while she was pregnant with her daughter (you can't eat cheese made from raw milk when you're pregnant because of the listeria risk). In fact, she admitted sheepishly, when she had just given birth and they put the squirmy newborn on her chest, she looked at the baby and sighed, "I can eat goat cheese again!"

I am falling in love with this country.

About that dog museum...

I just finished another chunk of the lanquetot cheese, and in thinking about the town of Lanquetot, I got to thinking about the dog museum, and then the time my stepsister Claire and I went to a dog collar museum, just because the idea sounded so bizarre. Not even a dog museum. A museum for dog collars.

We were visiting Leeds Castle in England (pictured above) on a family trip and saw that the Dog Collar Museum was on the grounds, so we took a detour there. It was actually pretty cool, for as weird as it was. Some cool medieval and renaissance jeweled collars for noblemen's hounds...I'm not quite sure why this is the only picture I took:



But then again, why did I even take this one?

Tour de France

So, since Josh and I were in the States this summer during the Tour de France, we've decided to do our own version. Every week we're going to get a cheese from a different part of l'hexagone (as la France is known, thanks to its shape) and document it. This week's cheese is Lanquetot, a sort of camembert from a town in Normandy with the same name. From what I found on the internet, the town only has about 1,200 inhabitants. And a dog museum.

Not only did it win a medaille d'argent (silver medal) at some kind of cheese contest, but it's appelation d'origine controlée, which is some kind of certification authentic local products get, but I'm not sure what it actually means. I guess I should find that out.

And the cheese itself--it's pretty good. Creamy, slightly thicker than a brie, but sweeter and less earthy. Should go well with the quince I've been poaching all afternoon. I got two quinces at the market to make this recipe, but one turned out to be full of some kind of bug egg. This is the second produce fail this weekend; we got salad from our salad lady at the market and it was full of aphids. I ran it through the salad spinner again and again for about 20 minutes and those little guys were still swimming around in the water every time I washed the lettuce. UGH. I think we find something alive in our salad at least one out of three times that we get it from her. Next time we go to the market, we're going to stand in the middle and yell "OK, Who uses pesticides!?!?!?" and whoever raises their hand is going to get all our business for awhile.

But I digress.

Back to the Tour of France. You may worry about our cholesterol, but don't forget those cool bikes we got. Today Josh took his on the bus, and the bus driver went wild. Turns out he, too, has a folding bike. He talked to Josh about his bike the whole ride (there was only one other person on the bus) and then when Josh got off. . . the bus driver made him pose with his bike, next to the bus, for a picture. We live a magical life.

Lanquetot - Noblesse oblige
envoyé par pubard3. -

Notice

Notice:
If it's possible, it's already done.
If it's impossible, we'll start right away.
If it'll take a miracle, expect a slight delay.

This was on the wall (in French, of course) in an office I had to visit today at the University. I'd filed my fiche pedagogique wrong, which means I wasn't appropriately registered for classes.

Now, this sign may be cute and funny, but if you've been paying attention around here, you know that there's more to it than that. You know that here in the south of France, if it's possible, they'll tell you it's not, just so you leave them alone. If it's possible, it probably won't happen anyway, so you may as well give up and take a pause café. And miracles--we haven't seen those since before the French Revolution. We've got laïcité, remember? No religion involved in the public sphere.

I pondered over the paradox of this sign while the secretary looked hopelessly at my fiche pedagogique, then at her computer screen, and then back at the fiche. "It's not going to let me register you," she sighed. "You need to get a derrogation to be allowed to take this class."

Ah, I pointed out. I know. My derrogation was stapled to my fiche. She shuffled through my papers to find it and sighed again. "It's not the right kind."

And then, the miracle happened. She stapled everything back together and told me, "I'll take care of it."

Well, maybe I should call it a tentative miracle--as the sign says, miracles do take a slight delay, and so maybe I should wait a month to see if this one has really come through or not. In the meantime, it's Friday, which is a small miracle of its own.

Joyeux vendredi!

The Gorges were Gorgeous

NO, SLu, I will NOT put up pictures of my awful haircut, but I will make it up to you by posting pictures of our latest adventure in the Provençal countryside: public restroom hunting around the Gorges du Verdon, the French Grand Canyon.

Good friends came to visit us and Josh explained to them the fundamental paradox of French culture: we will pay a third of our salary in taxes so that everyone can have health care, because we believe in solidarity. But our bathrooms are for customers only.

Most of the other hikers were pretty comfortable using the "green room" as my mom calls it. This was not surprising, since the last time we went hiking (on cliffs over the Mediterranean), we saw a few people decide to cool off with a dip in the sea. . . au naturale. What they say about French beaches? It's all true.

But back to the Gorges--we had a great time driving around the perimeter, and crossing the canyon at one point on a bridge being used for... bungee jumping!

It was a long way down.No, we didn't try it. Instead, we drove into the little medieval village of Trigance... with a public restroom! Yay! Mission accomplished.
Trigance was crowned by the third (and final) castle of the day. The first we had passed somewhere around Allemagne-en-Provence (Germany in Provence--weird name for a town that looked exactly like every other Provençal town).
The second castle was in the town of Aiguines, on a hill overlooking the lake made by the river Verdon after it leaves the canyon.
Yup, that's a soccer field in front of the castle there. After all the driving around, we finally found a good jumping-off point for a hike: "Point Sublime"--the name was promising.
Turned out we were not actually at Point Sublime, but instead about 900 feet below it in the bottom of the canyon.
It was, however, a fortunate mistake. The bottom of the canyon was cool and shadowy and we got to see the rock features close-up.
It was a great way to spend a fall weekend!