it's a cornucopia of love

Well I hope all of you had a good Thanksgiving/food day/rare opportunity to use the word "pilgrims." This was my first EVER Thanksgiving not spent somewhere within a mile of my parents' house, so that was kind of weird, but we made up for it with a Smith-sponsored foodstravaganza.

I was originally going to make "Grandaddy Rolls," aka my grandfather's recipe which has appeared at every family gathering at for at least as long as I have been alive, but in an odd turn of events I ended up with a host family who doesn't have an oven. While I personally would argue that this is impossible, I have seen the evidence, and I guess that's one of the differences between French and American cooking - it is apparently possible here to go your whole life without ever needing to bake or roast anything. Huh.

This posed a bit of a problem for me, as my main area of food expertise is bread products, and the rest of my diet could essentially be made over a campfire in the wilderness or picked directly off of plants. But you can't come to a dinner and be like, "I have PLUMS!" No, I needed civilized food. With a recipe.

So, as anyone would do in such a time of need, I turned to The Internest.

My starting point was this: peppers, onions, chick peas, various spices, and... an oven. So not exactly a possible choice. But I am all for adaptation, so I set out to turn this into something I could work with.

First, I left out the chick peas, because there was definitely going to be enough protein in everyone's lives at this point (side note: just before the dinner started, three people were required to carry the turkey across the Boulevard Montparnasse). I decided it would be possible to just do it in a large pan on the stove. And I wanted there to be carrots in it, because, I don't know, it's Thanksgiving, and you need carrots. At this point I ran into problems because I have no idea how to convert from standard to metric measurements, so when I asked Lorraine for advice and was told to buy a kilo of carrots, this wasn't exactly as informative as she intended.

"That sounds like a lot of carrots," I said.

"Well, the carrots are the most important part of the recipe, aren't they?"

"Not really. The carrots aren't actually in the recipe. I just added them."

I get the idea she is the kind of person who follows the recipe religiously. I am not. I proceeded to measure all the spices with my fingers.

In the end it turned out fine. I ate the rest of it for lunch yesterday.

adventures in consumption: persimmon

ne thing that I don't exactly share with the French is their food philosophy. They treat it as if it were a science, which I guess is what happens when you've been accumulating food rules. And there are a lot of rules, both spoken and unspoken - a baguette must have a particular weight, you use butter to stick the cheese to your bread, beer and not wine is had with Chinese food. They are Serious about their food. Every meal is an elaborate ordeal.

I'm all for elaborate food alchemy, but as it turns out, when left to my own devices - such as being allowed to feed myself for a weekend - I default to the diet of some kind of wandering nomad peasant. That is to say that two or three of my meals per day tend to consist of some combination of bread, cheese, yogurt, and fruit. Every once in a while Philippe comes home, looks in the refrigerator, and says, "There's nothing gone from here, what did you eat for the past two days?" And, judging by his reaction, "Mainly apples and cheese" is not a satisfactory answer.

The truth is I just really like bread, cheese, yogurt and fruit, and as I've mentioned here before, the fruit selection in Paris is too good not to take advantage of. So today, despite it being a holiday and therefore all of the stores being closed, I went out on a mission: I was going to buy a persimmon.

I'd never had a persimmon, with the possible exception of some persimmon pudding someone brought me at school once, so I didn't actually know if I liked them or not. Actually, I had never actually seen a persimmon, even though they grow in the southern US so I could probably find one around Maryland if I looked hard enough. Also whenever I asked anyone if they had even had one, the only stories they had were unpleasant ones. But still! No one becomes a fruit-eating champion by avoiding things that sound bad, and I am determined to succeed in the area of fruit-eating.

So I put on my new boots and went out, confident that I would be able to find the one produce stand open on a mysterious religious holiday. And, lo and behold, there it was, and I purchased my persimmon, which is "kaki" in French, or whatever language they borrowed that from, and which was a lovely red-orange and bruised under the gentle force of me trying to pick it up, which I took as a good sign. And I took it home and cut the end off with my Swiss army knife, because I am kind of a boy scout. And I hesitated for a second and thought, "How am I supposed to do this? Whatever, I'm just going to eat this with my hands like a savage beast," and proceeded to do so.

Now here is the only way that I can describe this persimmon: Imagine that you have a peach or something, the kind of fruit that's slightly fibrous inside but gets softer and softer as it matures. And then imagine that you take this peach and just leave it out to ripen far beyond the recommended time, but instead of turning into brown mush it just keep getting riper and riper until it is softer and sweeter than any peach imaginable, and at some point it will reach the peach singularity and transcend into a freakish level of fruit...ness. And that is what a properly ripe persimmon is like.

It was soft and pulpy, like I could have eaten it even if I was a baby or a toothless old person, and ridiculously sweet. Eventually I became so covered in juice I abandoned my original plan and used a spoon to scoop the inside right out of the skin. (I have heard of people putting these in the freezer and then eating the frozen slush out of them, which sounds delicious.) I should have taken a picture of it, because it was a terribly pretty fruit, but by the time I thought of it I was covered in slippery yellow pulp and felt like I had just eaten several spoonfuls of sugar.

So that is the story of the first time I had a persimmon.

things europe does better: fruit

If you know me, you may know how I feel about fruit. Or you may not, because this is one of those things that most people would try to avoid going around talking about too much. I am a big fan of fruit. Like, seriously. Like I could eat fruit three times a day and never feel like it was too much, partly because there quite possibly more fruits in the world than there days in a year. Since I was maybe thirteen one of my major life goals was to eat every kind of fruit there is.

I thought this was going pretty well, until I got here. Americans, you may not realize this, but your country is bad at fruits. This was a revelation to me. A revelation totally obscured by the variety of fruits suddenly available to me. Let us not expound on the ways that fruits became even more awesome when I got to France.

1. Plums. What, you say, we have plums in America. Yes, we do. But we do not have these plums. Our plums don't have names like Reine Claudes or Mirabelles. And while this might seem like by-any-other-name territory I'm venturing into, believe me, there is a difference. I'm not sure what it is. But a Mirabelle is not a "strangely tiny yellow plum." It is a Mirabelle, and it is probably grown in the gardens of magical fairies and then if you eat one you can never go back to the human world, and I ate a tart made of them. Sorry, humans.

2. Figs. I said this one before in my General Food Post, but I am going to reiterate. I had never eaten a fig before I got here, mainly because I had never actually encountered a fig before. I remember, as a child, reading a short story in a Highlights magazine in which a kid visits his grandfather and they have mundane male-bonding adventures like drinking buttermilk (?) and eating figs, which is apparently a male-specific activity, the reason given being that "girls don't like figs because they're weird and squishy." Figs, not girls. Though from my experience the description fits the girls better.

Anyway, I remember finding that oddly fascinating, because I had never seen a fig, and it was tricky for my mind to come up with a fruit so unpleasant that an entire gender would reject it. As it turns out, whoever wrote that story was just a crazy person because figs are neither squishy nor unpleasant, though my mother did once describe them as "weird." They are like mulberries except huge, and except for the fact that fig sap is mildly irritating and once when I ate one without washing it my lips were somewhat numb for the rest of the day.

3. Juice. I love juice (I'm pretty sure everyone does), and being here is making me suddenly realize just how limited the juice selection is in most US stores. Apple. Cranberry. Grape. Orange, tangerine, grapefruit, orange-tangerine, orange-tangerine-pineapple. And maybe one lonely pomegranate. I remember wondering why nobody made peach juice, or straight pineapple juice. But here it's another thing entirely. Apricot! (apricots are everywhere for some reason) Kiwi! (a freakish green color that I haven't tried yet but am looking forward to) Apple-raspberry-lychee! Something called "seasonal fruits" which had a picture of a fig and a pear on the front! Boggles the mind.

4. Applesauce. Well, this probably doesn't count so much, because the applesauce was pretty much applesauce, I don't think there's a lot of room for error. But: applesauce in little juicebox-type pouches that you suck out through a tube! I can't decide if I feel like a five-year-old or an astronaut. Also, once I came home and my host father was like, "Oh, hi, I made applesauce." As if it was something that you just do once in a while. Maybe it is, I have no idea, but it was pretty awesome.

So there you have it. In addition to bread and cheese, I now have fruit to be mildly disappointed about when I get back home. Do you think a fig tree would grow in Maryland?

a short list of food

Here is a short list of things I have eaten since I got here. I am pretty sure I would feel way too awkward to be one of those people who takes pictures of my food before I eat it, so for now you're going to have to imagine these for yourself.

A Short List of Things I Have Eaten in Paris, All of Which were Ridiculously Good in a Way That Does Not Make Any Sense:

1. pain au chocolat (less than a euro!)

2. pain au chocolat with candied orange peel (exactly the same price as the regular kind, but with extra stuff in it? There seem to be economic principles that just don't apply here.)

3. Chevre sandwiches from three different bakeries. I went on a mission to figure out which one was the best. The answer: two of them are equal but not identical (cheaper but without tomatoes, more expensive but with herbs and purple cabbage and good tomatoes), one is far inferior (too much mayonnaise - they've got a thing about mayonnaise here, but I'll get into that later - and rather unfortunate tomatoes).

4. Some kind of pastry filled with coffee-and-hazelnut flavored cream. I despise coffee, and this was still amazing.

5. Salmon and spinach quiche. This was actually a mistake, I asked for a cheese and broccoli one, but the girl behind the counter appeared to be at her first day of work and clearly didn't really understand what was going on. I watched as one of the other people showed her how to magically turn a piece of paper into a little pastry holder and she stared in complete confusion with one of those expressions that says "Oh no I am totally not absorbing any of this," which I recognized easily because this is what I spend much of my life thinking. When she took my order there was all kinds of confusion, because I have a funky accent and probably pretty bad pronunciation, and those glass food-cases block sound like nothing else. So I didn't feel like complaining, and it was pretty good anyway. Once again, I have never had a quiche that I liked in America. This confirmed my suspicions that we're just doing it wrong.

6. A Canele Bordelais. I actually had no idea what this was, and got it because it was the least expensive of the desserts at the above bakery, and it turned out to be one of the best baked goods I have ever eaten. The idea is a small cake (Wikipedia tells me they are flavored with rum and vanilla; the one I got mainly tasted like all the best qualities of an angel food cake) baked in a little fluted mold, with a very dense, moist interior part and the outside caramelized into a dark, chewy crust.

7. Mirabelles, aka tiny yellow plums. According to my host family it's been a good year for plums because there's been a lot of sun, and while I have not been here long enough to confirm this, the plums were definitely incredible.

8. Figs! A kind of shameful fact about me: before this trip, I had never actually had a fig. To be honest, I'm not sure I'd ever seen one. But they're everywhere here. So, in a move that required a lot of mental and temporal preparation (tip: check the store hours, they are not intuitive), I went to the nearest produce store and bought two figs, opened them with my pocket knife because I am a ten-year-old boy, and ate them sitting on my windowsill. Guess what - I like figs. I like them a lot.

And, of course,
9. cheese, and
10. bread. I actually did my required oral report on bread and why it is important in France, and can now spout off a few random facts if anyone starts to seem interested. Did you know that a baguette is approximately 250 grams? That the average French person eats 58 kg of bread in a year? That there are over 30,000 artisan bakers in the country, and they produce 70% of the bread, and the price of basic bread is fixed so that everyone can afford it and people from Algeria bake their bread differently from French people and France is the fourth producer of wheat in the world and and and bread riots! The French revolution! tHE BREAD DECREE OF 1993!

Bread, guys. It's serious business.