Gourmand Goodbyes

I'll admit it. Leaving this place is hard.

The other day we celebrated 50 years of my husband's family at La Morinière with a buffet. Dessert consisted of tarts made with fruit from our trees and sorbet made with berries from our bushes. People are going to think all we did on this vacation is eat till we couldn't breathe. That wouldn't be too far from the truth.

We did just ordinary family things on our last day here, but because it was our last day, the ordinary took on special meaning.

My kids and I hung laundry out to dry on the clothesline. I hadn't done this in years before this trip, and it's quite therapeutic!

I finished François Mauriac's brilliant novel Vipers' Tangle (Le Noeud de vipères).

I talked to my daughter a little bit about Apollinaire, and she made a calligramme. Can't see it that well because it's in pencil, but it's about her teddy bear.

The kids and their cousins, who have the summer place next door, played signal, a variation of hide-and-seek, after lunch, for which my husband's aunt had made a delectable charlotte.

For our last goûter we threw my son a small birthday party, with multiple generations of cousins and siblings, cakes from the bakery in Pacy-sur-Eure, a musical birthday card from his great-aunt, and a few presents from the toy store in Pacy - a medieval knight, some trading cards, and Monopoly Express. He turns 7 on Monday.

Tonight for our last family meal Oncle G. (the priest who helped marry us and who makes all our sorbets) made us a divine fondue with Emmental cheese and white wine. The kids put on a little show afterward.

Before leaving the U.S. I was concerned about how this trip would go. A colleague at work jokingly told me her "motto" for such circumstances: "Wine, and indifference!" Wine is good here. But indifference I've never been good at...so what can I say? It's sad for us to pack up and leave what for my husband and his family, and now me, is truly a home.

Au revoir, then: until the next time we see each other again.

Gastronomic Delights in France

Monday, August 20, 2007

After these long Paris posts - journal entries, really - I wanted to write something "on the lighter side"- though perhaps not: the topic is food!

On the way to the Eiffel Tower the other day we stopped by our neighborhood boulangerie, the P. Weiland, on the corner, near the Cambronne metro stop.

There I bought what I think is the most delicious thing I have ever eaten in my life, no exaggeration: a petit pain au chocolat aux amandes, flaky and soft and perfect.

I'm convinced M. Weiland baked a hint of brown sugar into the outermost layer of this heavenly pastry. The next day I bought a few more.

The boulangerie also had the largest palmiers on display I have ever seen - one of my father's favorite pastries, so I have to include them here.

The bathroom scale in Paris said I lost 3 kilos. How is that possible? (And why on earth did I get on it in the first place?) It's absolutely ludicrous. Obviously the device is defective. But wait, the pants are a little looser too...Could two intense days of stair-climbing have worked miracles? Nah!

But facetiously, let me outline the rules for The Paris Miracle Diet (or, The Anti-Atkins Revolution), just for fun:

-Have a small breakfast, a heavy lunch, a light goûter, and a light dinner every day.

-Butter your bread generously and eat it with gobs of home-made confiture.

-Drink French lait demi-écrêmé every day, which is supposed to be low-fat milk but which I am convinced is the equivalent of Half-and-Half; how can it taste just like cream, otherwise?! Is it just that the COWS in France are different? For that matter, how come almost EVERYTHING tastes better in France? Is it a conspiracy?!

-Eat rich cheeses twice a day.

-Eat meats of all kinds.

-Have wine with lunch and dinner.

-Have fromage blanc with your berries.
-Have dessert - don't deprive yourself - but only have a WHOPPING dessert once in a while.

but also

-Don't eat between meals.

-Limit your portion sizes.

-Climb lots of stairs each week.

-Avoid processed food; have milk from the cow, pork from the pig, fish from the river, etc. with as little interference from industry as possible.

-Finally, SAVOR EVERY BITE! Live in the moment! :)

A Village in Normandy

Our flight landed half an hour early, and with almost no one else on the road at dawn on a sunday morning, it only took us an hour and 5 minutes to reach our base of operations for the next 2 weeks: La Morinière.


My husband's family's country home is in a village so tiny I was able to draw a map of it.



My daughter and I took a walk into the village, past the little mairie, to the tiny church where my in-laws got married and whose nave dates, I believe, from the 12th century.



Under a light drizzle we spent a quiet moment at the grave of her great-grandmother, a special woman I am so glad we had a chance to get to know. I'll remember that sacred space and time with my daughter always.

It's only our first day and we've already eaten three gourmet meals. My husband's aunt creates what she calls "simple but typical" French meals. I think they are some of the most delicious I've had, as good as any I've had in a restaurant...in fact, better, because of our beautiful country setting. The fruits in our tarts, jams, and sorbets come from trees in our garden. We can also pick and eat our very own haricots verts, onions, and other vegetables. The wine and cheese - and, at last, some fromage blanc - are all just what you'd drive to a gourmet food store to get, only here they're widely available.



Breakfast: pain grillé, homemade confiture, chocolat au lait chaud

Lunch: pork roast, haricots verts, sautéed potatoes, salad, assorted cheeses, mirabelle tart


Dinner: quiche made with lardons (I was invited to make the custard - nervous about it, but it turned out well), salad, cheeses, fresh raspberries with fromage blanc

The mirabelle was a fruit I hadn't seen before. It's a type of small plum, the size and consistency of a large grape, with beautiful gold and red skin and the taste of peaches. My son, my mother-in-law, and I went outside to pick some at dusk, shaking them off the trees behind the house and culling them from the grass. By then the sun had let some beams through again. The weather turns quickly here in Normandy; it's been sunny and drizzly off and on all day, but always pleasant. We've had a beautiful start to our time here this summer.

How "Pinoy" Are You? (Or, Confessions of a Stinky-Food Gourmande)

How pinoy are you? (Pronounced "pee-NOY," slang among Filipinos for "Filipino;" feminine = pinay, pronounced "pee-NIGH.")

Perhaps you're a single (or for that matter, married) male in your thirties and you still live at home with Mumsy. Or maybe you greet your friends with your eyebrows, or have a cutesy, infantile nickname that bears no resemblance to your real name (like, "Cherry Pie," or "Bong," or what "T." stands for - and if you're not one of the ones who knows already, don't even bother asking). Perhaps you come from a country littered with signs like, "Second Floor Upstairs," or "Drop Your Pants Here" (at a dry cleaner's - we sort of have a preposition problem). Do you pronounce f's as p's and vice versa, or v's as b's? Do you "open" and "close" the light? Do you make (or worse, laugh at) corny jokes? Do you season your spaghetti sauce with sugar, eat rice at every meal (yup, breakfast too), and eat every meal with a spoon?

Even if you do, you may only be "mostly" pinoy. The acid test is this: do you like bagoong? (Pronounced "buh-GONG" or "buh-guh-ONG.")

I do. I love it. It's YUMMY. And it stinks to high heaven.

Our native shrimp paste has a DELECTABLE stink that has been compared to asafoetida, or la merde du diable - Devil's Dung. I would almost say there's nothing like it in the world, but of course, that's not true. There are plenty of versions of it - mam tom in Vietnam, kapi in Thailand, belacan in Malaysia, and terasi in Indonesia. I don't even want to know how it's made. I'm sure it's scary. They take some tiny shrimp or fish and ferment it in some kind of jar. All I want to know is what time is meriyenda (mid-afternoon meal, between lunch and dinner, from the Spanish "merienda"), and do we have some green mangoes to go with the bagoong? (Here in the U.S., I've found that ripe ones will do just fine, too.)

If you're like my whiter-than-white husband, the minute you detect it wafting from the kitchen, in all its divinely malodorous glory, you groan and exclaim, "Aw, MAN! That stuff is NASTY!" Out of love for him I don't consume it while he's around, but guess what? He's away for the weekend, and I'm on-call from home today, and there's a bottle of it in my fridge just waiting for me to slice open my last Champagne mango, the only variety I've found at Whole Foods Market that even resembles the perfect, sweet, succulent, incomparable Philippine mango.

As British journalist Matthew Sutherland informs in his witty article A Matter of Taste, most non-Filipinos should probably avoid "the ubiquitous, stinky shrimp paste, BAGOONG, and it's equally stinky sister, PATIS. Filipinos are so addicted to these latter items that they will even risk arrest or deportation trying to smuggle them into countries like Australia and the USA, which wisely ban the importation of items you can smell from more than 100 paces."

One of our native eats did make it onto Fear Factor - balut, or fertilized duck egg. My husband tried to try one of these at a banquet in Manila once but just couldn't do it. I can't do it either - maybe I'm not so pinay after all.

But at the end of this very formal banquet, I had the chance to show some of the native still in me. He didn't believe me at first when I said, "It's about time for the servers to start bringing out the tin foil so we can wrap up what's left of the buffet." (Or, as we say, "make balot" - same root as the duck egg thing, in which egg parts and duck embryo parts are "wrapped" around one another.)

"No, really? They're not going to do that here - are they? It's Black Tie."

"Just wait."

Sure enough, minutes later they came out with the tin foil and the plastic bags.

"See?" I said. "Filipinos hate to waste food. Plus, it's rude to the hosts not to want to carry some of their food home."

"The 'host' is a country club."

"The country club has a chef, and the chef will take it personally."

Food and relationships, the stories people tell - they say so much about a culture. I think my food right now is smiling at me (see Dr. Deb's post on pareidolia) and encouraging me to dig in.