FINALE

Well I am back from Paris and enjoying the plethora of baked goods my mom made me. I can't tell you how excited I am to eat spicy food, salsa, avocados and decent sushi again. I can tell you how excited I am to be once again under the legal drinking age; I guess some how with the time difference I have become to immature to handle the ability to buy Pabst Blue Ribbon and Cheap-as-sin Vodka. Jet lag does that.
Anyway, I wanted to really thank you guys for reading my blog over the past four months. Things didn't exactly work out as well as I wanted them to with "A chef's table", but I have really enjoyed writing this blog. I have never been one of those people who keeps a journal, and frankly I have always been jealous of the fact that some people know exactly what they were feeling at a certain point in their life. So while the flavors of all the madelienes, the vietnamese food and the oysters have left my palate, I am truly pleased to be able to look back on this blog and know that, if nothing else, I had a great time eating my way around Paris.
Hemingway said “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” Paris is magical, there is no doubt about it and I feel like I got out of this experience with a new appreciation for the Euro and the delicate complexity of Paris's sometimes wonderful, sometimes disappointing, but always interesting food culture.
Look out for my next food blog when I chronicle my eating experiences though out the romantic world of Vassar's dining hall! Just kidding. Merci encore (je adorerai toujour mes lecteurs)

A bientot!

A horse is a horse of course of course

It is finals time and I am stressed. I have to write five essays totaling 25-30 pages, in French, by the 14th of December. So yeah, I am busy and that’s why I haven’t been blogging much.

Of course, some times when I get stressed I need a distraction; so during finals I like to cook. I know a lot of people like to bake cookies or brownies (or at least get baked/eat baked goods) when they are stressed, but I tend to envision elaborate meals that would make the chefs at Per Se and El Bulli jealous. So I decided to have some friends over from my program who I haven’t cooked with and who haven’t seen my apartment (or the big freaking Chateau de Vincennes three blocks away) and cook. Now besides a recipe for pumpkin and duck curry I was planning to make (the curry is really excellent by the way), I wanted to realize a dream I have had for a very long time.

I want to try horsemeat. I know this may be off putting, but I pride myself on trying every thing culinary at least once. I have eaten some weird meat before (alligator, bear, scorpion fish, turkey heart, you know, that kind of stuff) and since the French are really the only people in the western world who still have (or maybe ever had) a taste for horse, I figured this would be an essentially French thing to eat. To my surprise the super market I go to about 15 times a week sells horse. It’s called “Viande Chevaline” and somewhat inappropriately has a picture of Pegasus on the cardbord box. I don’t know why that freaked me out: we see whole dead chickens, fish and a lot of packaged beef meat in France has cartoon cows of in, but something about eating Pegasus seems very weird to me. There are a lot of famous horses (think Mr. Ed, That horse that was appointed to the Roman senate by Caligula, Bucephals the horse of Alexander the Greats, or the mythical Esquilax, the horse with the head of a rabbit and the body…of a rabbit) but there are no famous cows or chickens, something that may ease our minds when we feast on their flesh.

I bought the horse anyway and planned to serve it at my dinner party. Sophia, a friend who was coming over, loves to travel and has eaten some equally weird stuff and was very excited to try horse. I was thinking about marinating it in lime juice, garlic and herbs and then broiling the horse and serving it with maybe like a fresh salsa of tomatoes, onions and cilantro. Then, as I walked to the store where I buy my vegetables (its waaaaaay cheaper than the supermarket), I started getting very uneasy with what I was planning to do. I haven’t had any great horse experiences, but they are majestic and smart creatures and my friend/intellectual soul mate Caroline is an Olympic level horse back rider and would never speak to me again if I ate horse. Also, it’s not my house, it’s Gisele’s, and I don’t know if it’s polite to cook ethically dubious meat in someone else's house (“Don’t bother cooking tonight Gisele, I made enough Panda for everybody!”).

So I chickened out. I threw the horsemeat away and prayed for forgiveness. Maybe I still will try horse at some point, but anyone who likes to cook will tell you there is a big difference between eating something weird and cooking something weird. I just couldn’t cook the horse. I couldn’t imagine how awkward I would feel on, ya know, my next handsome carriage ride had I just a few weeks before prepared my own horse meat. Plus, I have a really great bit about why my parent’s should buy me a horse for life in downtown Philadelphia, and I can’t imagine telling it knowing what my ride tasted like.

Some things, like eating horsemeat, Barack Obama or white skinny jeans, are sort of better when we keep them as romantic dreams rather than experience them up close and realize that make us uncomfortable, probably need more experience in the Senate or make you look like a hipster douchebag.

Oh shit! I gotta get back to work!

Christmas overload: a Swedenish oddysey

Oh my god, I have just returned from the most ridiculously Christmas-y experience of my life. This weekend I visited Gothenburg; the second largest city in Sweden, and it was as if Disney, Santa Claus and the Republican Party had engineered a land that is so cute and wonderfully festive that Scrooge McDuck himself would shit out a freaking tree ornament.

My old friend Kate Fussner (she appears as a supporting character in my last blog post) and I flew up to Gothenburg from Paris and were picked up at the airport in a spanking new Volvo (of course) by Kate’s father’s friends Hans and Ninny Hjalmers. Hans and Ninny, like all Swedes, speak fluent English in adorable British accents. If I could imagine Kate Fussner as a Swede, she would have come from these two. I began to suspect I was only invited to give Kate an excuse to overdose on the famous Swedish Christmas spirit.

Christmas time is of course as wonderfully Swedish as a race to an Ikea on a snowy pine tree flanked road between to equally ancient Volvo station wagons to the music of ABBA, Ace of Base or death metal (however, anyone who has ever driven or been in a Volvo station wagon knows that while racing is dangerous, Volvo station wagons are so bottom heavy that they could not possibly reach a high enough speed to make racing dangerous). In covering the five main Swedish stereotypes (sorry Saab, Ingmar Bergman and Jens Lekman), you probably didn’t notice that I left out anything food related; that’s because Americans, while the have strong images of Swedish products and culture, if pushed would probably guess Swedes only eat snow smeared with Lingonberry jam. However, the food we ate in Sweden, whether it was traditional Swedish, Thai or Turkish was without exception good to excellent.

My first day in Sweden began with our host Osa asking us if we wanted to go to the fish market. Anyone who knows me knows that asking me that question is somewhat like asking Charlie Sheen if he wants to go a whorehouse in Bogotá. We saw the coolest fish at this market, big shiny salmon, massive white flounder and a fish they called “a catfish”, that which its buck teeth and massive googly eyes was without a doubt the ugliest fish I have ever seen for sale. We then toured Gothenburg and got some lunch at a café in a 17th century dockside warehouse: I had a cheese and ham pie, because I though it sounded very Swedish. The cheese was gooey and salty, and the ham was the perfect level of smokiness. The dish somewhat resembled a quiche, and with some pesto on top it was a very hearty and delicious way to begin a day that would be marked by its total food diversity.

After the cheese and ham pie we went to Liseburg, which is the largest amusement park in Scandinavia. The place was in a beautiful 1920’s art-deco style and with millions of Christmas lights it was genuinely gorgeous (If you are wondering if we saw Ace of Base performing there, we did: Rolf was running the Ferris wheel, and I think I saw Fjlayla cleaning the bathroom). I had three awesomely Swedish things to eat at the amusement park that are pretty different than the stale popcorn and nausea from massively obese people in bathing suits tends to fill your stomach at American amusement parks. First was Glügg, which is the Swedish Christmas drink. It tastes somewhat like hot mulled wine, but is apparently made with potatoes, spices, yeast and something Ninny described as “a not as good Swedish coca-cola”. We you add raisins and almonds it was so sweet and warm you could forget that it was pitch dark out and only 4 pm. We then found a stand selling salmon. Listen up Six Flags: I want gravlax at your amusement parks too. To finish our culinary tour of Liseburg, we had reindeer ham. Kate felt more than somewhat conflicted about eating Donner or Rudolf, but I just enjoyed its salty woodsy quality.

Over the next twenty-four hours Kate and I had genuinely spicy Thai food and genuinely tasty Turkish food. Paris has a lot of poor excuses for Thai food (it’s too close to the bad Chinese food and the French cannot stand any level of spice) and Turkish food (I am recalling numerous memories of drunkenly eating grecque sandwiches with dry meat and not enough sauce blanche at 2 am and wishing I could wipe my tongue off with a napkin). While ethnic food and Swedish breakfasts (lots of cheese and a weird fish-paste in a tube that was surprisingly good) were nice, the best moment of the trip came our third night there when we joined the Hjalmers for a family dinner. The Hjalmers all speak beautiful English, are either blonde or blue eyed and are just as unbelievably friendly. Their boyfriends are friendly! Their granddaughter is friendly! God I love Sweden!

Anyway, we started the evening by baking ginger bread cookies with the family. It was somewhat like a bizarre version of my family: friendly blonde people not discussing Hitler or Alec Baldwin and celebrating Christmas. Is there a word that means scary and attractive? A yes- Maureendowd. Very Maureendowd. Anyway, the meal started with some wonderful home made Glügg. We then had an appetizer of green beans with shallot vinaigrette and cured reindeer. It was really good and I am excited to now have a reindeer and a green bean recipe (if Campbell’s soup ever makes a reindeer flavored soup I will send in the recipe). We then had seafood chowder with curry that was very hearty. Finally for dessert we had a wonderful tort with berries from the Hjamlers backyard and an ancient Swedish dessert (in English its called Beasting Pudding) that is the milk from a cow that just gave birth: it was somewhat like a panna cotta and while it wasn’t amazing it was good to taste it. The great food, good wine (Hans is a wine nerd) and all the discussion about socialized medicine (something I gather the Swedes LOVE talking about) made for a wonderful final night for our trip.

The next day we went to the airport to fly home and I had a Swedish hot dog that was so good I went back and had another. The sausage is lighter and fluffier than American Hot dogs and is served with a honey mustard sauce and little pieces of fried onion. Delicious! They should just serve hot dogs on airplanes. In any case, I really loved my time in Sweden, and I totally recommend everyone finding your own insanely friendly Swedish family to stay with. If only as soon as I flew back to Paris I didn’t start freaking out about finals…