Frenchiladas

Last Sunday we had our first dinner guests. All being American, Mexican food was the obvious choice. And for a crowd, enchiladas are always an easy way to dish up the portions. But, having been to the grocery store many times now, we knew this would be an interesting venture into fusion cuisine. Some might say a reckless force-fit of stuff-on-a-plate.

Why we might die here. 

Muddling through another country's food-selling system is a good way to discover nuances of society and culture--or at least collect some prompts for cynical conjecture. The grocery stores we've shopped at in Angers are pretty similar to what we're used to in the U.S. but there are enough quirks to keep it interesting. Part of the discrepancy is our reluctance to embrace a French diet. While we have been eating exquisite cheeses and drinking local wine with a frequency I won't document, we don't seem to have gone native with our three squares a day.

One of my favorites: Choucroute garnie
ready-to-eat (or cook perhaps?).
Conspicuously absent: blood sausage.

A walk around the grocery store we shop at most (Monoprix), observing relative quantities, depth of selection, and shelf-placement, indicates that the local man/woman (not meant as a comment on gender ambiguity but, now that I think about it...) is comprised of bread, cheese, pork sausage, wine, and dried pork sausage. The shelves between the main groups hold second-tier staples: lentils, pâté, endives, mustard, cigarettes, blood sausage, and Nutella.
You already know that some U.S. products have not caught on elsewhere such as peanut butter and Cheetos. But our Mexican dinner preparations highlight new examples of heretofore under-appreciated North American specialty foods which we've now invented or attempted substituions for. We then tested these on our friends/subjects (not meant as comment on social science but, now that I think about it...).

Cheddar: the other orange fat. But

you wouldn't want to ruin a good

serving of pork with it.

1) Cheddar cheese. There have been sightings of cheddar but we've been prostituting ourselves to mimolette, a mild and unimposing orangey stand-in. Our other tactic was to blend mozzarella and gouda. Pros: We avoided forcing edam, emmental, and comté into a Mexican menu (all deemed not-quite-right by the three-kid jury). We could call our dinner "fromage a trois." And, we avoided the goat-cheese enchilada zone (though that sounds like territory worth exploring). Con: our enchiladas took one step towards mexi-calzone.

Old El Paso has about

cornered the French

market for

mex-in-a-box.

2) Refried beans. Refried beans, or even never-once-fried whole pinto beans, are not for sale here. The beanish aisle offers 15 types of lentils, white beans, and kidney beans. There's a little wooden-shelf display at an endcap with some specialty lentils and popcorn that also includes small mesh bags of what look very much like dry pinto beans except they are labeled "red beans" and priced at 4.90€ for two cups (almost $7). So, for anyone who still thinks a suitcase of blue jeans is the quick way to pay off your plane ticket to Europe, get hip: suitcase of pinto beans. Our faux refritos were concocted of equal amounts of canned white beans and kidney beans dumped in blender. Texture, check. Color, check. Salt to taste. Fiesta.
3) Chorizo. Okay, here's a wild card. I found a meat product labeled chorizo. Unlike the chorizo back in the old country, it's a cured and dried sausage. A package of sliced chorizo looked sufficiently like extruded pork'n cumin. The list of ingredients just said pork and spices. What, no love? It was tasty but a better complement to mozzarella than tortillas and enchilada sauce. Another small step towards mexi-calzone.


Châteaux

Far from the world that you prepare your own food in, last Saturday we bussed east along the Loire to three châteaux: Azay-le-Rideau, Chenonceau, and Chambord: stunning relics of the Renaissance, that time of unchecked imagination and cheap home-heating fuel. Pictures at: châteaux Picasa album.
In the same way that blogging exaggerates the relevance of disconnected stimuli, the châteaux are a gratuitous mashup of architectures and curious personal hobbies. Thus, I fear any attempt at description would only miss the point. These are LOOK-AT-ME! houses. The chât is the story. (Thank you for politely ignoring that I know nothing about these places). So, if you check out the collection of photos (or even if you don't), here are a few possible captions that merely respond to the eye candy that is chât d'Loire.

• Seeing as you're able to sit the better part of a day for a nude portrait, why the wet nurse?
• Angry babies with wings should wear diapers.
• All rooms should have a crowned golden H in them.
• If it were you who had cleared the earth of countless flesh-eating jack-a-lope, you wouldn't feel like you had to explain to anyone why you deserve a gigantic house. But since I've got nothing better to do, I'll show you a tapestry about how it all went down. It was an epic battle and, lucky for me, the cameras were weaving.
• Hey honey, I was thinking we could maybe take out a loan and do one of those tower-additions. We could use that new stone everyone's crazy about and your parents could stay in it when they visit.

Me so ferrous: A genuine
Invicta. 26 cm. Wooden
handle. 2.1kg. Smooth
enough for a crepe. Heavy
enough to bludgeon a
giant lizard. 

Big news in the apartment this week. We got a new frying pan! We were missing our cast iron pans and noticing that a couple of pans in the cupboard were due for retirement so a few weeks ago, we started walking into kitchen stores whenever we'd find ourselves in front of one. Sure you can set yourself up with a medium sized Le Creuset, porcelain glazed iron pan for a cool 96€ (about $130) but not only is that a bad deal, they cover up all the good iron with porcelain. What's up with that? A search of Amazon.fr seemed to confirm our fears. No basic iron pans in France. We could order something similar via Sweden but, the price was no different than the local Le Creuset. Then, in a basic stumble-upon, we walked in a little "hardware store." Right near the front door was a medium sized cast iron pan, made in France, with the porcelain only on the bottom--39€. Hey, if you cleared the earth of giant sharp-tooth lizards, you wouldn't be defensive about buying a nice pan (sorry, I don't have a tapestry of that). Before actually buying it, I asked Kristin to check with the owner about a larger size. He said no--that if they were any bigger, you couldn't lift it. Jeez. With my bare hands I deal with the giant lizards and he thinks I can't manage a few more centimeters of iron. Maybe I'll sketch the scene for him when I go back for a spatula.

Before retiring the old teflon pan, it was given a special mission that I should mention. I alluded to duck sausage in a previous post. For some reason, it sounded like it could be good. It could even become my surprise favorite thing about France. I tossed a package of two in the basket and that evening covered the bottom of Ol' Teffy with some water and set the links to cookin'. I was the only one home when I started in on this task but not too long into it the rest of the crew came in the door--a resounding OMFG chorus. Like the proverbial frog in a pot brought slowly to boil, I was evidently oblivious to having filled our apartment with the fumes of an abandoned sewer. Luckily, I suppose, we didn't have the drying-rack up with all the kids' clothes absorbing the classic French country scents for school the next morning... Yeah, well... yo mamma so stinky, she use duck sausage as air freshener...

We do have one of those drying

racks but when ya got three loads

it's time to start rigging.

We have indeed re-mastered the lost arts of hand-washing all dishes and air-drying clothes indoors. It's a charming past-time that always seems to need doing. And if Ella, Ivy, and Jack read this blog, I'm sure they'll wholeheartedly agree if not feel suddenly compelled to go wash the stack of plates that is undoubtedly next to the sink at this very moment.

Location, location, location.

(I'd wash the dishes but I'm

waiting for my jeans to dry)

Ella, Ivy, and Jack are all on day three of their two week winter break. After all, French kids have been in school since early January and it won't be until the last week of April that their two-week Spring break begins. This of course means a lot of stores and other things have whacky schedules through next Friday. Including shoe stores. I'm getting some pressure to get a couple of Frenchish clothing items -- maybe a darker colored coat and some "shoes that aren't Keens." I figure, if I've got some visual queues that I might not speak French, I need to hold on to those.

Look at my shoes. If I don't speak

French, nobody does. But then, if
you're wearing these, what's left to say?