I’ve been meaning to come write this post for a long time. For several months, actually, but this whole full-time working thing is pretty tough to handle.
Yes, I, the one who claimed I would never get an office job… went ahead and got an office job. It’s not nearly as bad as I thought it would be, mainly because it doesn’t resemble Office Space one bit. Also, because it’s a foodie job.
Ever since February, I’ve been working at QOOQ, a company that produces a tablet computer for the kitchen. While the product itself is awesome — splash proof, water resistant, you name it — I’m not so much working with the tablet itself as with the content, a job that has me filming video recipes, editing news reports on everything from kale to mushrooms to cheese, translating obscure cuts of meat, making friends with my local butcher, writing snappy copy about parsnips and chatting with famous American chefs… often in the same day.
Needless to say, I love it.
Of course, working full-time at a job you love often leaves little time for anything else. And considering that I’m simultaneously trying to complete my Masters degree (just a few weeks left to finish start writing my thesis… *yikes*), I’ve been absent. Not only from this blog, but from my own kitchen. I’m reminded of the summer I spent as a waitress, when after 12-hour days of staring at French fries, nothing sounded good to me except for 7-11 Slurpees. When you spend the whole day staring at food — be it pictures, ingredients or dishes themselves — it can be hard to wrestle up the energy and the appetite to pull out the pots and pans at 9PM to make something else that smells like food. I’ve traded my Slurpee in for a beer and sesame breadsticks (which The Country Boy calls bird food), and I’m very lucky to have not one but two people who are very good at following my over-the-phone instructions on how to make a pork roast so that the other inhabitants of my apartment don’t starve, or at the very least suffer malnutrition from subsiding entirely on the aforementioned beer and breadsticks.
But spring is here, if not in weather (weird, weird year for weather in Paris) then in ingredients. My market has started stocking some of my favorite produce to work with, and I can’t help but help myself.
Consider this salad my pledge to try harder to be present, both here with you and in my own kitchen. It was inspired by one of the recipes filmed by my co-worker for the tablet, which I translated for the English version. Needless to say, I know it by heart now.
The original is actually a tart; the parmesan dough is baked into the base, and the salad is stacked on top. The original calls for raw beets, which are nearly impossible to find in Paris (most supermarkets sell them vacuum packed, and even my favorite market vendor sells them wood-roasted, forking them into a paper bag that bleeds all over the rest of your groceries by the time you get home). It was my co-worker’s idea to make it into a salad; I subbed the vegetables for what I had on-hand. The finished product may be too far from Paul-Arthur Berlan‘s original to be considered a variation, but that’s beside the point. The important thing is that it’s delicious.
I’m excited to be bringing you more recipes and stories over the next few months… thank you all for being patient while I got adjusted to being a grown-up. I’m both surprised and happy to say that it’s much more fun than I thought it would be.
Radish, Carrot, Mushroom and Parmesan Salad
For the Parmesan pastry: 1.5 ounces flour
1.5 ounces grated Parmesan cheese 1.5 ounces butter
For the salad 1 cup French breakfast radishes 2 cups button mushrooms 2 medium carrots 1 spring onion
7 green olives baby arugula (optional: I have since made this salad with the addition, and it’s excellent as well!) fresh chives
For the dressing 2 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil 1 Tbsp. red wine vinegar salt and pepper, to taste
Prepare the pastry. Combine the flour, butter and parmesan, rubbing it between your fingertips until it resembles wet sand. Pack the dough into a disk and wrap with plastic wrap. Place in the freezer while you prepare the salad.
Using a mandoline or a very sharp knife, slice the radishes thinly. Stem the mushrooms and brush them clean. Slice them thinly as well. Peel the carrots. Slice half of one into thin rounds, and grate the rest of them with a box grater.
Mince the bulb of the spring onion. Thinly slice the white and light green portions of the stems. Discard the rest.
Finely chop the olives. Toss all of the prepared vegetables together.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Using a box grater, grate the pastry evenly over the surface of a baking tray. Bake the pastry until it is golden brown. Use a fork to break it apart into crumbles the moment it comes out of the oven, before it has time to set up.
Drizzle the oil and vinegar over the vegetables. Season with salt and pepper and toss to combine.
Finely mince the chives. Sprinkle the parmesan crumbles and chives over the top of the salad. Serve immediately.
Remember my Paris lives? I crossed one of them the other day.
As one of my many, many jobs, I teach math to a young Canadian girl who lives in the 7th. I finish at 7pm ; my sister finishes her last class at 8 just two blocks away. (You know you’re a New Yorker when you measure distances in blocks.)
While she usually goes out with her friends after, that day she had nothing to do, and seeing as we had been having unseasonably nice weather (this was before Paris stormageddon, aka a normal Tuesday in January in Massachusetts), I decided to wait for her for an hour and work in the lobby of my former univeristy, and then we would walk home together.
As I sat in this building, a building that for a year and half was a permanent fixture of my life, waves of the past washed over me. A sign said No Smoking – Ne Pas Fumer. It seems inocuous enough, except that I know that when my mother attended the school, this was not the case. I imagined what it would have been like then, mentally erased the computers in the corner from the picture, listened to people starting to drink for a Tuesday night out — let’s not pretend to be surprised — and wondered if the same loud music, laughing and screeching was there when my mother was 19, cigarette smoke curling out from under the door of the lounge and creeping up the plaster molded walls.
And then, I remembered. I steeped in the memory of what it was like, being one of these obvious Americans, one of these people whose identity is so defined by the fact that they live in the bubble that is the American University. I watched as two students sitting side-by-side in front of the row of computers tried fruitlessly to confirm concert tickets over the phone, failing miserably to communicate their e-mail address to the French person on the other end. I almost volunteered my help, when another girl sitting next to them, someone they didn’t know, did it for me. She spoke well but was obviously an American; I wonder if that is how I would have seen myself, had I been able to sit in that very same chair and watch one of a myriad of times that I lived that same situation, translating for people who couldn’t or wouldn’t learn the language that surrounded us.
I find, more and more, that people are surprised by the fact that I live here upon meeting me. Perhaps it’s because it’s no longer undergrad, a time when you’re allowed to do strange things like move to another country before moving back to the real world. Perhaps it’s because when people ask me, hardly interested, how long I’ve been here, I say six years and watch as they digest it. Six years.
Perhaps it’s because it still takes people time — my rock climbing instructor waited at least ten minutes, until I mis-counted by twos and skipped six — to ask me if I am or am not French; it takes them time to notice, time to realize why I’m different. It’s a completely different situation than the flagrant Americanness in which I existed in my first Paris life.
When I was a part of that world, I looked down upon it. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to exist in such a bubble, why anyone would want to so undeniably shirk the culture that surrounded them. Now, I realize two things: firstly, when I thought that I was integrating, I wasn’t. And secondly, I sometimes miss that bubble.
Of course I have versions of it now, with my expat friends, but there was something about that comfort, that familiarity, that unity… I’m glad I’m on the outside looking in, now, as much as I ever can be, but sometimes I wish I could look in on my past instead of their present, see for a moment what it was once like to be so blind to how hard some days of living my dream would be.
Because, of course, knowing how hard your dream is only makes it more worth it. I suppose that’s the nostalgia I feel today; nostalgia for a past when I had no idea how much I would love my present.
What better way to delve into such feelings of nostalgia than with a nostalgic dish. I’ve made these beans before, during one of my other Paris lives, when the 7th was still home. Now I mix in diced mozzarella cheese and bake them in mini cocottes. They’re still delicious.
Italian-Inspired White Beans with Tomatoes
2 tsp. olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
1/4 tsp. ground cayenne pepper
1 clove garlic, minced
3 tbsp. tomato paste
1 15-oz can whole peeled tomatoes
1 28-oz. can white beans (cannellini or white navy)
2 tsp. dried basil
1 tsp. dried rosemary
salt and black pepper
2 ounces mozzarella cheese, diced
Heat the olive oil over medium-high heat. Add the onion and a pinch of salt and cook until soft and translucent, about five minutes. Add the peppers and garlic and stir until fragrant, 1-2 minutes.
Add the tomato paste and stir to combine. Allow to cook for one minute, stirring constantly. Add the tomatoes and herbs. Add salt and pepper to taste. Use an immersion blender to blend the tomato sauce to your desired consistency. Add the beans.
Reduce the heat to medium-low and allow to cook, stirring occasionally, until sauce has thickened, about 30 minutes. Taste for seasonings.
Stir in the diced mozzarella. Ladle servings into individual cocottes or a larger baking dish. Broil until the cheese has melted, about 5 minutes. Cool 10 minutes before serving.
I’ve always felt as though I was an adult, even when I was a kid.
My father tells a story of taking me to a toy store when I was about ten. After a few minutes, I walked up to him and said, forlornly, “I think I must be growing up. I don’t want anything anymore.” I’m embarrassed for the certainty with which my 11-year-old self agreed with those general sentiments that make excellent New Yorker cartoons, thinking, “It’s true… when I was a kid, Christmas did seem a long way off.” Except that I still was a kid. I had no idea what I was talking about.
Maybe I’ll feel the same way in a few years when I look back on my life now, but I can say now, with complete certainty, that this year has flown by. I have no idea how it’s already March. I feel as though it was only yesterday that my Little Sister arrived here in Paris, and that was on December 31st. I think that someone has stolen a few weeks without letting me know.
Maybe it’s because I’ve stumbled upon a job that I love. Maybe it’s because I often work through the weekend, so I don’t see the weekly breaks go by. Maybe it’s because I spend most of my life in front of a screen, whether it’s at home, in the car, in the métro or at the office. It’s depressing to think about, and yet as of now, I’ve done very little to change it. I keep telling myself I have time, I have time. Maybe I do; maybe I don’t.
I made this salad weeks ago, maybe months. It was the perfect way to play with Brussels sprouts, a favorite of mine that I very often roast simply with salt and oil and occasionally bacon. In this salad, the sprouts are shredded using a sharp knife and topped with discs of fried goat’s cheese. Pomegranate seeds are scattered through the salad for additional crust.
I remember the first time I taught the Actress how to fry goat cheese this way, she thought it was magic. Now it’s just normal, but there’s still something nice about a beautiful, seasonal winter salad. You have a few more weeks to try this one; don’t let the time get away from you. Before you know it, it’ll be spring.
Shredded Brussels Sprout, Goat Cheese and Pomegranate Seed Salad (adapted from Heather Christo) 1 pound Brussels Sprouts ½ cup pomegranate seeds 1 shallot, minced 1 teaspoons grainy mustard 1/4 cup cider vinegar 1/4 cup olive oil Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper 8 ounces soft goat cheese, cold 1 egg 1/4 cup flour 1/4 cup seasoned breadcrumbs ½ teaspoon kosher salt 2 Tbsp. Olive oil for frying
Shred the Brussels Sprouts very, very thinly with a sharp knife. Transfer to a large bowl and dispose of the bottoms.
In a small bowl whisk together the shallots, mustard, oil and vinegar. Season to taste with Kosher salt and black pepper. Set aside.
Beat the egg until fluffy in a small bowl. Put the flour in a small dish and the breadcrumbs in another.
Divide the soft goat cheese into 8 even discs.
Lightly dredge the cheese in flour and pat any extra off.
Dredge the cheese through the egg, and then gently coat the cheese with the breadcrumbs.
In a medium sauté pan, heat the olive oil to medium-high heat. Fry the goat cheese balls until golden brown about 1 1/2 minutes on each side.
Gently toss the shredded Brussels sprouts with the dressing and season to taste with a little kosher salt. Transfer to a serving platter and top with the goat cheese balls and the pomegranate seeds.
I often forget, when it’s been a long time since I visited the Loiret, where the Country Boy is from, that Paris is not the rest of France. I even forget as we drive into town, leaving the freeway and slipping along quiet back country roads, looking for pheasant and rabbits as we move closer and closer to the house that raised him. I forget, that is, until the next day, when we head out into the world.
Mindsets are different here, and it only takes a few glasses of wine for people to start sharing their opinions on that trifecta of restricted dinner table conversation — politics, religion and sex. As I nurse my glass of wine and try my best to be invisible, I let the waves of opinions, completely different from those I’m accustomed to hearing back home, just two hours away, wash over me.
In this economic and political climate, conversation often turns to the immigration situation here in France, and for the most part, I stay silent. It’s not that I don’t have things to say, but my opinions differ so much from those of the people I’m with, and while I’m ashamed to admit it, I’m afraid to draw attention to myself, especially because, no matter how long I’ve been here or how much I feel as though France is my home, I have to remember that in the eyes of everyone around me, I’m still different.
Mais ce n’est pas pareil avec Emily, someone always says, after awhile, after I’ve been noticed in spite of my silence. Elle n’est pas comme les autres étrangers. I’m used to hearing it by now; “she’s not like the other foreigners.” At first I thought that it was because I’m white, because I’m Western. Maybe that’s the case, but it’s never the reason that people give. Elle s’est assimilée. She’s assimilated.
What does that mean? Even I’m not sure. It means that I drink French wine. It means that I eat saucisson. It means that I speak French and that I know who Victor Hugo, Zinedine Zidane and Jacques Chirac are. It means that I roll my eyes when I hear about the Findus horse meat scandal, and I occasionally say things like, Ça revient au même or Ça n’a rien à voir… expressions that you won’t learn in a French textbook but, rather, that come to you after time living here, speaking to those who are French. I don’t hear the distinction anymore between these phrases and the ones I had practiced over and over in middle school French class, only to have them roll flat and tinny off my tongue during my first months here, in the North.
I am an étrangère, but it’s not me to whom they’re referring when they talk about étrangers. Here, the word is an euphemism for people of Arab descent; I’m not implicated in the group, in spite of my bright pink carte de séjour and the accent I still have. And what’s more, I don’t feel implicated. I know that they don’t mean me when they talk about étrangers changing things here in France, bringing pieces of home to affect all things Gallic, inserting minarets in the sky scape and halal labels in the butcher’s. And I also know that if I dared to say anything about the subject, I’d say on referring to the French, not to the étrangers… but I don’t have that right.
I suppose that’s the hardest part of these conversations, for me. I have assimilated, in many respects. I speak the language and work in France and pay my taxes. I shop at the French supermarket and don’t (usually) complain when I can’t find brown sugar or jalapeños or corn tortillas. I identify with French characters on television, and I raise my eyebrow when I see the versions of the French that appear in American films.
I like living here. I like feeling Parisian, but as I realize every time I leave Paris, no matter how Parisian I become, I still am not French. I have assimilated, but it isn’t enough. I’m not a part of that group of étrangers — “Ce n’est pas pareil avec Emily“ – but I’m not French either. If I say on during a conversation about foreigners, I belong to a third group, a group apart, a group that isn’t considered at all.
The truth of the matter is, the longer I stay here, the more I realize how lost I would feel without my fellow expats. I may spend most of my day interacting with French people — mainly Parisians — but the circle of expats I’ve come to know has become a sort of security blanket for me. Just knowing that they’re there, that I’m not alone in my otherness, is enough for me to continue trying to integrate — perhaps not assimilate, perhaps never become truly French — but to know enough that when I’m sitting around a table and someone asks the Country Boy, “I thought you had an American girlfriend,” I can draw attention to myself with a wave of the hand — “Oui, c’est moi,” — and relish the fact that, if only for a moment, an étrangère tricked a group of Frenchmen into believing that I was one of them.
Like me, this pizza is a bit of both. Barbecue beef topped with Brie cheese. An amalgam of two cultures, two cuisines. Not assimilated — no “melting pots” here — but coexisting nonetheless. I suppose it helps that it’s delicious.
Barbecue Beef and Brie Pizza (serves 6)
2/3 cup warm water
1 packet (1/4 ounce) active dry yeast 1 teaspoon granulated sugar 1/2 pound all-purpose flour 1 teaspoon fine salt 1 tablespoons olive oil
Make the pizza dough. Put the water in a small shallow bowl and sprinkle the yeast and sugar over the surface. Allow to sit in a warm place for 10-15 minutes, until the yeast foams and doubles in size.
Place the flour in a large glass bowl and make a hole in the center. Add the yeast and water and stir with a wooden spoon until the dough begins to come together. Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and knead until you have a smooth, soft dough, about 15 minutes. Knead the salt into the dough.
Rinse the bowl and pour the olive oil into it. Roll the ball of dough so that it’s covered in oil. Lightly cover with plastic wrap (allow the dough to breathe) and then with a dishtowel. Leave in a warm place and allow to double in size. Punch down, cover with wrap and dishtowel.
At this point I usually put the dough in the fridge overnight. If you’re doing this the same day, allow it to double in size again on the countertop, then punch down and roll out, allowing the rolled dough to rest for 20 minutes before adding the toppings. If you’re like me, keep it in the fridge, then take it out an hour before you’re ready to eat. After 40 minutes, roll the dough out on parchment paper and allow it to rest 20 minutes before adding the toppings. This makes two half-sized or one full-sized dough.
Heat a small saucepan over medium heat and add the butter and the onion. Cook until translucent. Add the rest of the ingredients and reduce heat to low. Cook, stirring occasionally, 30 minutes. Use an immersion blender to purée the sauce. Set aside.
In a large, heavy pot, heat the olive oil on high heat. Add the stew meat to brown on all sides. Remove and reserve.
Reduce heat to medium. Add the onions and cook until translucent. Add the tomatoes by hand, squeezing them to crush as you go. Add the barbecue sauce and bring to a simmer. Add the meat back to the pot. Reduce to low and cover. Cook for about 2 hours, or until the meat is very tender.
Remove the meat and increase the heat to high. Simmer until the liquid has reduced and thickened. Shred the beef and add back to the pot. Up until this point, everything can be done the night before.
When ready to make the pizza, preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Roll out the dough on parchment paper. Top with beef, using a spaghetti spoon or slotted spoon to make sure you don’t add too much sauce, which will drench the dough. Top with Brie. Bake for 20 minutes, until bubbly.
In case you’ve been wondering where I’ve been, I started a new job. It’s a very exciting, foodie-based job, and it has swallowed me whole and is only now starting to spit me out. It’s not bad, just different. But the new rhythm it’s instilled in me — the getting up at 8am every morning and going mechanically to the same metro stop — has reminded me of something I’ve been wanting to talk about for awhile.
When expats meet in Paris, one of the first questions we ask, after, “How are you here?” and “Where are you living?” is “How long have you been here?” I’ve started to accumulate months and years, scattered here and there since my first arrival in 2007. Most expats, even the ones who have been here awhile, are surprised when I say six years.
“That’s a long time!”
It is, but it doesn’t feel like it, mainly because Paris has been reinventing itself for me ever since I moved here. There are clear breaks in my time here, breaks that make it seem as though it’s a completely different place, as though I moved somewhere new, instead of just looking at Paris in a new way.
Paris: The Prequel
When I count how long I’ve been here, I almost always start in Cannes. It may not be Paris, but it’s where it all began. Cannes, for me, was the place that made me even consider living in Paris full-time, not to mention the springboard for my arrival. Three weeks after starting my semester abroad there in February 2007, I filled out the AUP transfer application, and that was that. I was convinced that I was in love with France, and perhaps I was, but it wasn’t the France that I know today.
We were warned, in Cannes, that we would develop “third culture.” It sounded like a disease, and we made fun of it together, as we had midday picnics with bottles of wine, skipped class in favor of going camping, and closed the bar on a Tuesday night at our favorite Irish pub. Without actually consciously thinking it, I was convinced that this would be my life when I moved to Paris.
My 1st Paris Life
Of course, it wasn’t, but my new life — September 2007 — was quite similar, even if it didn’t seem that way at the time. The huge, bonded group I knew from the collège in Cannes was replaced by a much more manageable group of students from my American university — mostly visiting students from California, but also a Bulgarian, a Lebanese guy, my Canadian ex-boyfriend who had a penchant for throwing parties without even having to get up from his chair, and Emese, the other American, the other one who was permanent.
For me, life was small. Paris was restricted to the 5th, 6th and 7th arrondissements. Emese and I had a local brasserie, a few blocks away, and a far-flung Vietnamese noodle shop in the 20th that felt like an adventure each time we set out in its direction. When an old friend of mine from California moved to the 16th, it felt far. I saw the distance between the two stops as I rode across the city from the third time today — Alma-Marceau to Ranelagh — and almost laughed out loud.
As much as I didn’t realize it at the time, we were still living a third culture life. We had “floor picnics” of cheese and wine, convinced the bartenders at a weekly Erasmus night that we were Hungarian and Canadian (not that they cared), and finally ventured to our local market after months without knowing it was there. That life lasted three months in its entirety; then the exchange students and the Canadian left, and it was just me and Em, but we continued shirking the generally accepted use of daylight and nighttime until December 2008 and the end of my first Paris life.
My 2nd Paris Life
My second Paris life started when I finished university a semester early and moved out of my first Paris apartment and into the Parisian’s apartment. I decided to shirk “third culture” once and for all and immerse myself, but when I made the leap, I didn’t realize that I hadn’t set up anywhere to fall. I worked for one month as an intern at a Franco-African news agency — my first-and-a-half Parisian life — and then decided to “be a writer,” which, as I’ve told numerous writers since, is a very, very, very bad idea and was the true beginning of my second Paris life.
I had good intentions, but it’s really quite difficult to write all day when you’ve got nothing to write about. I had some friends here — the Artist and the Almost Frenchman — but mostly I watched all six seasons of Lost and picked up running again. I took excellent photos for the blog because I cooked during the day, gained fifteen pounds from eating a huge lunch and a huge dinner (in spite of the running), and started taking myself on destinationless walks every afternoon through unfamiliar neighborhoods, neighborhoods I had never encountered before. I felt like I was adventuring, but I was walking in circles through the 5th and 13th. I was bored, but I refused to admit it. I talked to random people in the street and tried to convince myself I loved my new Paris life.
And then I moved to Spain.
My 3rd Paris Life
Spain was like the palate cleanser between two courses. I was very happy to come back to Paris, convinced that this time would be different. Instead of wandering aimlessly through the 5th and 13th, I moved in with my cousin, the Actress, in the 7th, my original arrondissement. That’s perhaps the moment I realized how different I was, how different Paris was from what I had first encountered more than two years before. I was two blocks away from the apartment I had shared with Emese, and yet the neighborhood felt like a completely new world.
I was attending an intensive month-long course, 9am to 5pm, Monday through Friday. My weekends were filled with trips to London, studying like a maniac, and occasionally meeting my cousin’s expat friends, a full five years older than I was and therefore on their sixth or seventh Paris life already.
Before I knew it, the month was over, and I had moved back to New York. My third Paris life had ended.
My 4th Paris Life
My fourth Paris life was a dream life, perhaps, but it was real all the same. It began the day that I arrived in Paris after I had accidentally stayed in New York for five months and pretended to be a grown-up, all while living at home for the first time in six years. I came back to Paris to collect some belongings for an intended move back to New York, and I felt such a visceral connection with the city that I distinctly remember wanting to physically burrow into the sidewalk. Instead, I wandered the streets until my shoes broke, and then I applied for a job in Cannes and planned to move back to the south in January.
And then I fell in love.
My 5th Paris Life
So there you go. My fifth Paris life started, I rented an apartment in the 15th, and I started school, met the Almost Proust Fan and developed a penchant for pulling all-nighters to write 30 pages or more of literary comparison. Try to tell that to the Emiglia of my second Paris life… she wouldn’t believe you. I didn’t really live in Paris at this point, at least not Paris 2011. I lived in 1830s Paris and on my sofa. I moved apartments once, 200 meters away. Sometimes, I went to parc Georges Brassens.
My 6th Paris Life
My fifth Paris life bled into my sixth Paris life — an odd and manic combination of Masters degree and working odd jobs — and I didn’t even realize it had began until my seventh Paris life – this Paris life — began. Working a 9-6, eating out on occasion, because now I have the money, but not too often, because I don’t have the time. I believe that some call it adulthood. I’m not sure what I call it, but there you go.
If you’re still here — I don’t blame you if you left 500 words ago — here’s the reason I was thinking about this today.
On days like this — days when the weather is just starting to get nice — pieces of my old life bleed through the distinctions that otherwise seem so clear. I have an automatic desire to call up Emese and jump on a train to Cannes, or at least get a bottle of wine and day drink in a park, and yet that’s impossible, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that Paris as it once was doesn’t exist for me anymore.
Some part of me wishes that I had locked it up and left it the way it was in my memory — the way Toronto will always be — so that I didn’t have to see what it looks like when the sparkle wears off. With each new life, a layer of the novelty faded away, but with each new incarnation, I also felt closer to my adoptive city, like it was finally becoming mine. And now I feel almost further away from it, seeing as new people discover what I’ve already discovered, so blinded by the other things that consume my life that I have little time to think about what it really means to live in Paris.
I don’t know if this is something that will go away. Is this just another life? Just another version of Paris that a later version of me will look back on and smile? Maybe. It’s impossible to know now. But regardless of what Paris has in store for me in the future, I’m glad to have the Russian dolls of my Paris lives, the transformative métro stops that feel like a step back in time when I visit them, on occasion; the whiffs of a certain smell that make me think of a different time, a different year, a different life, a different me.
As for the sweet part of this story, this Carambar cake does it pretty well. Carambars were one of the first foreign things I encountered in France, or at least, the first tangible foreign things. Before I started thinking about cultural differences and what made France distinct from America, I noticed that these candies — like caramel Tootsie rolls with jokes printed on them — were different from anything I’d seen before. Of course, now they’re normal, alongside Speculoos spread and Nutella in the supermarket aisles. I baked them into a cake, because I can.
10 cl milk 150 g butter 20 Carambars 160 g sugar 3 eggs 150 g flour 1 t. baking powder 1 t. salt
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
In a saucepan, gently heat the milk and the butter. Add the Carambars, stirring regularly until they melt.
In a mixing bowl, combine the sugar and eggs. Add the flour, baking powder and salt, and mix until just combined. Add the melted Carambars with milk and butter. Mix well and pour into a lined baking pan.
Bake 40 minutes. Turn out onto a cooling rack and cool.
Sometimes, when I get too happy, I start to freak out.
It’s as though there’s a part of me watching my life from the outside, waiting to pounce on a perceived moment of bliss. Suddenly, everything starts to fall apart. Anxiety creeps in. I start thinking about all the things that could go wrong. That will go wrong. All of the reasons that my happiness is temporary.
It’s not something that I enjoy or that I do on purpose, though the frequency with which I do it is alarming and may make it seem like a purposeful thwarting of joy. In fact, after so many years of living inside my own head, I’ve started to be able to anticipate it, which has led to something entirely different. A third me is watching, waiting to fend off the feelings of dread as I sense them building up.
It’s very confusing to be in my head.
I had a moment of these entwined feelings — a moment of the panic that leads up to panic — as I sat, contentedly, in the library this weekend. I was working on my thesis while waiting for my sister to return from Fontainebleau, and then we would go get a drink and dinner together. It seems like an ordinary situation, except that I was immediately aware of one thing.
This is, in its very essence, a temporary situation. My sister being here is temporary. The rhythm we’ve found of existing side-by-side, in our own lives but brushing past one another just the right amount, will cease to exist in a matter of short months. I need to forget — during my real life — how much I actually miss my family when they’re gone. I’m enjoying my sister being here, but it’s not just that. There’s a symmetry between us, a similarity that is by no means carbon-copied, but just enough of the same temperament and the same memories and the same habits so that she is there exactly when I need her and yet has exactly the right amount of her own stuff to do the minute I need to be alone. It’s hard to wrap the feeling up in words, no matter how much words are generally a comfort. I think that this is what people mean when they say, “We were like sisters.” Except we are sisters; we just never got to be sisters in the same place.
But I’ve abandoned what I intended to say, which is that I didn’t allow myself to spiral this weekend. I didn’t let the feeling of dread take over. Instead, it was a completely new feeling. A feeling of power: the power to decide to be happy.
I’ve found, particularly in the past year, that I need to learn to see the beauty in the temporary, if only by virtue of the choices I’ve made in my life that have led me to here. As a child — a period that I define alternately as continuing up to (and perhaps through, it’s hard to say) very recently — I wanted all things I enjoyed to last forever, a principal influence behind my repetitive desires and subsequent decisions to move instead of visit, sell instead of put away, break up instead of step back. Black or white. All or nothing. Always or not at all.
And yet, as I decided a month and a few days ago — on New Year’s Eve, just before I climbed up to go to bed next to my sister after a New Years’ party on the brink between sleep and awake –, I’m going to be happy this year. Whatever this year decides to offer me. I’m going to take advantage of the temporary. I’m going to let beautiful yet fleeting moments be beautiful first. And I’m not going to let that panic of missing out, of time running too fast, of things passing me by catch up with me. Because it’s only when I give in to that panic that I truly miss out on what’s important.
I may have mentioned before — I don’t quite remember — the cyclical view of time that was popular during the Renaissance. As opposed to a straight line of points marching forward, leaving the rest behind for eternity, Renaissance thinkers believed that time was a circle, a series of points that always came back. I think that this might be closer to reality than the standard past, present, future line that I use to illustrate verb tenses to my ESL students — although I’m also inclined to believe in “wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff.” Whatever the truth of time may be, moments always come back to us, and often when we least expect it. Like the seasons, things are never truly over; the past comes back to visit in very unexpected ways. The end isn’t always the end.
Maybe that’s what I find so interesting about seasonal food. There’s just enough time to fall in love with something before it’s gone, but it always comes back again. I made a similar chausson a bit more than a year ago; it’s still a favorite, though it’s different every time. I think that’s pretty much what I want, anyway.
Potimarron, goat cheese and caramelized onion chausson
Heat the butter over low heat and add the onion and a pinch of salt. Cook, stirring occasionally and adding tablespoons of water as needed, until the onions are deep mahogany in color, about an hour.
Halfway through the onion cooking time, preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Toss the squash with the olive oil and salt. Place in an even layer on a baking pan, and roast 30 minutes, tossing once. The squash should be browned and caramelized on the edges. Reduce the heat to 350.
Line a cake pan with parchment paper and unroll the puff pastry in the bottom, with the edges hanging over the sides. Pour the roasted squash into the pastry. Top with the onions and the goat’s cheese. Seal the pastry edges by squeezing them together.
Bake for about 25-30 minutes, until the pastry turns golden. Savor.
In the past month, I can count the sunny days we’ve had on one hand. Last week, one appeared out of the blue, and I spent the day walking through the 6th and 15th with my sister, buying a variety of croissants for a new project (more on that later!) and enjoying the sunshine.
But if I’m being truly honest, I can’t complain about the cloudy weather we’ve been having. I actually quite like it. Even if it means that my hair is behaving in a delightfully 80s manner and I have to carry an umbrella everywhere I go, there’s something kind of nice about a grey day…
I’m slightly horrified with myself when I realize that the reason behind this love of Paris’ greyness is because a grey day is the perfect excuse to get a lot of work done… but there you go. People who knew me in high school and college may laugh, but sometime between my last year of university and now, I became a bona fide workaholic. I spend my weekends holed up in the BNF, doing research for my thesis, and I spend my days shuttling myself back and forth between school and work, leaving and arriving home when it’s dark. And yet I haven’t been happier in months.
I think it might be because I’ve chosen something that I really love to do as the way to pay the bills. I’ve been working freelance for several years now, which was fun in and of itself, if a bit stressful, as sources of income changed from one month to the next. But I’m finally nearing a full-time position at a company that I love that allows me to do the things that I love to do — namely speak French and talk about food — and call it “work.” It doesn’t bother me that I have little time for anything else, though it might bother me a bit more if I felt as though I was never taking advantage of the sunshine. You see, there’s no sunshine to take advantage of.
There is, however, a chill in the air… perfect soup weather. For my first foray into French onion soup, I chose an easy recipe that required very little attention on my part, as it bubbled away all afternoon. And I was quite pleased with the results. Next time, I’ll let the onions caramelize even longer, the perfect task to punctuate days of working very, very hard, a little breath of fresh, oniony air between translations, editing photos and replying to endless e-mails.
3 pounds yellow onions, thinly sliced 3 Tbsp. butter 1/2 teaspoon salt, plus more to taste 8 cups water, divided 1 Tbsp. flour 1/4 cup white wine 1 bouquet garni (1 bay leaf and a few sprigs of thyme) 1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce 1 day-old baguette 8 ounces gruyère cheese, thinly sliced
Melt the butter in a large soup pot over medium heat. Add the onions and salt. Toss to coat. Cover and cook for 10 minutes to sweat the onions.
Remove the cover and cook the onions, stirring frequently, until the onions begin to brown, about 90 minutes. Add water by the tablespoon to loosen the fond, stirring frequently. Cook an additional 45 minutes this way, until the onions are an even, very dark brown color. They will lighten in the soup, so keep going!
Add the flour and stir for two minutes. Add the white wine.
Add the remaining water, bouquet garni and Worcestershire sauce. Bring to a boil, then lower heat and simmer for 20 minutes. Season to taste with salt.
Turn on the broiler. Slice the baguette to fit the tops of the oven-safe bowls you’ll use for serving. Fill the bowls with soup and top with the baguette slices. Cover with the gruyère cheese. Broil until the cheese bubbles and starts to brown, about 10 minutes. Cool slightly before serving.
I think that anyone who loves reading has gone through periods of time where they get lost in a story. Where the narrative becomes more real than real life. But there’s something even stranger about getting lost in research, a feeling that perhaps fewer have felt, but no less strongly.
Getting lost in research is different than getting lost in fiction. There are no characters that feel like your friends, no imaginary worlds that you feel you know by heart. But it’s no less real a feeling when, after days of reading about someone’s life, you start to feel that you may know them. I’m starting to feel that way about Mark Twain.
The “comparative” part of my Comparative Literature degree involves a study of Twain and Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. It involves endless reading about the life of Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain, and the more I read, the closer I feel to him. Of course, it doesn’t help that I’m often stumbling upon gems like this:
“Because he came to the study of foreign languages as an adult, and because he was largely self-taught, Twain was painfully aware of the semantic and grammatical barriers that separate languages and the difficulties that communication in a foreign tongue creates. To study a foreign language was, paradoxically, both liberating and oppressive. On the one hand, a command of French and German provided entry into the “adult” world of cosmopolitan, educated society; on the other, it made him a “child” again as it limited his means of expression and forced him to rely on others for the satisfaction of needs and desires.*”
This is yet another feeling that I — and many others — know all too well. Learning a new language is exciting at first… until you reach that point when you realize that there are five-year-old children in the street who speak better than you do. You learn more; you realize, someday, that you speak better than they do… but you still sound like a teenager, or at the very least a fairly uneducated person. The more you learn, the more you realize you still have to learn. It can get very discouraging, especially given how long I’ve been at it.
I don’t feel the sort of anger that Twain felt when trying to communicate with an Italian family with whom he was staying, four languages flying around the table and no one really understanding. But I do have other feelings, feelings that are strange and foreign and not-foreign all at once. When I’m with my French friends, I feel 12 and 6 and 14 and 25 and 46 all at once. I feel like me, but I don’t feel like me. I feel like a version of myself and a version of someone else. Through language, I am constantly reinvented, becoming someone who is both more and less like me.
The more I change, the more I grow into the person who moved here and lives here and speaks two languages as a regular fact of life, the more I realize how strange it is to have had those feelings — so vivid, even now — of knowing exactly who I was at 6 and 12 and 20 and 22. Of thinking, “This is it; this is me…” only to feel like a completely different person now.
Of course, the truth of it all is that everyone is composite, a person built out of pieces that come from everywhere. This piece is one of the few that has remained in tact of home, of the person I was when I lived in New York. The Italian component — oddly perpetrated by my German-Irish mother — and the security that is comfort food.
Vegetable Lasagna
For the marinara sauce:
1 onion, chopped 1 tsp. olive oil pinch of salt 1 clove garlic, minced 1 can tomato paste 1 large can tomatoes
For the béchamel:
1 Tbsp. butter 1 Tbsp. flour 1 cup milk 1 pinch nutmeg 1 pinch freshly ground black pepper
For the vegetables:
2 Tbsp. olive oil
1 small eggplant, diced 1 small zucchini, diced 2 cups crimini mushrooms, sliced
For the lasagna:
1 box no-boil lasagna noodles 2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese
First, make the marinara sauce. Heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onion to the oil with the salt. Sauté, stirring occasionally, until the onion is translucent, about 8 minutes. Add the clove of garlic and stir until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add the tomato paste. Stir to combine. Add a can of water and the tomatoes. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 30 minutes. Season to taste with salt. Use an immersion blender to purée the sauce. Set aside.
For the vegetables, toss the eggplant and zucchini with 1 Tbsp. olive oil and 1 tsp. salt. Place in one layer in a baking pan and roast at 400 degrees, tossing occasionally, until soft and browned, about 30 minutes. Meanwhile, heat 1 Tbsp. of olive oil in a pan, and add the mushrooms by the handful, browning them and then pushing them to the outsides of the pan to make room for more. When all of the mushrooms are browned, combine them with the other vegetables for the vegetable layer.
For the béchamel, whisk together the butter and the flour in a small saucepan over medium heat. Allow it to come to room temperature while you prepare the other ingredients. When ready to use, heat the cup of milk in another saucepan or in the microwave. Add the milk, by the tablespoon at first, whisking all the while. Allowing the roux to come to room temperature is the fool-proof secret to a rich, creamy béchamel. Season the béchamel and set aside.
Once these sauces are prepared, you’re ready for assembly. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Place a dollop of tomato sauce in the lasagna pan and smooth it over the bottom of the pan. Place a layer of lasagna noodles over this thin layer of sauce. Add a layer of tomato sauce over the top. Next, add a layer of vegetables. Top this with a layer of béchamel. Add a layer of noodles. Continue layering — tomato sauce, vegetables, béchamel, noodles — until you run out of ingredients. Make sure that the top layer is not noodles.
Cover the lasagna with foil and bake for 30 minutes. At this point, you can refrigerate or freeze the lasagna to eat another day, or you can continue with the recipe.
When ready to serve, sprinkle the cheese over the top of the lasagna. Bake at 400 degrees until the cheese is melted and bubbly.
*HOWE, Lawrence, Mark Twain and the Novel. The Double-Cross of Authority, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 51-52.
There are all sorts of infographics on the web, explaining how people can tell if they’re a geek, nerd or dork. There’s even a web-wide scandal (sometimes I wonder what people in 1999 would think of us…) as to whether hot girls dressed in cosplay are to be considered fake geek girls.
I’m not planning on participating in that particular conversation, except to say that as someone who started wearing coke-bottle glasses at the age of four, was so socially inept that I hid under my desk in the fifth grade to avoid dealing with unwanted attention, and used my free periods in high school to hang out in the language lab, I feel that I’m entitled to be at least somewhere on one of those Venn diagrams, though if I’ve achieved the nirvana of geek or if I’m to be relegated to dork-dom is yet to be decided.
I’m getting to a point soon… I swear. But first, I’d like to tell you a story about the aforementioned language lab.
When I was at boarding school, we had a language lab where people in lower-level language classes had to go to watch videos and do interactive activities for homework. It was in the basement of the language building, and it was one of a selection of places — including the music building, library and computer labs — that we were allowed to be signed into during study periods in the evenings. Starting in my junior year, I added a second foreign language — Spanish — to my schedule, and so I began frequenting the language lab to watch episodes of Destinos.
But when my Destinos-watching was over, I started venturing into other folders with other language titles, including — of course — the French one. The beginners French classes were using French in Action, a delightfully 80s series of videos, whereby a man in a turtleneck and a blazer sits at a desk, and he and his classroom of adult students make up a story about French people in Paris. It’s because of videos like this that I was convinced that all French teenagers hang out at cafés all day long, which, in my experience, they have neither the time nor the money to do.
In the first French in Action episode, the man at the desk tells us that bonjour doesn’t mean hello. This startling piece of news was surely a surprise for me, who had by then been studying French for nearly eight years and who may have had a few issues when deciding whether to use the passé composé or the imparfait but who was convinced beyond a doubt that bonjour did, indeed, mean hello. But I kept watching, and I finally understood what he meant, which is, essentially, that translation is a futile exercise. The words that we have in one language don’t necessarily have an equivalent in another.
Yes, bonjour kind of means hello. But as I lunched with the Law Professor last week, and he detailed his recent trip to San Francisco, he expressed surprise at how many of the locals were asking after his well-being. People he had never met before. After some time, we came to the conclusion that English’s “Hello, how are you?” is the equivalent of France’s “Bonjour,” a conclusion I wonder if the turtleneck-man behind the desk would be content with as well.
It all comes down to the fact that cross-culturally, everything is different, right down to the simplest of simple things: greetings. We don’t notice much of it — perhaps because we’re constantly seeking to understand and make ourselves understood. We’re willing to overlook minute differences between simple words in different languages, but the truth of the matter is, “How are you?” is a phrase much more frequently said in English than in French, and “bonjour” doesn’t mean “hello.”
Truffle, Hazelnut and Pumpkin Soup
Even a concept as simple as soup doesn’t merit a direct translation between the two languages, not even when there’s a word in French — soupe – that looks mysteriously like soup. When I first told the Country Boy that I was planning soup for dinner and served up a bowl of chunky minestrone, he was perplexed. Here, soup is always puréed and creamy; Campbell’s Chunky Soups wouldn’t do so well at Monoprix. That being said, I like the boxed soups you get at the grocery store here for a quick dinner. I make bread dough the night before and pop it in the oven when I get home from work. Heat up a bowl of soup, and dinner’s ready. Bon appétit.
Yeasted Dark Beer Bread (based off an original recipe first published by Food Loves Beer Magazine)
1 tablespoon dry active yeast 1 scant tablespoon sugar ¼ cup warm water 12 ounces dark beer, lukewarm 3 ½ cups all-purpose flour 2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons butter, melted
In a wide bowl, sprinkle the yeast and sugar over the water. Leave in a warm place for about 15 minutes, until the yeast foams and triples in size. Add to the beer and stir to combine.
In a large bowl, sift the flour. Make a well and add the liquid ingredients. With a wooden spoon, stir to combine the wet and dry ingredients. Turn out onto a lightly floured surface. Knead 15 to 20 minutes, until you have a smooth, pliable dough. Flatten the dough and sprinkle the salt over it. Knead the salt in for at least 10 turns.
Grease a bowl with the melted butter. Form a dough ball, and roll it in the butter until it is well-coated. Cover loosely with a piece of plastic wrap, then cover with a kitchen towel. Leave in a warm place until the dough has doubled in size, about 90 minutes. Punch the dough down and cover securely with plastic wrap. Refrigerate overnight.
When you’re ready to bake, remove the dough from the refrigerator and form a loaf in a loaf pan. Allow the dough to reach room temperature and double in size – about 1 to 2 hours, depending on how cold your refrigerator is and how warm the room is. To speed up the process, place it near a preheated oven, set to 450 F.
When the dough is ready, bake it at 450 F for 30 minutes, until the loaf sounds hollow when tapped. Allow to cool before slicing.
It’s easy, when you first move to a foreign country, to over-generalize everything.
First, you generalize based on stereotypes, expecting that all French men have a moustache, a beret and a striped shirt, that all French women are impossibly thin, smoke, and have a lover for every day of the week. You arrive; you get to know a handful of real French people that don’t come from billboards and 1950s movies. Your expectations change.
And yet, it’s still easy to generalize, though the new generalizations come not from cardboard stereotypes but rather are based upon the people you meet. You hang out with a handful of French people who drink whiskey, and you start to assume that everyone here drinks whiskey. You meet some people who are left wing; you start to think that everyone is left wing. Maybe it’s just me; maybe it’s a mechanism I’ve developed to define or categorize the people that live in this country, a way to make sense of the ways in which we are different from them.
But if that were the case, I wouldn’t be boxing myself into stereotypes as well.
Because there’s another kind of over-generalization happening in my life: the longer I live in France, the more I start to cling onto things that are “typically” American… whether they were interesting to me when I lived in the States or not. For whatever reason, in the past six years, this native New Yorker has become a country music fan, the proud owner of no fewer than three pairs of cowboy boots and an amateur student of the American Constitution and the values of our founding fathers. My Masters thesis involves a comparison of these values in France and in America at the beginning of the 19th century, and yet when we studied American history and politics in school, I couldn’t have been more bored.
I over-generalized the French when I first arrived here, assuming that all families were like my host family, that all girls were like my host sister. Later, I assumed that all boys were like my first French boyfriend, all of which I’ve since learned not to be the case. I know that there’s still a wealth of different sides of the French that I have yet to see, different people I have yet to meet who will expose yet another facet of the nation I love. I know that, even today, as aware as I am of how silly it was to generalize when I first arrived, I’m still doing it; I’m still assuming that because the majority of my French friends studied computer science, like to dance and sing at karaoke bars, and ride motorcycles on the weekends that most French people do those things… and while I realize how silly it is, I have a hard time stopping. I want to be able to make sense of the cultural differences between America and France, and yet I know that neither one really exists as an entity, but rather as a composition, made up of hundreds of thousands of differences that form a heterogenous whole.
And yet I’m still doing it, for whatever reason. Trying to draw lines between “the French” to create a portrait, while simultaneously grasping at anything and everything that seems “American” in order to feel closer to the country that is such a part of me and yet remains so far away.
Case in point: jambalaya. My first ever jambalaya was one I made on request in Paziols a few years ago. It was good but nothing special; after seeing Jennifer’s – yet another American expat in France — I decided I needed to try my hand at this dish once again. The new version was delicious, though far from traditional, as the chicken legs are roasted instead of stewed, and even further from all-American, with merguez sausage and a bouquet garni on the ingredients list. But all the same, it made me feel slightly closer to home… wherever that is.
1 pound headless jumbo shrimp, shells on 3 cups homemade chicken broth 1 bouquet garni (bay leaf and thyme, held together with kitchen twine) 1 Tbsp. vegetable oil 220 grams (7.75 ounces) fresh chorizo, merguez or other spiced sausage 6 chicken drumsticks 2 yellow onions, chopped 1 green pepper, chopped 1 stalk celery, chopped 2 cloves garlic, minced 1 28-ounce can whole peeled tomatoes 1 cup long-grain rice salt and pepper to taste Tabasco sauce, for serving
Shell the shrimp, setting aside the meat. Place the shells in a medium saucepan. Add the chicken broth and bouquet garni. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, then cover and turn off the heat. Allow to infuse 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, heat the vegetable oil over medium-high heat in a large, heavy stockpot with a lid. Cut the sausage into bite-sized pieces and add it to the oil, turning to brown on all sides. Remove to a plate. Salt and pepper the chicken drumsticks, then add them to the pot to sear on all sides. You are not looking to cook the chicken and sausage through; just to sear them. Remove the chicken drumsticks to the plate.
Add the onions, pepper and celery to the pot, along with a pinch of salt. Cook, stirring frequently, until the vegetables have cooked down and just begun to brown, about 10 minutes. Add the garlic and cook until fragrant, 1-2 minutes.
Open the can of tomatoes. Use your hands to remove each tomato, crushing it as you add it to the pot. When all of the tomatoes have been added, reduce the heat to low and cook, stirring occasionally, until the mixture is thick, about 5 minutes.
Meanwhile, line a baking dish with foil, and lay the chicken drumsticks on it. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
When the tomatoes and vegetables have thickened, add the sausage and any juices that have run off from the chicken and sausage to the pot.
Strain the broth into a measuring cup, reserving the bouquet garni. Add the juice from the tomatoes and water if needed to get 3 cups of liquid. Add the liquid to the pot, and then add the rice and the bouquet garni. Cover and cook on low for 25 minutes, or until the rice is tender.
Meanwhile, place the baking sheet with the chicken drumsticks into the oven, and roast 25 minutes, until cooked through with crisp skin.
When the rice is cooked through, season to taste with salt and pepper. You can also add more liquid if needed to achieve the consistency you like. Turn off the heat and add the shrimp, tossing until they are just cooked. Serve in bowls with the roasted chicken drumsticks and Tabasco sauce.
