ExpatW

In Food

Quintessentially French Food

November 1, 2021 1 Comment

I stared at it. If it still had its eyes I’m sure it would be staring at me back. Trembling slightly, maybe, in anticipation of its fate. Fortunately there were no eyes, it was the wrong end of the animal for that. Literally. Had it been moving it would instead have aimed a deft kick. It was not moving. Of course it wasn’t, it was on my plate. I was supposed to eat it. I had eaten all around it. All that remained to be eaten was it. I took a breath, grasped my knife, and sliced into it, preparing for the offensive onslaught to my olfactory senses.

I like to think I’m pretty adventurous. I’ll usually eat anything. I mean anything. Food is always a pleasure, particularly when shared with others. The only things I will not eat are tripe and black pudding. Not a chance. I have eaten each once and that was enough. The first time, I was at an Asian restaurant with my brother and mother where the waitress tried to trick me by serving “beef honeycomb.” My brother and I liked beef so we decided honeyed beef would be tasty. My mother waited till we had a mouthful each, then said casually “You know that’s tripe, right?” The crunchy chewy sensation was difficult to stomach especially now that I knew what it was.

As for black pudding, well, I was forced to by my English colleagues who had piled it up on their plates for breakfast on one of our work trips. They polished the whole lot off except one small portion that they cut off for me and made me eat. Fried blood. My emotional centre is way too connected to my stomach, the mere image triggers feelings of disgust and illness.

Most people when they think of traditional French food, they think of snails and frogs’ legs. I have eaten both of these and love them. Snails smothered in garlic butter and parsley are totally yummy little chewy delicacies, a texture similar to a mussel. Never been able to convince non-French people to order them. My daughter turned her nose up at them. Couldn’t convince her to try the frogs’ legs either. Frogs’ legs look like mini chicken wings with very delicate bones. Breaded with lemon, garlic and parsley, they taste just like chicken too. Also totally yummy. Some people can’t get past the fact they were once slimy green things hopping along their lilypads oblivious as to what they were to become. But imagine my excitement when I discovered them on the menu at a little local restaurant just across from my apartment.

However, of course, there are many more traditional dishes depending on the region. In the north you’ll get choucroute de la mer – seafood sauerkraut, oysters, moules mariniere (mussels in white wine), salted lamb and kig ha farz, a Breton stew containing different types of meat and vegetables. Not great for your arteries. In the east, real sauerkraut and sausages plus quiche lorraine. As you move south, snails and truffles start to feature, along with foie gras, cassoulet, and of course frogs’ legs. Along the coasts in the south you get the famous fish soup bouillabaisse, the north coasts, its equivalent, cotriade. And of course, the seafood platters, simple chilled seafood served with a slice of lemon. Avoid the bigorneaux. They look like big chunks of snot.

So here I was, sitting in an auberge that had been recommended to me by the agent who helped me find my apartment. An auberge is a restaurant that serves only locally sourced food, prepared on the property (believe it or not there are restaurants where the dishes are prepared offsite and simply cooked in the oven at the restaurant. Make sure you find a restaurant that is “fait maison” – made on site). The auberge itself was high on a mountain road in the middle of the Vosges, a region popular for hiking and mountain-biking. It’s easy to see why – the panoramic views are breathtaking. A beautiful stone building, the auberge is a quirky shape, and covered in ivy turning red and gold in the Autumn sun. Its terrasse looks out over the ranges facing fully into the setting sun. The welcoming owner took my reservation and then advised me where to go for a hike while I waited for the restaurant to open officially for the evening.

As I finished watching the sun set, its orange and gold rays spreading over the hills like a velvet cloak, I hurried back, my teeth starting to chatter with the cold. I wondered what hearty local produce would be served in this auberge, perched on its narrow mountain road, with hardly another building in sight. Maybe some rich beef stew drowned in red wine and surrounded with locally grown vegetables, home-made jus and hot crusty chewy baguette fresh from the oven. I was salivating already.

I sat down, took a local aperitif and looked at the menu. Turns out local produce here is mainly pig-related. Specifically, andouillette. And feet. Pig’s feet. Andouillette is a type of sausage made with the intestinal tubes and minced up pig offal from various internal organs. It is popular in many rural areas of France. If it’s made from the large intestine, the smell is really special. When you cut into it, you can see the intestinal tubes more or less intact, poking out at various lengths, not too dissimilar to a cathedral’s organ pipes . They are not all minced up nicely like a normal sausage. I have been with people who have eaten it, I have smelled the odour of it, I have never eaten it myself.

I continued my search of the menu. Except for some vegetarian dishes, it was composed entirely of andouillette in some form or other. Well I didn’t come all this way to eat vegetarian. I reminded myself I was an adventurer, a courageous empty nester exploring far-off lands for the first time. Experiencing local food, I told myself, was part of the package. I ordered a smoked pork salad entree and then the dish with the least amount of andouillette in it as a main. Pigs’ feet stuffed with andouillette.

Fortunately it arrived as one big fat phallic-looking log rolled in breadcrumbs, and not as actual feet. I ate all the vegetables and potates first. As I sliced into it, I breathed a little sigh of relief. There were still the organ pipe tubes, but they were small – not the large intestine. So no overwhelming smell of offal mixed with intestinal waste product from the pig’s last supper. The feet were minced and the whole concoction, although distinctly piggy-tasting, was spiced and seasoned perfectly with a lightly chunky texture. I’m not saying I would rush out to eat it again, but it had that wonderful rustic home-cooking feel to it, made even better washed down with a local pinot noir. I looked around at the completely full restaurant, other diners contentedly munching on these evidently popular dishes.

I nearly didn’t dare to order dessert, but out came a simple bowl of fresh fromage blanc with drunken cherries. The perfect piggy palate cleanser.

You must try pig’s feet and andouillette once. Not in a tourist restaurant, but the real thing, fait maison, in an auberge.

I ate at Auberge de la Ferme St Vallier , Girmont Val d’Ajol, Vosges. They also have rooms to rent so you can stay if you don’t feel like braving the mountain road after dinner.

In Expat Experiences

Solo Furniture Building

October 12, 2021 3 Comments

On what planet did someone actually think it was a great idea to create a large-scale furniture store where the winning feature was that you got to construct the furniture yourself? More to the point, how come they were right and people actually flock to this to-remain-nameless store? (It’s big, blue, and yellow).

One of the things that sucks about expatting alone is that you have to do everything yourself unless you can rope some kind random person that you just met into doing stuff for you. I mean, sure, I’ve done cheap flatpacks before. That time when you’re a student and/or living on the bones of your bum so you economise and buy flatpacks of white MDF board shelving to build yourself a bookcase. A few screws and dowel later, bit of banging with the screwdriver and voila, 30 minutes later, there’s your bookcase.

I am no longer a student. I am a with-it, daring, adventurous 40-something expat. My life is supposed to be seen on social networks as glamorous, chic and sophisticated. Quaffing French wine and munching on snails. OK it’s true I do that from time to time. But never as an expat did I think I would be spending my Saturday morning building a couch.

Yes, a couch.

Up until now I have prided myself on travelling and living a minimalist existence. When I first went on my big world trip I shed an enormous amount of Stuff. I am by no means materialistic, but I realised just how much Stuff I had accumulated over the years when I moved out of my house. I got rid of a lot of it, although my daughter would not agree, seeing as there is still Stuff in the shed.

My first three years in France I owned clothes and a couple of soft toys. I rented already-furnished places. My last place, I acquired some coffee cups, a car, and decided to bring over from New Zealand some books and my treasured snow globes from different parts of the world. But I still owned not a jot. Except the cat. Then Covid hit and I acquired a yoga mat, a blender, a swiss ball, superfood powders, and a penchant for good French wine.

So when I needed to move recently for work over to the other side of France, I was blessed with just being able to fill up the car and leave. OK I may have done a couple of car trips (those superfood powders and cat toys take up a lot of space). However, I was faced with renting an unfurnished apartment in a tight rental and housing market. This required furnishing with everything in one hit on a limited budget.

Bring on ginormous blue and yellow furniture chain store. This store does not exist in New Zealand. People talk of it as if it is some holy grail of home decoration, the answer to all your prayers. Stylish, Swedish furniture, mainly in wood or wood/steel mix paying homage to a sort of steampunk sauna trend. Extremely reasonable prices. There is also every type of utensil and appliance so you can literally deck out your entire house solely at this one store. Right down to the persian rugs (hand made too) and bohemian cushions (I confess, these are a personal favourite and I have succumbed to buying many).

I had been warned. There is just one small catch. You have to buy everything separately and build it all yourself. Buy here and you’ll spend much time cursing and breaking your back while putting together furniture. Millions of screws in packages. Instructions that come only in pictures, which are so iconic they feature in instagram posts. It will then all break when you next move. I had built flatpacks before, I decided. I was ready, I decided. How hard can this be?

I guess I should have been alerted when I booked the furniture-building service for a bookshelf, TV stand, table, couch, bed, chest of drawers and wardrobe. Total estimated construction time 10.7 hours. That’s nearly 1.5 hours per item.

For some reason the couch couldn’t be delivered the same day as everything else, because I had added it later. By some quirk of French simplicity I would have needed to cancel the entire first order then re-order everything in order to add the couch. There was no way to simply add it ot the existing scheduled delivery. Plus there was a six week waiting time and by the time I’d saved for the couch I was already four weeks in.

Here’s the thing. This place also makes its name on modularity. Furniture items don’t necessarily come all in one package when you order. That would be too simple. No, you can’t just order “a bed” and expect all the right parts to turn up. You have to make sure that you have included in your order the frame plus the slats plus that thing that goes down the middle of the slats. Miss one of those and you are heading back to the store to find whatever bit you missed. Then you get the joy of putting the bed together, including each individual slat. I spent an entire day at the store carefully checking that I had ordered all the correct bits. Even the lamp came in three separate packages.

When I ordered the couch, I thought I was being clever. I had got the hang of this place. I checked the picture at the store. I looked on the internet site. I read reviews. All pointed to the fact that you needed to make sure the couch came with the material cover actually on the couch. Plus the cushion covers. Plus the cushions. The couch I wanted definitely came with the cover. However from what I could see online it turned out the store didn’t stock the cushions. Since when do couch cushions come separately to a couch?? I ordered the couch part from the store. Then I ordered the cushions from another store with, helpfully, a pick up location an hour away.

I drove the hour to pick up the three cushions. Three months later after missed deliveries, long phone calls to customer service, and cushions staring at me from their place on the floor, the couch finally arrived. In three large pieces. Like seriously, I had to build the couch. Of course, I opened up one package to discover three cushions inside. Bastards. I now had six cushions.

The fun part was discovering the bag of screws and allen keys. An enormous bag of various types of screws, wheels, and couch feet. Some of the screws even came in two parts. WTAF? What nobsmoking nitwimble thought up that trick? Just give me effing whole screws!

“I know, not only can we take up excruciatingly long hours of their life and make them build a couch, but let’s have some fun making them build screws too! It’ll be just like playing with lego!” I kid you not, I spent half an hour putting screws together. By the time I finished, my fingers ached and I wanted to stab someone.

“The trick is,” said the guy from the agency service who found me my apartment, and who I persuaded to come in and build my kitchen island for me, “you don’t use the tools they provide. You need to use a cordless drill” he continued breezily, fitting screws, his cordless drill whirring away. I do not have a cordless drill.

I figured three big pieces of couch, should be relatively straightforward. That was until I discovered the bag of screws and allen keys. All I can say is that I’m grateful I do yoga. Once I finally had the screws together, there were poses of varying degrees of difficulty as I tried to get the sodding things in in tight corners with the godforsaken tiny allen keys. Not for the first time did I curse myself for being cheap and buying a screwdriver set instead of a drill. I thought “Here, I am woman, hear me roar!” “Women can do anything!” “I can build a couch without any help!”

Yes, you can build a couch without help and without a cordless drill. It will take you approximately four hours, much swearing, significant mental rotation ability (which I sadly lack) to read the instruction manual pictures , bandaids from the inevitable screw-stabbing, and a heatpack for your sore back.

But I did it, I finally did it. I proudly text a work colleague who happens to be a maintenance guy, to show off my achievement. I made mention that I did not have a cordless drill. “Oh I have one of those, he said.”

It’s a nice couch. I managed to squeeze the six cushions on, plus another three bohemian ones. There’s just enough space to sit on it. The cat has taken to it too. It’s sufficiently blue enough to show up all her cat hair. I came home after a long day’s work, looking forward to stretching out on it with said heatpack only to discover the cat had indeed profited from it during the day. As well as leaving me a present of well-aimed cat barf neatly stacked on one of the cushions.

At least I have six. Don’t do it. Buy your couch from a place that sells them whole.

In Wanderlusting

Bottles in Bourgogne

September 26, 2021 4 Comments

I have decided that tottering in heels through vineyards, while elegant, is not particularly practical. But then I’ve never been a particularly practical kind of girl except when I have my hands deep in garden soil. This was not the best occasion to have one’s heels deep in garden soil, while visiting some of the most famous vineyards in France. There was, however, a logical reason for my madness: quite simply, I felt like being a bit posh.

It was time for a weekend away to reconnect with life, and also time to indulge my wine hobby. What better activity than enrolling in a one day wine discovery course in Beaune, in the Bourgogne region. I had never been to Beaune. I knew that Bourgogne wines are considered some of the top wines in France, if not the top. A good Nuits-Saint-Georges had already traversed my lips and its mellow, silky, chocolatey body is to be cherished. Price tag to boot. As well, there are 33 Grand Crus in Bourgogne, the top of the top wines.

So I figured that the kind of people attending this wine school would likely be refined, well-dressed and cultured, mature French. Heavens, there might even be a Count among them. I also figured that, seeing as I spent most of my days in a high vis vest clumping around in safety shoes, it was time to have fun dressing up just enough not to look silly.

When I arrived to the class, I realised I was brushing up against the silly side. The teacher arrived to the class in t-shirt and jeans. My classmates were indeed refined, and a range of ages. There was one other english-speaking expat in the class, and we quickly exchanged phone numbers. Meeting other expats can be gold when you are struggling with adopted-country life.

Most were wearing jeans and canvas sneakers, some with scarves draped casually around their shoulders, in that understated French chic. There were a couple of flowy sundresses on show, paired with denim jackets. OK so at least I wasn’t in a ballgown, with my black trousers and vintage deep purple and black lace top, but I was definitely the only one in heels. No matter, I thought. We’ll be spending the day largely seated as we taste wines, I thought. Then we eat lunch at a local, casually chic, French restaurant, paired with more wine, I thought. Once we get to the vineyards, we’ll be seated in the cave of some chateau tasting even more wines, I thought.

The thing is, I wasn’t actually far wrong. We did, in fact, do this. What I hadn’t factored in was that after tasting approximately tenty-billion very good wines, the little walking that we did do, was significantly complicated.

Added to that, the evening prior I had decided to eat out in the centre of Beaune and whet my palate with a couple of glasses of the local variety with my meal. I had told myself I would definitely be in bed by 10pm so that I could be refreshed and ready for the day ahead. That was before I met the table of English, Irish and Scotsmen on some kind of weekend boys midlife crisis trip from Luxembourg.

At 12:30am, I was back at the hotel, safely in bed. The two wines I had had were somehow joined by another two before I got home. While I was in that nice, sleepy space, dozing off, I was reminded that Mademoiselle Le Chat had joined me on this trip. Normally she settles quite happily into hotel life but this time round, she decided she was having none of it, and played zoomies and meowies from 3am.

So the wine class was already a little effort, but after tasting a few in the morning and dutifully spitting them out (I nearly cried doing this with the Nuits-Saint-Georges Premier Cru) and a little nap in the shuttle on the way to the vineyards, my form was returning.

We visited Clos de Vougeot, a former 12th century chateau and vineyard run by Cistercian monks (after all, wine was needed for Mass, the teacher told us with a twinkle in his eye). Now a tour chateau, its surrounding lots (“parcelles”) of vines are divided among no less than 80 owners. Next stop was the famous Domaine No 1 of Bourgogne and the smallest at 2 acres, Romanée-Conti. A quick Google search reveals you can get your hands on a bottle from here starting from a mere 3300 euros, all the way up to 49000 euros.

We finished the vineyard tour at a Vosne-Romanée vineyard…with more tastings. Bourgogne does truffles. Not the chocolate kind, but the kind that dogs and pigs sniff out. As luck would have it, the truffle season had just started. We were served a platter of truffled butter on toasts washed down with a Nuits-Saint-Georges Premier Cru. Suffice to say, I did not spit this one out. Actually, because of covid rules, we were sadly banned from spitting any wine out.

Beaune is a stunningly beautiful village, as is the surrounding countryside. I fell in love with it immediately. The buildings are typically French, built of stone and peppered with shutters and flowers. The waiters are friendly and helpful. The centre is awash with wine shops and terrace restaurants serving extremely good Bourgogne fare. You can go for the traditional beef bourguignon, (beef drowned in red wine), oeuf meurette (eggs drowned in red wine) or snails drowned in (no, not red wine … parsley and garlic!), as well as another local specialty, jambon persillé (ham drowned in parsley). Or try the tiny chanterelle mushrooms. It’s very simple fare, but totally mouth-watering.

If you do want to posh it up a notch, go for the supreme de volaille (chicken breast) with Epoisse potato gratin. Epoisse cheese is the local specialty (along with Comte) which is added to any dish with a cream sauce to give that extra special kick. It also happens to be my favourite cheese of all time. So I just had to have a wodge of it with my decaf.

Exploring the vineyards amongst chateaux, watching the pickers harvest the grapes, and listening to the history of the region from a teacher is also a very enjoyable way to spend a sunny afternoon. I must admit, it wasn’t too much of a downside to be standing, slightly wobbly, in heels amongst 50-70 year old Grand Cru vines. I went back the next day. In sensible shoes.