…that Frenchfoodfool is going on holidays. I know, I know: This will be hard for all of us (and it’ll bring clickrates to zero point zero, alas!). But try to do it my way during the rough times: Switch off your computers and go back to nature for a while, enjoying the sea, some fresh air, the salty water, the sun – and pop into a nice trattoria, a bistrot, a food stall wherever you roam. I’ll be very happy to meet […]
Categories: Whatever Works • Tags: Food
…steamed and topped with a well-seasoned butter mix, you don’t need more to be decently fed. It’s a perfect dish for the 14th of July celebration, France’s holiest holiday. The masses will gather on the Champs-Elysées to commemorate the revolutionary days of 1789…well, ok, I’m kidding. Nowadays, it’s not about commemoration, instead you will find lots of drunken guys waiting to be kissed and, honestly, if I was a woman, I would try to avoid the most famous boulevard of […]
Categories: Dinner, good food, Lunch, seafood, signature dish • Tags: Food, France, recipes
…made by dedicated people I don’t know but admire for their passion. It’s a lot of fun to search Google for “flag cake pictures”. 80 percent of them come with stars & stripes, as you can imagine, but tonight the USA won’t play a role for a change. Oranje and “la Roja” will enter the pitch for the final match of this World Cup 2010, the event is only two hours away. Tomorrow, quite a lot of people will eat […]
Categories: poetry, signature dish, Whatever Works, World • Tags: Food, Football, Nation
…and if you asked me, I’d say we should bring them up with the best food we can possibly get hold of. I mean, what’s the use of industrial fish fingers, artificially flavoured instant sauces, packaged pizza (“Greek style”) and deep frozen chicken from the killing fields of our times? There isn’t any, as you might agree. So you have to cook – which isn’t a guarantee for success though. Maybe your loved ones are not willing to enjoy what […]
Categories: Dinner, good food, malbouffe, Whatever Works • Tags: Children, Education, Fish, Food
…on a Chinese day weatherwise, it was cloudy but steaming hot in Paris today and I had to change my shirt three times. First time came this morning after I came back from the street market on Boulevard Richard Lenoir (you know it already, don’t you?). Have a look, it’s a weird selection: Seems, I had winter dreams while shopping (I mean: celery?). I’ll show you soon what I do with the cucumbers in the center, they’re of a special kind […]
Categories: good food, Paris, Savoy, Whatever Works • Tags: Fish, Food, France
…was a hit ballad song once you might have forgotten or never heard, I always loved it, actually, and I still do like it, I found it on youtube just a couple of minutes ago and was asking myself what might have happened to Irene Cara? Anyway – I’m on my own this week, family is gone which is nice for a change on the one hand and on the other it isn’t, of course. I miss our dinners and […]
Categories: poetry, seafood, Whatever Works • Tags: Fame, Food, Music
…right after the starter and then another one after the main course and maybe a last one before the dessert is finally served – that’s what is called a trou normand in colloquial French, a Norman “hole”, meaning in fact that you “extend” the capacities of your stomach by rinsing it with hard liquor. That sounds barbaric? Well, Normandy is quite a rough place, food there is mostly about butter, cream and cheese so you can always use some help […]
Categories: Drinks, poetry, Whatever Works • Tags: Food, France, Wine
…that’s what French people say when they sit down in a bistro like Astier in Paris, a picturesque little restaurant complete with chequered tablecloth, l’ardoise (that’s a chalkboard) and even original Laguiole knives on display tucked on the wall. The experienced traveller could shy away and with good reason: beware, this could be a tourist trap as well! But don’t fear: here, at Astier, in a street named after Jean-Pierre Timbaud (who was a unionist and a freedom fighter once) you’re […]
…combining French world-class cherry tomatoes, real Greek féta (made from sheep milk!), basil from my (French) kitchen window sill, the leaves sprinkled with old Italian balsamico vinegar and spiced with pepper from Indonesia and Atlantic sea salt from Spain – the whole served on a plate of Portuguese origin (offered to me by the concierge of our house) and the whole thing somehow representing the Italian flag. Come on, it can’t get much better than that! And it’s delicious!
…by cooking them in grey, coarse sea salt – you won’t regret it (even if you don’t understand what “turn two giltheads into salty dogs” means). It’s a very simple, yet delicious dish, I guess the idea is Italian, originally, but you can find this preparation in places like southern France, too. The fish is kind of steaming, sealed off from the rest of the world by the salt (which turns into a firm crust while baking). And the result […]
Categories: Dinner, good food, Lunch, seafood, skills • Tags: Fish, Food
…quite often comes from pizza delivery services – and I’ve never understood why. It takes 5 minutes to make your home-made pizza dough, it takes 5 minutes to dress your pizza, it takes 15 minutes to bake it in your oven – and in between, yes, it takes one or two hours or so to let the dough go. The final product is superior to any pizza you can buy. The deep-frozen ones clearly are terrible, they contain industrial ingredients […]
Categories: Dinner, good food, Whatever Works • Tags: Fast Food, Food, Pizza
…when the summer heat is on in your city. In Paris, we have days of canicule right now – that’s a European kind of heat wave that Australians, Indonesians or Africans would find quite laughable, I guess. But we don’t have that settler-style toughness, so we start suffering when the temperatures hit 30° Celsius (86° F) during the day and don’t fall below 20°C (68°F) at night. That’s exactly where we are in Paris these days, summer is here finally, […]
Categories: Dinner, good food, signature dish, Whatever Works • Tags: Canicule, Food
