For a while now, Frenchified has been Stultified, i.e. on the back burner whilst I’ve been struggling with unprecedented workload and exhaustion. No longer. I miss writing about France, so I’m dusting off the blog and preparing to give it some renewed OOMPH. Thank you for being patient and if things are a bit quiet here as I give Frenchified some much-needed CPR, please do visit me at my other blog, Epicurienne.
Here’s a photo of the menu from the restaurant at the top of the Centre Pompidou. It has dazzling views over Paris and features as a location in various films, like le Divorce, starring Kate Hudson.
La Tranche Sur Mer, on the Atlantic Coast of France, is one of those typically Euro beach destinations: lots of camping grounds, men who think it’s okay to terrify the female public by strutting around in a pair of form-revealing speedos, kids dragging giant inflatable animal-shaped float-aids along the street and lots and lots of ice cream shops. I can’t actually work out how all the different ice cream shops make any money because there are so many of them, but practicalities aside, they are skilled in the art of displaying their products in ways that make you not just want ice cream but physically NEED it.
The vendors accessorise their ice cream to show what taste you’ll be licking off the cone. In the top picture, the nutella ice cream was indicated by a whole jar of nutella stuck into the top of its vat. In the picture above, strawberries show that the red ice cream is strawberry flavoured. That’s what I call ingenious ice cream merchandising. Then below we have limes showing lime ice cream and flowers to indicate… what exactly? It can’t be flower ice cream. Perhaps it’s almond. Those flower petals look suspiciously like dragées and some couples give sugared almond flowers to the guests on their wedding day.
The shot below isn’t great but I have yet to work out what Arlequin ice cream is. Hundreds and thousands sprinkled over the top… all different colours… could be tutti frutti, I guess. I’ve googled and still can’t work it out. If you read this and know what Arlequin ice cream tastes like, please let me know!
Monsieur and I didn’t even glance at the dessert card at the restaurant where we’d dined that evening. We paid the bill, walked out onto the still-busy street, found an ice cream stand where the ‘accessorising’ was particularly good, and ordered. I had a two scoop cup with coconut and guimauve.
“How do you translate guimauve into English?” I asked Monsieur.
“I don’t really know.” Came his reply.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est, la guimauve?” I asked the ice cream man.
“La guimauve, c’est, euh, la guimauve!”
He gave a gallic shrug, throwing his hands up into the air. Monsieur and the ice cream man were of no help to me at all. Looking at the display, the guimauve ice cream was studded with multi-coloured marshmallow twists on sticks. I hoped that when I ordered guimauve flavour, the taste would indeed be marshmallow, and it was. That’s another reason why this sort of merchandising is so clever: it helps foreigners like me to understand what they’re eating…
This sign hangs outside a Chambres d’Hôte or B&B on the Ile de Ré. What I love most about this is the name:
La Maison du puits sans fond
Roughly translated, that means The House of the Bottomless Well. It sounds like a fairy story waiting to be written. Sadly, when you look up a dictionary definition, the term ‘puits sans fond’ is far less romantically translated into ‘bottomless pit’.
There are also songs called ‘Puits sans fond’.
Here’s one by a group called Vulgaires Machins. I’m not so sure about their name but their Puits sans fond gets 5 stars on You Tube, so here they are:
As you may or may not realise, things have been a bit quiet around Frenchified of late. You can blame the Dutch for that. I won a competition to go to Blog08, a bloggers’ conference in Amsterdam, through vowing to wear Big, Wooden, Netherlandish clogs all day long if I won. Apparently, that was funny, so I won and jetted off to the land of wooden shoes to learn what I could about blogging. As part of my competition pledge I also had to set up Clogblogger, a site devoted to clogs. That meant no time for Frenchified.
One of the great things about going to Blog08 was meeting new people. One new acquaintance, Natasha Cloutier, hails from Canada but has lived in the Netherlands for some time. As you can probably tell from her name, Natasha lived in the francophone part of Canada, and therefore has a passion for French language and culture, especially French music.
Natasha’s site, Oh La La, concentrates on French sounds from the 50s right up to present day. She even creates downloadable podcasts with some of her latest favourites, so if you feel like Frenchifying your MP3 player, tune in to Radio Oh La La and tap your feet to everything from classic Gainsbourg croons through to the retro beat of César et ses Romains. Enjoy.
Thanks to ThePolskiBlog’s blogroll, I have today found a fantastic French food blog based in Austin, Texas of all places! Called The French Fork, it’s the blog-child of Laetitia Bertrand, a French native with a no-nonsense approach to French gastronomy. Because I can’t say it any better myself, here’s Laetitia’s blog profile:
Laetitia Bertrand was born in Bourgoin-Jallieu, France, and was raised in the small village of Bouvesse, just outside of France’s gastronomical capital, Lyon. Passionate about food, she was influenced by both her grandparents’ cooking from an early age. Today, she aspires to take the mystery out of French cooking – believing that French cooking does not have to be hard, or complicated. She currently lives in Austin, Texas with her husband, where they pursue a French lifestyle and split time between Texas and France.
Laetitia’s latest posts include gratin dauphinois and a recipe for zucchini soup made with La Vache Qui Rit. It would seem we share a love of those cheese triangles. Believe it or not (and remember, I’m a Pacific-born kid) the first time I ever had La Vache Qui Rit was in Honolulu. We were there on a family holiday, staying at a self-catering apartment with a fantastic pool complex. We shopped for provisions at a local corner store, and that’s where we first bought La Vache Qui Rit cheese. It was called Laughing Cow there, for obvious reasons, but I loved the happy cow face on the packaging and it’s one of those brands which is so strong that it hasn’t needed changing since. In fact, bearing in mind that my Honolulu introduction to the happy vache was just less than thirty years ago, that has to be a superb example of brand survival.
I digress. Visit Laetitia at The French Fork for practical culinary inspiration but I’d suggest you eat something first. This is the sort of site that makes you hungry.
Just to let you know that I have hundreds of things to post about concerning the Frenchified world, but a bloggers’ competition has come between me and abundant posting time. I entered the competition to win a ticket to Blog08 and Essential Travel threw in the flights and travel insurance, so later this week I will be at my very first Blogference, wearing a big pair of clogs to promote the concept that won me the competition: Clogblogger. If you want to catch me, click here. Or here. And before you know it, I’ll be back HERE.
As it’s the anniversary of 9-11, here’s a very relevant clip from Renaud and Axelle Red:
And here are the lyrics:
Petit Portoricain, bien intégré quasiment New-yorkais
Dans mon building tout de verre et d’acier,
Je prends mon job, un rail de coke, un café,
Petite fille Afghane, de l’autre côté de la terre,
Jamais entendu parler de Manhattan,
Mon quotidien c’est la misère et la guerre
Deux étrangers au bout du monde, si différents
Deux inconnus, deux anonymes, mais pourtant,
Pulvérisés, sur l’autel, de la violence éternelle
Un 747, s’est explosé dans mes fenêtres,
Mon ciel si bleu est devenu orage,
Lorsque les bombes ont rasé mon village
Deux étrangers au bout du monde, si différents
Deux inconnus, deux anonymes, mais pourtant,
Pulvérisés, sur l’autel, de la violence éternelle
So long, adieu mon rêve américain,
Moi, plus jamais esclave des chiens
Vite imposé l’islam des tyrans
Ceux là ont-ils jamais lu le coran ?
Suis redev’nu poussière,
Je s’rai pas maître de l’univers,
Ce pays que j’aimais tellement serait-il
Finalement colosse aux pieds d’argile ?
Les dieux, les religions,
Les guerres de civilisation,
Les armes, les drapeaux, les patries, les nations,
Font toujours de nous de la chair à canon
Deux étrangers au bout du monde, si différents
Deux inconnus, deux anonymes, mais pourtant,
Pulvérisés, sur l’autel, de la violence éternelle
Deux étrangers au bout du monde, si différents
Deux inconnus, deux anonymes, mais pourtant,
Pulvérisés, sur l’autel, de la violence éternelle.
If you’d like to read more about this song, which was released to great acclaim in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Centre, click here.
Nothing happens in this clip from You Tube because this song was never made into a video, but this is one of my favourite renditions of Les Yeux Ouverts. If the tune sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the same as ‘Dream a little dream of me’. Same dog, different words!
If you feel like reading more about Enzo Enzo, click here, but be warned – it’s the French wikipedia entry.
This is a photo of a horse-butcher’s shop in Fontenay-le-Comte. I simply had to take a photo. Monsieur didn’t get it, but he didn’t grow up in a country where eating horse would be like eating the family dog. Kiwis just wouldn’t ever consider it. Because of that, for me, seeing horse butchers is half novelty and half horror. Thank heavens I can’t eat red meat. Now I’ll never have to consider eating Black Beauty’s cousins.
At our Christmas party last year, an Italian colleague explained to us what horse meat tastes like. She thoroughly enjoys eating horse and waxed lyrical about her favourite horse preparation methods. Meanwhile, a strictly ethical vegetarian colleague gagged and had to excuse herself.
If you think eating horse is bad, I suggest you pop across to Epicurienne, where I’m currently discussing the more bizarre items to be found on a Vietnamese menu. Monsieur and I are in Vietnam right now, studiously avoiding the consumption of anything involving monkey, dog or snake meat. Wish us luck! The Vietnamese motto is “if you can catch it, you can eat it!” Does that include me?
If you’re a weekend Telegraph reader, you’ve probably come across Michael Wright. He’s one of the many Brits who’ve up-sticks and crossed the Channel in search of a better life, subsiding his new farm-country existence by writing a weekly column called C’est La Folie. The column is the inspiration for one of the most entertaining books about the transition to French life that I’ve come across so far, also named C’est La Folie.
The book starts out with entertaining anecdotes explaining why MW decides to leave London and his job as a theatre critic. We don’t need much convincing that he’s right to leave sunny Dulwich for a ramshackle house in need of his love and attention. La Folie, as it’s called, is suitably close to an aerodrome, so MW might be able to take his plane (if there’s ever an opening on the waiting list, that is), and there’s plenty of room for his beloved feline companion, with all the mouse-hunting opportunities that a country house provides.
C’est La Folie follows MW’s assimilation into the community of ‘Jolibois’, a false name for a real place, created in the interests of privacy. His quest for love pops up from time to time, we meet his neighbours, his visitors and the local pharmacist, who helps him with a sensitive medical issue concerning hens. An unexpectedly important part is played by MW’s sheep. Dwarf-like with wool likened to Rastafarian dreadlocks, their personalities are as individual and vibrant as the people described in these pages. If you’re an animal person, you’ll be laughing one minute and close to crying the next as you work your way through this tale.
When I turned the last page of C’est La Folie, I immediately wanted to read the next instalment. For that, we’ll have to wait, but any curiosity regarding MW’s progress in France can be assuaged by tuning into his column. This is a self-deprecating character who has worked hard to fit into a very different lifestyle from the one he left behind in London. Unlike some other writers in the same vein, he is refreshingly un-snobbish about it. That’s what makes this book even more fun to read. Highly recommended.
