Now is as good a time as any to talk about food and France. I like food a lot and I like the food I like a lot more than I like food in general. When I got here I noticed that the French like food a lot too. The thing about the food they like is that it's very different from the food I like. Another thing is that they like French food and mainly just other French food, there isn't a lot of diversity. I have yet to take a picture of the dairy section of the grocery store but it is a sight to behold. You cannot imaging the yogurt. I have always liked yogurt okay but to me there have been two kinds, the knd thats plain and the kind thats fruity. Here is a little piece of my weekly grocery list. I buy all of this every week.
Yogurt= Activia-coconut(kids-8), Panier Yoplait fruit 0% (8), Panier plain0%(8),
Taillefine-Brasse 0% plain(8 or 16), fjord (8)
I had no idea what any of that meant and still struggle to find just the right kind of yogurt for every different member of the family. Each member also had the right kind of chocolate. To them chocolate is not a sort of candy or dessert, it's just a staple, along with the baguette and brioche. So when I just want some chips and salsa or a little macaroni and cheese I have to dig through all the sugar and starch.
So there was Thanksgiving last week and I was pretty excited to make everything but I had a few problems. Leading up to Thanksgiving I had some things I needed. I needed cranberries, which I couldn't find anywhere, pecans, canned pumpkin, corn meal, corn syrup, allspice, vanilla and a few other miscillaneous things. I searched high and low in every so called ethnic food selling store I could find. Le Grand Epicerie at Le Bon Marche had ethnic foods. It had a five foot span devoted to American foods. This was pancake mix, six different brands of peanut butter, cranberry jelly and oreos. For the things I didn't manage to find I made recipes with alternative ingredients(no corn syrup in France). One little surprise was that after I'd bought Fleur de Mais (flower of corn, not flour of corn mind you, I missed that one) I realized that it was actually corn starch(that would have been some interesting corn bread).
So I began with making a sweet potato casserole and then made two pumpkin pies and a pecan pie, stuffing from scratch, cranberry sauce, mashed potatos, the whole thing. The meal was for 18 people (and before we served it the FX and the kids went out and bought me a huge bouquet of flowers). They were all French besides my friends Charlene(British) and Hannah(American) from church.
One memorable moment came when Anne asked if we usually held hands and said a few words. I took this to mean prayer so I said a prayer to a bunch of French people looking awkwardly and confusedly at eachother. Yeah, they don't know we usually pray before eating Thanksgiving meals.
Another thing about the French is they don't really go for the natural American tradition of unreasonably stuffing your face for Thanksgiving. The leftovers were overwhelmig and on Monday when the cleaning lady came we had a nice chat while I retrieved stuffing and two pies from our little outdoor area. I sent her home with some pumpkin and pecan pie. She was very nice and said that she had an American friend who had given her a taste of pumpkin pie once and that it hadn't been good but that she really liked mine. Probably because it was made from a fresh French pumpkin(the green kind, called potiron, the orange kind is called citrouille and they only have those at select grocery stores n the fall. Most French people don't know that the name for pumpkin is citrouille. I found this out after askng for it in four grocery stores. It was when I spotted the 'soupe potiron' that I changed my tactics.).
Pecans and cranberries both exist in France but the cranberries only come in dried version. I kept my laptop in the kitchen and was googling recipes all day. When I googled 'cranberry sauce with dried cranberries' several recipes came up they mostly went like this: 'place cranberries in bowl of warm water overnight, finish the recipe as if they were fresh.' So that was simple. By the way, American recipes can be a real hassle. I was pretty annoyed with the '1.5 cans of evaporated milk'. Thanks for that, evaporated milk must come in the same size the world round...not.
Overall it was really fun but I know this, Thanksgiving jsut really fits with American culture and not totally with French, and there's a reason it's always a collaboration of grandmas and aunts and moms, it's really close to impossible to do it by yourself. But not totally impossible because I managed it.
And the title is what the kids grandma said to me as we were eating, "you will open a restaurant". I was kind of thinking, not after today.
