Bon voyage

Life 3000 miles from home has its ups and downs, and the last couple of weeks have been a bit trying. Whatever Paris mojo I'd had earlier this autumn seems to have disappeared, either because I'm just off my French game or because the lingering glow of post-vacances tolerance has finally been extinguished from the natives. Suddenly my French isn't good enough for anybody, anymore, and more frustratingly I'm doing stupid things like fusing together pots and bowls used as double-boilers (admittedly a foreseeable, apparently inevitable, occurrence, in my weekly yogurt making; I've applied heat to the pot while applying ice to the bowl to break the vapor lock, but there's so much shared wall length and relatively little wall thickness that the two vessels won't act independently. It's out on the balcony now for one last-ditch effort at separation, and barring that, it'll at least make an impressive impression in the hood of the next Frog to lay on the horn. Still, a crying shame, as I love my bowl and I'll have to spend money to replace Madame's pot...) and shrinking my favorite sweaters. So it goes.

The ice-bound, vapor-locked pot-and-bowl double boiler that's soon destined for the garbage bin.

So when I had one of those baffling Paris exchanges at the market this week, it came as no surprise. I wanted duck breast, a pretty straightforward choice, given that I always buy from the same vendor, mostly because his magrets are better cleaned and plucked than many. But when I asked for one, he said he didn't have any more, despite the fact that we were both looking at several there in his case. Was this another "crepine" incident, or did he just not feel like selling me anything this week? Turns out that I'd asked for magret de canard, and he only had filet de canard. They're both duck breast, so what's the difference? The magret de canard is the breast from a fatted (ie, for foie gras) duck, whereas the filet de canard is the breast from a non-fatted duck. Learn something new every week.

Anyway, it's been birthday season here in the 16e, and usually we go out for a somewhat extravagant meal to celebrate them. But after all of the excesses of the last month, and with traveling yet to come, we decided to stay low key this year. But that doesn't mean there there can't be some playing with food. I particularly like getting to work with the same ingredients a few days in a row, to learn from mistakes, or at least try variations on a theme. Here's the highlights.

Karen's birthday dinner: parsnip gnocchi with walnut sauce. I'm certain I've commented previously on the fact that parsnips and walnuts, like chestnuts and celery root, are made for each other. Karen laughed at me when I made the parsnip gnocchi a few weeks ago. Happy birthday, Funny Girl.

Sometimes it sucks to have a birthday so close to the holidays. In this case, K had to suffer though the indignity of the uncooked portion of venison filet I bought for Thanksgiving, paired with her favorite sides of braised belgian endive (maybe the simplest and most delicious preparation ever: brown endive in butter, put lid on and turn down heat for ~45 min) and potatoes anna.

The opera cake (dark chocolate, coffee, and almond-- how can anybody resist) from Gantier that she didn't get at Thanksgiving. Everything else was just foreplay. I'm OK with that. It's that good...

Funny Girl has a thing for Italian wines, especially from the Montalcino/Montepulciano area. Despite historical fondnesses for Beaujoulais and Bordeaux, we've recently figured out that her favorite French red wines come from the southern Languedoc/Rousillon region, where the intense sun and grape varietals play up the jammy "yummy" flavors. I think I tasted this wine, the last one bought at the Salon des Vins last month, but I'm not 100% sure I managed to pry the bottle out of her hands. She's surprisingly strong for an old broad...

There have been lots of mushrooms available through the year here. Morels, girolles, cepes/porcinis. But right now it's black trumpet season, or as I first learned, black trumpets of death. Kind of like huitlacoche (the black fungus that grows on corn and used in Mexican cooking), they're black, dark, intensely earthy. And compared to their more glamorous cousins, cheap. So I bought 250 g and made a black ragu with creamy polenta. Man, I love winter.

For my birthday, a simple frisee salad with bacon (well, pancetta from Mucci). Love the bacon.

And now that we have a good fishmonger, striped bass with sunchoke ravioli and saffron broth.

Emptying the freezer before leaving for Spain: parsnip gnocchi with walnut broth (roasted walnuts pureed with chicken broth and strained, yet another way to make these two ingredients work together), mizuna, and crisp pancetta. Funny Girl's been busting on me about my complete lack of plating skills, so I tried to make it pretty.

Sweet potato ravioli with browned butter, mizuna, and pine nuts. I never get tired of pasta.

Magret, err.... , filet of duck with sweet-and-sour golden turnips and potatoes "boulangerie" (from the days when people brought crocks of food to the baker to put in the back of his oven). The sauce is black and nasty (in the good way) from the trumpets of death.

Looking at the weather forecasts for the Mid-Atlantic, it seems the freakish December dusting of snow we got here in Paris the last couple of days will be dwarfed by copious white stuff in the next days at home. Riding the mountain bike in the snow is one of the great pleasures in life, so those of you drooling at the prospect go out and enjoy it enough for both of us this weekend!

Beer Run: Brussels

There are a lot of things one associates with Paris, but beer is probably not among them for most people. And for good reason. Despite the fact that there are a lot (hundreds) of breweries in France making interesting, even good, unfiltered unpasteurized beers in small batches, finding said beers in Paris is nearly impossible.

Or rather, finding them in a bar in Paris is nearly impossible. One can always find them at La Cave a Bulles, a beer specialty store in the shadow of the (still-crippled-by-strike) Centre Pompidou. The proprietor there, who shares both an amicable and enthusiastic personality and a fondness for tie-died t-shirts with the owner of one of my favorite beer-related places in Philly, will be happy to dispel the notion that Kronenbourg 1664 and Fischer, or the handful of barely interesting Belgian imports that are on tap everywhere in Paris, define French beer. Even so, in the 8 months we'd been in Paris, we'd developed a bit of a beer craving.

And when you live in Paris and have a real beer craving, your best bet is to head for the border. If, like one of the members of my family, you think anything that isn't a generic by-the-book lager "tastes like mud," you'd best head east for Germany. If you like variety in your beer, however, or even just like mud, Belgium's a good bit more fun.

We spent 5 days in Belgium in Nov indulging our interests in beer and mud, combining vacation, cyclocross Superprestige spectating, and (for Karen) work.

First things first: After getting off the train, we dropped our bags at the hotel and made a bee-line for Le Pré Salé, where Karen had the most amazing mussels of her life. They were so good, I rolled the dice and had not 1 but 2. Even if I'd wound up in the ER, it would have been worth it. The Duvel was a nice first beer, too.

We were in the Congo room at the hotel, where every room had a different theme. Thank heavens there was no Galveston room.

The mud part of the trip: the women's race at Cyclocross Gavere. Even the Belgian champion was having a rough go of it, with terrible chain suck on this last lap.

And the men's race a little later, when the 15,000-strong crowds made for SRO spectating.

Sunday afternoon at the Gent train station, and this is one of 2 bike parking lots.

The inside of the Gent train station, where we had a Westmalle Tripel while waiting for our (ultimately cancelled) train back to Brussels.

Based on the beer offerings in the better beer bars and restaurants in Brussels, it's hard to believe that there are more breweries in France than Belgium. Though Belgium has somewhere south of 150 breweries, they produce an astonishing number of beers: roughly 700-800 regular production beers and well over 5000 when special occasion (holidays, etc) beers are included. Like France and the US, a lot of the beer drunk in Belgium is rather uninteresting lager-- it's certainly what's on tap at the bike races: Primus, Jupiler, Maes. But the variety of other offerings includes wheat beers, blondes, ambers, browns, dubbels, tripels, and christmas beers, all with different flavorings and yeasts to produce an astonishing range of tastes, and also lambics and their cousins, still spontaneously brewed (ie, yeast is wild and from the air, not a laboratory-cultured specimen, and so unpredictable and ever-changing). We worked our way through the whole range, and although I felt beery enough when we got back to Paris to worry I may have tried all 5000, we surely fell well short of 1%. Karen, a committed hop-head, loved the beers from De Ranke, whose XX Bitter and Guldenberg scratched her hop itch. Their Noir de Dottignies was an exceptional black beer, as well. My favorite brew was the 100% 3-year-old lambic on down-draught (increasingly rare even in Brussels, a center of the traditional lambic brewing region) as an aperitif before lunch one day. Somewhere between cider, wine, and beer, sour and wild and smooth all at the same time. Sampling such a wide range of styles was most of the fun.

A bottled lambic from Cantillon (whose brewery is in Brussels) at Poechenellekelder. The exceptional draft lambic was a couple of days later at Bier Circus.

Still at Poechenellekelder, 2 Christmas beers: Kerst Pater and St Feuillien. We also spent an evening at Porte Noire, which was great but too dark for pictures.

Typical meal in Belgium, this one a leisurely lunch at In 't Spinnokopke: 2 orders of food and 6 beers.

Ste Catherine's square at night, home of a then-under-construction Christmas market, apparently one of the largest in Europe.

We had a couple of dud meals at relatively fancy/modern places in Brussels. This is the menu for the best meal we ate, at La Villette just off of Ste Catherine. Didn't get too far with this side...

... but being an officially bi-lingual city, the other side was more familiar. The food was simple but excellent, and the atmosphere was a lot more relaxed and friendly than most places in Paris.

The Musee d'Art Ancien housed amazing works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and even the bizarre works of Bosch were given a run for their money by this globe of beetles in the entry gallery.

Like the beer, the variety of architecture in Brussels was astonishing, especially coming from the Barron Haussmann theme park that is Paris. I've come to appreciate the consistency of style and color in Paris and the little details that make each building different, but the mixing of styles in Brussels was refreshing. Though the exuberance of the Grand Place is breathtaking, it was probably the number and variety of Art Nouveau buildings that most impressed, especially concentrated south of the main city in and around Ixelles, where Victor Horta, the Belgian architect often credited as the first to apply the developing decorative style to architecture, lived and worked. The remaining examples in the area range from exuberantly thematic designs to what appear to be later additions of art nouveau decorative elements to existing buildings. With the ponds and parks and rambling streets, it made for a great day's wanderings.

The guild houses at Grand Place in Brussels.

City Hall in Brussels, from the 1400s, the only part of Grand Place to survive pummeling by the pesky French in 1695.

One could never mistake this for Paris.

Remarkable details in an Art Nouveau building.

The mail slot in Horta's office/home.

Some buildings were as much canvas as building.

Loved the doors and windows in general, and especially the metal work.

Blending of Art Nouveau and the more traditional Flemish style.

Big apartment building with restrained Nouveau elements, including a very stylized carved signature of the architect at street level.

Hotel Solvay, designed by Horta but no longer a hotel, available for interior tours by appointment.

In short, no we'll have no problems with going back to Belgium. Cyclocross, beer, and site-seeing make a pretty good package.

L'hiver est arrivé

Though it's officially still 4 days away yet, the temperatures here have definitely been winter-like. Then today, 2 things happened that cemented winter's unofficial official arrival.

1. It snowed. Snowfall in Paris, according to the locals, isn't a miracle event. But it also isn't an everyday winter occurrence. It started early this morning, before the nominal sunrise, and continued for much of the morning and early afternoon before kind of petering out. Since I'm not sure we'll get to see it again, I went out and took pictures, like a dork. It was fun.

Off the balcony.

One of the few times today La Tour was visible at all.

Square Lamartine

Student uprising. The local high school is around the corner from our apartment, and as I went out to do chores first thing this morning, they had gathered and were chanting/shouting slogans, throwing firecrackers, and had shut down the street. There have been railway and museum strikes for awhile now, so not really sure what this was about, but I heard a couple of students a few blocks away say the school was closed today. Were they refusing to go to school, protesting, or celebrating?

Though I saw a few intrepid souls on bikes today, most of the Velib stations were pretty full.

The Cluny.

Houseboats on the Seine.

The rear end of Notre Dame.

Benches in the 3e.

Place des Vosges.

2. Springerles magically arrived at our apartment. OK, so it wasn't magic-- my mother sent them. But the package's arrival was magical, nonetheless. If you don't know what these things are, don't read any further, so you don't know what you're missing. If you do know what they are, don't read any further, because you'll know what you're missing. Wait-- cancel that. Read further, so you get to see the picture.

Springerles are a German anise-flavored christmas cookie made with ridiculously intricate molds. My grandmother made them, and whether it was the anise (which I adore) or the fact that my grandmother (whom I adored) made them and sent them, with a cut apple in the tin to keep them moist, I developed an almost unnatural fondness for them. My other grandmother's cookies were also amazing, the Scandinavian butter cookies that could sustain a soul through 8 months of darkness. So I guess it was the anise, and the texture, that made these the best of a pretty amazingly good holiday variety. Anyway, my mom took up the whisk some time ago and makes a darn good, though definitely different, springerle. And either because she loves me, or because she knows I'll whine until next christmas if she doesn't, she sent a package of goodness my way. Maybe the best thing about it is that Karen has never really developed a taste for them, so they're all mine!

Anyway, their arrival says it's officially christmas season, so it must be winter.

Beautiful anisey goodness: springerles.

The Paris Groove

With all of the turmoil at work, I was only assured we could stay here until the end of August. That date came and went... work kept going, and there was no reason to go home. So we stayed.

The merger of companies occured, and I still have a job. The fate of the Paris office is still not clear, but it looks like we'll be here into the New Year at the very least, and possibly through all of next year. We had come with the mind-set of the 6 month assignment, and have been shifting focus back to the original target of 2 years, since it may happen yet.

So, we have been trying to get deeper into Paris and the Paris lifestyle while we are here. After success with the boots, I am rediscovering my inner clothes horse, and have been gradually acquiring proper French clothes. Last weekend I had success at a cool little boutique in the 10th- a dress, a skirt, and a top.

Dupleks

We've been marveling at the Christmas spectacle in Paris. The decorations definitely have a different esthetic. They really like white lights, and especially lights that look like dripping water. We have wandered up and down the Champs Elysees twice (once from the Arc de Triomphe end, the other time from Concorde) where there is a huge Christmas festival. Apparently Christmas in Europe involves a lot of little "chalets" in which vendors can peddle their wares. We had seen them in Brussles, but they are everywhere in Paris, in little clumps. You know you are in Europe when the snacks for sale include fois gras or duck breast sandwiches.

This stuff passes for Gourmet in the US, not food at the state fair. And wine to drink!

Christmas lights everywhere

We kept hearing about the window displays at the Galleries Lafayette, one of the tony department stores. The whole store has its own impressive light show going on.

Not well captured here, the lights dim, brighten, and change pattern.

We braved the huge crouds not inside, but outside, families who brought their children just to see the windows. And what do they have? A whole series of stuffed animal marionettes. They have probably done this same show since the parents were kids, sort of like the light show at Wannamaker's (or whatever it's called now). Totally cheezy, but it becomes part of the Christmas tradition.

This window has a bunch of stuffed rabbits frollicking in champagne glasses. We are in France, after all.

This coming Saturday we begin our Christmas vacation (I'm taking Mon-Wed as vacation days, and the rest of the week and a half are company holidays). We're headed to Barcelona- something completely different.

But this week, before we go, I can even get into the Christmas spirit at work, since the requisite chalets are in La Defense.

Happy holidays, every one!

A Thanksgiving in Paris

Thanks to a visit from some friends from home, Thanksgiving weekend was a blur.

It started with a 10-h Thanksgiving feast as soon as our guests arrived on Thursday. How they managed to stay awake (or even alive) is beyond me. Talk about good sports.

Friday, after about 12 hours of food coma, we attended the fall edition of the Salon des Vins (this edition's motto: Now without food poisoning!), a convention of about 1000 independent French wine makers south of town. Preston decided he wanted to bring back cognac, which gave us a much-needed focus in the sea of tasting opportunity. Because sampling the offerings from all 13 cognac producers at the Salon would have buried us, we limited ourselves to just one subregion. Even from the restricted selection, the favorite was awfully good. And though one's tasting perceptions have to be viewed with some suspicion after 20 cognacs, the fun of working through them all does not. There was a boat show in the adjoining building, and I have to wonder how many wine-fueled yacht purchases were made over the 5-day Salon des Vins weekend.

We followed the wine convention up with a pleasant dinner at Hier et Aujourd'hui, a nice little place a little out of the way in the 17e. It's the kind of place that still does the help-yourself (and delicious) terrine and cornichons before the meal, and the 1-man kitchen turns out updated versions of classic French food. Good food, good value, and always a good time.

Having guests who wanted to see the non-touristy side of Paris was the perfect opportunity to so some things we'd been too lazy to get to. So we spent a soggy Saturday walking from the Bois de Vincennes to Bastille along the Promenade Plantée, a converted railway line that is now a greenway that offers diverse botanical and architectural views. From there we walked through the Marais, the warren of non-Haussmann small and twisty streets lined with hip shops, and then for contrast the Champs Elysees, all lit up for Christmas and hosting a Christmas market, complete with rides for kids, ice sculptures (10 eurobucks, please), a Ferris wheel, cheesy little wooden chalets selling just about any kitschy thing you can think of, and even a Santa sleigh on a zip line. It's not often in high-style Paris you get to see people in cow hats selling coo-coo clocks. We had dinner at my favorite restaurant in Paris, La Gazzetta in the 12e. The cooking there is both full of flavor and very delicate, a difficult combination to pull off, and the service is always exceptional.

After a delicious lunch of Portuguese roast chicken in the 9e on Sunday, we visited the Parc des Buttes Chaumont in the 19e (another Haussmann project) and made our way back along the Canal St Martin, stopping for hot chocolate and christmas beer in one of the many cozy neighborhood bars.

With a beer-and-food-rich 5 days in Belgium 2 weeks earlier and a smaller wine event on two boats on the Seine the weekend prior (where we bought our wines for Thanksgiving), we've now succeeded in storing just enough fat for winter. Winter's 14 months long in Paris, right??

Salmon tartare, apple-infused creme fraiche, parmesan crisp. I finally found truly fish fresh in Paris, and it was so good that I used the leftovers from making the roulade (below) for tartare.

Parsnip and walnut soup: like chestnut and celery root, these 2 flavors work together very well.

Salmon-and-leek roulade, beurre blanc sauce

Cauliflower timbale with truffle oil

Sweet potato ravioli with browned butter and sage.

At this point in the proceedings, our jet-lagged guests needed some reviving, so we broke for a couple of hours for sleep and a walk. The post-break pictures suffered from inadequate lighting and bad flash.

Skate with braised red cabbage and mustard sauce, a recipe straight out of the French Laundry Cookbook

Seared foie gras with cranberry gastrique, cranberry-and-candied fennel salad

Guinea fowl en crepinette with porcini mushrooms, crispy polenta, and pommeau sauce. Though I love guinea hen with apple, the reduced pommeau (a blend of apple cider and calvados) was too sweet. And instead of mushrooms, a bitter green like turnip greens would have set off the bird-with-browned-onions better. Live and learn.

Venison loin with pureed potimarron (squash that supposedly tastes like chestnuts), chocolate sauce, and poached quince. I'd seen the venison-and-chocolate combination at Vetri and had been dying to try something similar. The bitter chocolate (cocoa powder in the sauce) really brings up the flavor of the venison, in this case farmed instead of the preferred wild.

Arugula salad

Cheeses from Quatrehomme: livarot (cow, Normandy), bonde gatine (goat, Loire), brie de meaux (cow, Ile de France), compte (cow, French Alps), and roquefort papillon (sheep, Pyrenees).

Dessert: pastries from Gantier

The evening's beverages.

Salon des Vins: wines from every region of France for every budget.

At the Salon des Vins cafe, this fellow was ordering beers. I'm not sure I'd buy his wine...

The breathalyzer near the exit was popular. Though the alcohol blood limit for driving in France, as many other places in Europe, is a strict 0.5 mg/mL (or 0.05%), there are no limits on the Metro as far as we know.

The Bastille end of the Promenade Plantée is elevated on a now-restored viaduct that houses galleries, cafes, and shops.

The elevated portion of the Promenade Plantée wends its way past and sometimes seemingly through buildings, offering some unique and interesting vantage points of the surrounding neighborhoods, even when the gardens themselves are relatively minimal for winter.

The elevated promenade offers evidence of building codes. Presumably this chimney was too close to the adjoining building, so the flues were extended above the other building's roofline.

The Christmas market along the Champs Elysees. Brought to you by Mastercard.

The Ferris wheel at Concorde.

Parc des Buttes Chaumont

Temple Sybil in Parc des Buttes Chaumonts, in what used to be a quarry.

The view from the Temple Sybil.

Canal St Martin. The perfect place to use that boat you bought at the Salon Nautique.

Reasons to live in Paris, entry 1

For my impending senility, or maybe just to look at on those occasional trying days here, I've decided to keep track of the reasons one should live in Paris. No ranking or top 10 list or anything-- just good stuff about being here, as it happens.

But if I were keeping a prioritized list, smart money would have a hot chocolate break on a rainy day at Jacques Genin's boutique/tea room near Republique pretty darn close to the top.

Paris has quite a number of good spots to get hot chocolate, and we've been partaking frequently, lately. Angelina's (wonderfully rich but a bit sweet for my tastes) and Charles Chocolatier (dark and intense, no dairy used so just a little gritty, which I quite liked) were both good starts. Unfortunately, perhaps the first entry onto the "reasons not to live in Paris" list, well, after the obvious entry of bilious coffee, is that there is also plenty of lousy hot chocolate in Paris, and while we were out wandering with guests last weekend, we had two examples of that.

But today, knowing we were going to be in that part of town, we made a point of finding Genin's shop, not certain it was open and less certain yet there was really hot chocolate to be had. The shop is luxuriously sparse, and any other place in Paris would squeeze at least 3 times as many tables into the tea room. As such, we had to wait nearly 30 min for a table, because to our modest annoyance, they don't offer the hot chocolate to go. But the charmingly gracious and graceful hostess brought us each one of Genin's fabulous caramels while we waited, which aside from nearly prompting a marriage proposal from me (my second of the day, because the waitress at Breizh Cafe, surely on another day its own entry onto the Reasons to Live in Paris list, brought us (me) not 2 but 4 caramels after I waxed poetic about their caramel beurre salé that came on my dessert crêpe), made me hope it might be another 30 or 60 min of waiting. And the experience once seated was worth at least twice that wait and made the thought of take-out seem downright silly. In addition to hot chocolate, which comes with a sugar bowl covered with an assortment of flawless chocolate-covered bitter orange rind or ginger (how is that that other tables were leaving these amazing treats on the table?), there's a menu of pastries, including popular made-to-order mille feuilles, and a tasting of chocolates.

We had 2 magnificent hot chocolates, rich, dense, smooth, and perfectly (ie, only modestly) sweetened. Oh. My. And Karen had a chocolate eclair, decent enough pastry filled with a heart-stoppingly good chocolate cream, and I did the chocolate tasting, 7 little chocolates filled with chocolate, spice, honey, herb, or nut, all of them superb. The only problem with the chocolates was that getting every nuance of taste while drinking the hot chocolate was a bit like doing a wine tasting while drinking a bottle of a big California cabernet. Next time (and there will absolutely be a next time) I'll do a pastry sûr place and save the chocolates for bringing home.

Chocolicious: the wonder that is chocolat chaud at Genin.

Don't blink

Paris the last month or more has been mostly cool dreary damp days, where the low clouds part and reform to give off-and-on rain. But if the clouds part at just the right time, the result can still be pretty spectacular. The show above lasted just a brief moment before dissolving.

The thrill of victory

We returned to Paris last night weary from work/site-seeing (I'll leave you to guess who of us was tired from which) and from the dense food and beer of 5 days in Belgium.

We were greeted on the metro platform at Gare du Nord by mass shouting, whistling, and chanting-- weird even in the Paris metro. At first we couldn't tell where it was coming from. When the sound got louder when the doors opened at the next stop, we realized there were two cars on our train packed to the gills with an energetic mob. Hmm. Happy energy or angry energy? And who were they?

At each stop, the pressure valve would release the compressed contents of the cars, expelling fervent youth with red-and-green-painted faces or waving Algerian flags onto the platform before they pushed their way back into the mosh pits or colonized other cars. The smiling and singing made it clear that this was celebration rather than demonstration, and there's only one thing going on right now that could trigger such euphoria: World Cup soccer. Indeed, Algeria had just beaten Egypt to gain entry into the tournament. From the looks of them, I'm guessing most of the revelers aren't old enough to remember Algeria's last trip this far, in 1986.

A busker had gotten on our car and just started to play when a group of about 8 displaced celebrators got on and carried on at full volume, pogoing up and down so exuberantly that it felt like the floor would crack. Even with his accordion and amplified accompaniment, he was no match for the small crowd, and so he finally gave up and sat down, watching warily.

In fact, we were all warily watching to see what happened next-- even a happy mob can turn into a disruptive mob. But at Franklin Roosevelt, the mob poured out of the subway to join the full-scale celebration on the Champs Elysées, and we heard honking and partying in our neighborhood for hours. I was too lazy to go out and take pictures, but you can get a pretty good idea of the fun from this one (Nov 19 photo) and this one.

France, too, qualified last night, though in less honorable fashion: they tied Ireland on what even the perpetrator, Thierry Henry, admitted was a handball and so won a 2-game, total-goals playoff 2-1. Had the playoff gone to penalty kicks and France lost, I suspect we'd have witnessed a less positive taking to the streets.

I guess there's still time for that next summer.

Coutancie beef

For a lot of years now, I've been on a first-name basis with many of my food vendors. I'm not sure any of those relationships is more important than with my butchers (except probably a great fishmonger, which I've never found).

But this past weekend was the first time I've ever been on a first-name basis with my beef. Or first-number basis, anyway. We went to a butcher around the corner from the apartment to buy something nice for a Saturday night dinner, and though we arrived thinking lamb, our minds had changed by the time our spot in the out-the-door line came around.

That's because it became obvious that the specialty of the house was beef, followed distantly by beef, and then, finally, at the very bottom of the list, beef. Placards throughout the store advertise that the beef in question is Boeuf de Coutancie. The colorful placards are difficult to see, though, since there are animal-specific certificates papering over nearly every surface.

Checking your papers at the door: well, they're somebody's papers.

The shop reminds me of the office of one particularly self-impressed professor in my department in graduate school. A savvy media user and unabashed self-promoter, his office walls were a dense mosaic of degrees, certificates, and official honors that confirmed his superiority over the rest of us. In a cheeky bit of subversion, a couple of his senior students slid a quality assurance certificate for a bottle of acetonitrile, a solvent used for some of the procedures in the lab, into a frame that was in the direct line of sight of the chair used by visitors into the office while talking to The Boss. Like the real accolades, the QA certificate that came with every bottle was printed on fake parchment with a gold seal and an extravagant signature, and I'd like to think the substitution was noticed but never commented on by visitors, though it's far more likely that it continued to hang unnoticed by anyone in a series of progressively bigger offices.

Like the certificates in that professor's office, I don't know the significance of the cow papers in the butcher shop. Second place in the third grade spelling bee, passing the motor scooter driving test, acknowledgement of delivery of a keynote address at a physics conference, admittance into the mile high club, or contestant on America's Top Model? Given the price of the meat, it could equally be law degrees (from Cowlumbia? sorry...) or official aristocracy papers.

That this beef has so many papers must appeal to the French fondness for bureaucratic paperwork (it's worth noting that none of the papers was folded-- anybody whose gone through the process of getting a carte de sejour knows that folding one's documents is strictly interdit). In fact, boeuf de Coutancie claims to have special characteristics, one of which is that it comes from the Perigord region in southwestern France, which is where foie gras and Limousin beef come from. The French put a lot of stock into famous origins and brands, as evidenced by the whole AOC system.

Appellation d’origine contrôlée, or controlled name of origin, is a certification granted to products of certain geographical areas of France. Whether a wine (say, Vouvray, Brouilly, Chateauneuf-du-Pape, or about 314 others), a cheese (Pont l'Eveque, Roquefort, or about 40 others), liquor, vegetable, or other, great emphasis is placed on certified product origin. In many ways, this makes sense. A given style of cheese or wine has an awful lot to do with the place it's cultivated, and so establishing where these things are officially produced helps protect the geographical “brand” and reputation. I mean, one would view a Côtes du Provence from Normandy with suspicion, right? Furthermore, the AOC designations establish rules (aging time, type of milk, etc for cheeses, eg) that help to protect and maintain the aspects of production that make a product what it is. Of course, these systems are established and administered with typical bureaucratic mindlessness and personal commercial agendas, and so are subject to the same shenanigans as any other biasable process: exclusion of competitors from higher profile/profit designations, rubber stamping and cronyism in whatever nominal product quality inspection takes place, etc. And those geographic limitations and protections can't counterbalance the industrialization of agriculture.

Whatever its flaws, the AOC designations have done much to protect traditional French agricultural/gustatory industries. And sometimes the AOC designation really does mean a difference in taste. One might not think that terroir plays a huge rule in dried beans, but the lentils from Puy-en-Velay trump any of the the various other “French green lentils” I've used. They're wonderful.

But back to our accomplished cows. I don't believe Boeuf de Coutancie is AOC, which on further reflection is probably exactly why so much paperwork comes with it, to convince of its specialness in the absence of bureaucratic proclamation. From what I can tell, Coutancie beef is named for the farm, rather than the breed of cattle. According to the distributor's website, the animals are raised on the prairies until maturity, at which point they're brought to Coutancie farm for a spa vacation, which includes a carefully selected diet of farm vegetables and grain presented in their comfortable feeding cubicles. Beyond their pampered food diet, the cows receive complementary beer and are massaged twice daily. While I'm maybe taking a little literary liberty with the description, I swear I'm not making any of this up. No word on mud masks or sauna access... The finishing diet, beer, and massage are similar to the processes used for Kobe beef and are purported to produce meat with excellent grain and marbling.

Would you call this delicately marbled and juicy red? I think that's some truth in advertising.

There's not a lot of challenge in cooking a good steak: make sure it's at room temp, season it, sear it well on both sides over high heat to give it that deeply browned flavor, and then finish it in a slowish oven until it's cooked the to temperature you like (hopefully not beyond medium rare...).

Cromagnon (appropriate in France, non?) meal: Every once in awhile, a good rare steak hits the spot.

It should be all about the quality and taste of the meat-- well marbled, fine grain, dry aged for at least a couple of weeks. We bought côte du boeuf, which had a robust flavor and a surprisingly tender texture for French beef (must be the massage). Karen opined that it was on par or even better than the superb beef we buy from our favorite butcher in Philly, and I can't argue. Good simple steak deserves equally good simple accompaniments: sauce Bordelaise, mashed potatoes, and braised endive. If I'd had good wild mushrooms, I'd have put those on the plate, too.

Beef: it's what was for dinner.

As much as they can be really satisfying, we don't eat a lot of steaks or chops. They're not that interesting to cook and they're expensive. They also seem extravagant with respect to animal use. We don't eat much meat at any given meal-- it's more often a flavoring than featured item-- but I try to use the whole animal in my cooking to the extent possible. When buying poultry or rabbits or smaller fish, that's easy, since the unit of sale is the whole animal, and buying from a real butcher or fishmonger (rather than in shrink-wrapped styrofoam boats), I can make sure that pretty much everything comes home in my basket. That's less practical when it comes to the larger 4-hoofed creatures (or, say, a 200-lb tuna). Sides of beef may have been acceptable forms of payment for services rendered by my grandfather many decades ago, but I'd like to see my grandmother try to store them in my French refrigerator or get a case freezer in my Parisian apartment! So I approximate over time, buying a lot more of the less glamorous cuts than steaks and chops. Not only do I feel an obligation to waste as little as possible, those meats, and the cooking techniques needed to maximize their edibility, are exceptionally flavorful. Which is a not insignificant point of cooking.

So this week, while buying the côte du boeuf, I also bought a bunch of oxtail, which I used to make a ragu (of course). Mostly the same procedure as all of the others: brown the oxtails (I dredged them lightly in flour, this time), lightly cook the aromatics, add a little tomato and some herbs, then some red wine, reduce a little bit to get rid of some of the alcohol, add a little water to adjust the volume, then cover and pop it in the oven for a long slow simmer, the bottom of the lid turning a deep mahogany with the simmering juices. Mmmmm. Once super tender, pull the meat off the bones, skim the (copious) fat off the sauce, mash the veggies up, then add back a little of meat. It makes an intensely rich sauce, which we've eaten with chocolate pasta (finally, a great pairing of the chocolate pasta-- I only wish I'd had some good black olives to add to the ragu that night), as lasagna (with some pecorino cheese), and over polenta. And there's a lot of meat left, which looks destined to flavor a white bean casserole next week.

Oxtail ragu over polenta: winter comfort food

Mid-week weekend

Nov 11 is Armistice Day. Unlike the United States, where the remembrance has grown to encompass all veterans, here in France it is still a day of remembrance for those who lost their lives in WWI, which is a heckuvalot of people. The armistice treaty ending the war on the western front was signed in a railway car in the forest of Compiègne, a little north of Paris, where a replica of the car can be visited today (never one to pass on symbolism, Hitler chose the original car as the site for French surrender in WWII, then had it hauled off and blown up by the SS). The last of the French WWI veterans died last year, a rather amazing 90 years after the armistice signing, and so the nature of the celebrations for this holiday may change, but for now it's still a major holiday. A parade down the Champs is standard, and this year German chancellor Angela Merkel was in Paris for the observation, the first Armistice Day visit by a German leader.

We didn't see the parade, though. Since it was a holiday, Karen had the day off from work. And since it wasn't raining for a change, we took the opportunity to get in a mid-week bike ride. We considered exotic destinations, riding a bunch of hours to someplace new and taking a train back, or heading up north of the city by train to ride in the rolling hills and fall colors of the Oise valley. But in the end, it was more of the same, ie, destination: Chevreuse. Even so, there were still some vivid colors on the cold, damp ride.

In the end, the safe/known path turned out to be a good one, since it took less than 90 minutes for the stabbing pain from my Blois trip to make a reappearance. As we pulled over to discuss our options, we saw we were fittingly at rue de 11 Novembre. And though the train back into town took as long as the ride out of town, we were lucky to have gotten to the station moments before it departed, because between the holiday and the ongoing regional rail mini-strike, the next train wasn't for a long while. Even luckier, we escaped a right-on-red (not allowed in France) directly in front of a police van with just a long and patronizing scolding instead of 90-euro tickets.

But best of all, after hot showers, some lunch, and basking in the afternoon sun that poured through our big front windows (where was that during the ride?), we were invited to dinner at friends', where we shared good company, food, and wine. A treat on any day, and especially luxurious on a Wednesday.