Cooking experiment

After living in Paris for seven or so week, the thing from home that we miss the most is Mexican food. We’ve found that there are a few authentic Mexican restaurants in Paris, and have already visited two of them: Candelaria and El Nopal. I’ve also been able to find sources for canned chipotle chiles, dried ancho chiles, and fresh hot peppers, but the thing keeping me from making Mexican food at home has been the lack of tortillas. Big grocery stores stock corn and flour tortillas, but they are of very dubious quality. We tried some flour tortillas this week and they were . . . okay? Definitely edible, but we are spoiled from years of living in Chicago and having access to tortillas so fresh that they are still warm.

An acquaintance of mine that lives in Paris told me about Thanksgiving, a shop in the 4th arrondissement that carries American grocery products. I stopped by the store for the first time last week and was excited to discover that they sold masa harina, the flour that is used to make corn tortillas. I excitedly bought a bag and went straight home to try it out. Luckily, one of the few cookbooks that I had shipped to Paris has a recipe for making tortillas from scratch.

The only ingredients involved were the masa and some water.

I had a ball of tortilla dough to work with pretty quickly, but then things got a little trickier. I don’t have a tortilla press to form the tortillas, so I had to improvise. First I tried using the flat bottom of a sauce pan to press out the dough.

I also tried using a rolling pin.

Ultimately, a combination of the two worked the best. As you can see in the pictures, I formed the tortilla in a plastic bag so I didn’t have to worry about the dough sticking to any of my improvised presses.

Finally, I cooked the tortillas in a hot, dry skillet. And it worked! The final product was delicious.

Since this experiment was a success, I am pretty sure that we will be eating a lot more Mexican food at home.

Settling in

This is what the kitchen in our current apartment (and my hand) looked like on the day that we signed our lease. Everything you see, including the combination microwave/oven sitting on top of the counter, came with the apartment. At least half of these things have been packed up and are being stored in the loft above our living room.

Last week we received the items that we had shipped from the U.S, and our apartment feels a lot more like home now that we have familiar things surrounding us.

I've been working hard to unpack and find a place for everything, and I’ve also been hunting around to fill in the gaps. We didn’t bring any baking dishes or cookie sheets, because ovens are much smaller in Paris and I suspected (correctly!) that the ones I had would not fit in whatever oven we ended up with. We also didn’t bring any kitchen appliances because of the difference in voltage between the U.S. and France. And for some reason we didn’t bring any cutting boards, but I can’t remember why.

The rest of the apartment is still far from being finished, but it feels like the kitchen is finally in good shape. Here are a few pictures of the kitchen with all of our belongings and new acquisitions put away:

Le marché de la Bastille

Paris is home to a large number of markets. Some are set up outdoors on certain days of the week, much like an American farmer’s market. Others are housed in a permanent structure and operate several days of the week, like La Boqueria in Barcelona. One of the things we love about our neighborhood is that we are close to some fantastic markets.

Since our refrigerator about the size of a college dorm room refrigerator, it is very helpful to have markets to go to several days a week. I usually plan out our meals for the week in advance, but only buy enough meat and produce for a day or two at a time. Going to the market is also a good way to build my vocabulary. Not only are all of the products are labelled in French, but because the stands are usually not self-service you have to ask for each item by name and specify the desired quantity. “Je voudrais trois pommes de terre s'il vous plaît.” If I shop at the grocery store, I only need to say “Bonjour” and “Merci, au revoir” to the person at the cash register.

The Bastille market is one of the biggest in Paris, and we started shopping there even before we moved to our new apartment. It is an outdoor market that operates every Thursday and Sunday morning, and its vendors sell vegetables, fruits, cheeses, meats, fish, bread, and an variety of non-food items like clothing and housewares. It looks a lot like an American farmer’s market, but most of the vendors are not farmers. The food mostly gets there via a huge wholesale market at the edge of the city, where farmers and other producers bring their products to sell to the market vendors, shops, and restaurants.

We brought the camera on a Thursday morning (it is too crowded on Sunday to take pictures) and snapped a few pictures of the market: