Dans le panier

We recently signed up for a CSA program in Paris. We belonged to one in Chicago, and we really enjoyed both the high-quality produce and the opportunity to try things that I wouldn’t normally pick out at the market. I might never have found out how much I liked kohlrabi, celery root, kale or turnips if I had not received them in one of our weekly CSA boxes.

When an acquaintance mentioned how much she had enjoyed her CSA in Paris, I did a little research and found that we could sign up to receive a panier (basket) of four or five different vegetables, one type of fruit, and six eggs every other week. This leaves me with the flexibility to still buy some of our produce at the market while hopefully bringing a little more variety to our menu.

Our first panier arrived this week. We pick up at Puerto Cacao, a chocolate store in our neighborhood that sells candies and drinking chocolates. I’m sure at some point I will be leaving Puerto Cacao with more than just vegetables, it smells amazing!

Here’s what we received in our first “panier” (it was really a paper bag):

oeufs (eggs), poivrons (leeks), pommes (apples), pommes de terre (potatoes),

endives (endives), and celeri rave (celery root)

I had forgotten how much I enjoyed coming up with a plan to use the vegetables we received in our boxes at home. We used our basket contents to have an endive and apple salad, potato leek soup, potato and celery root purée, and omelettes.

On vacation in Paris

Even after living here for over four months, there is still a lot that we have not done in Paris. J recently took a vacation day and we spent a fun day getting to see a little more of this gorgeous city.

We started our day at the Grand Palais to see an exhibition called “La France en relief.” The exhibition was a collection of three-dimensional relief maps of cities in France, built between the 1660s and the 1870s. These maps were built to allow evaluation of the measures taken to fortify towns around the country against attack. About two hundred and sixty maps were originally created and around one hundred still exist today.

The relief maps were put out on display in the Grand Palais, clustered around a large floor map of the country of France, with circles marking the cities shown in the relief maps.

As a child and as an adult, I have always been up for a miniature model of something (or even a full-scale model: I still have fond memories of Greenfield Village and of Yesterday’s Main Street at the Museum of Science & Industry), so I was pretty excited about the exhibit.

The scale of the models was amazing, as was the good condition of the models given their age.

I think the most interesting part of the display was an enormous model that included the French city of Brest. Brest was decimated by World War II; 40% of the buildings in the city were totally destroyed and 30% were severely damaged by the war. The city has since been rebuilt, but the model is one of the best representations of the old pre-war city. Accompanying the model of Brest were photos of the city prior to the war and immediately after, as well as a screen playing video of the city during the war.

After we left the exhibit, we walked over to a little Spanish restaurant I had been wanting to try. We had a late lunch of chorizo, grilled pimientos de padron and manchego, with a little Spanish wine. Refreshed by the lunch break, we set off toward out next destination, stopping first to take a few pictures from the very ornate bridge between the Grand Palais and Les Invalides.

We walked over to the Louvre and spent an hour or so walking through some of the galleries of large format French and Italian paintings, stopping to admire Winged Victory, the Mona Lisa (and the crowds in front of the Mona Lisa), and the beautiful rooms housing these treasures.

We stopped off for a fresh baguette on our way home and were happy for a quiet night in after a long day of playing tourist.

At the market

There are many reasons I enjoy going to our local market. I like the woman at my favorite vegetable stand who helps me with the correct pronunciations of the different vegetable names in French. I like that the produce is generally much better than what is available in the grocery stores. I like getting to have random interactions with other customers at the market, like this week when the person ahead of me in line was convinced that I was German and was very excited about trying to help me learn French while we picked out our produce.

But putting all of those very sensible reasons for shopping at the market aside, I also enjoy going to the market because of the way all of my purchases are wrapped.

I am always amused by the paper bags (helpfully printed with recipes) holding my potatoes and spinach or the brown paper artfully twisted around bigger things like heads of lettuce and cauliflower.

And I was charmed by the neatly sealed paper bags holding the dried black beans and pearled barley that I picked up on my Saturday morning shopping trip.

Things I've learned in French class

You can only ask if someone likes a pair of pants before they buy them. You should not ask someone how they like pants that they already own. They bought them, didn’t they? They must like them.

There is no word in French that has the exact meaning of the English word “confused.” My teacher told us this is because French people do not get confused.

You should not introduce yourself to someone you do not know. If you don’t know them, why would you do such a thing?

In the kitchen

When we decided to take this opportunity to come to Paris, it meant leaving my job and becoming a full-time housewife/part-time French student. Before we moved, I imagined myself making elaborate dinners, working my way through my favorite cookbooks, and doing all of it in a charming French kitchen. The reality is quite a bit different.

My kitchen here is much more limited than what I had at home. I posted a few pictures of the kitchen back in November; other than a few more spices on the spice rack and a new piece of cookware I received as a Christmas gift, it looks pretty much the same today. I’ve tried to keep the counter fairly clear so that I have a good-sized workspace, but it is less than a quarter of the counter space of our kitchen in the U.S. Our refrigerator and freezer are each the size of a typical dorm room refrigerator in the U.S. The sink is very small, which means washing our larger pots takes some creativity (thankfully this is J’s job, not mine). And our combination microwave/oven is just barely big enough to accommodate a 13 x 9 inch baking dish. Despite these challenges, I do manage to pull together dinner for the two of us five or six nights a week. It probably helps that I learned to cook in a studio apartment “kitchen” with miniature appliances and a single counter the size of a cutting board.

Here are a few of the things I made in our tiny kitchen last week...

We had fresh chevre from our favorite cheese shop a while ago and loved it, so I decided to use the cheese in a goat cheese salad. The base of the salad was the batavia lettuce that I usually get at the market. A single head is big enough to make side salads for most of the week in addition to a main course salad. I pressed chopped walnuts into the pieces of goat cheese, then put the cheese in the oven to warm it and toast the nuts. We also had roasted sweet potatoes.

I make some sort of Mexican food almost every week. This week’s effort was a tortilla soup from Mexican Everyday, by Rick Bayless. As an experiment I made some corn tortillas, sprayed them with olive oil, and baked them in the oven to make chips for garnishing the soup. They tasted kind of like corn-flavored pita chips (we had a few with some guacamole), but they worked in the soup.

We also had a lentil stew topped with a poached egg, parmesan cheese, and balsamic vinegar, inspired by this recipe. I used French green lentils instead of Umbrian lentils and omitted the proscuitto, using a little smoked paprika to give the stew a hint of smokiness instead.

J had asked for a butternut squash and goat cheese tart that I make once in a while. This is a recipe that I’ve made successfully many times before, but this time I managed to screw it up in many different ways. I decided to try substituting a slice of potiron (a pumpkin-like winter squash) for the butternut squash. I noticed giant slices of squash at the market a while ago and thought this was the perfect time to try it out. This was one experiment that didn’t work at all - the potiron I bought had a much higher water content than butternut squash and less flavor.

I usually peel, cut up and roast the squash before I put it in the tart. When I pulled it out of the oven I found mealy, limp-looking squash sitting in a pool of water instead of the gorgeously caramelized pieces I was expecting. I tried to drain off the water without dropping squash pieces in the sink (burning my arm in the process) and put it back in the oven to give them more time to cook. The potiron released so much liquid that the final volume was much lower than I was expecting, and I ended up not having enough to fill up the tart shell.

I also decided to try out a new recipe for the tart crust. I usually use a pâte brisée recipe from Martha Stewart, but decided that “when in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Or in this case, when in France, do as Julia Child would do, so I tried a recipe out of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I’m not sure if I did something wrong when making the crust or if the squash released even more water while the tart was baking, but the bottom of the crust ended up being soggy.

I ended the day having spent way more time than I thought possible making a dinner that I thought would be easy, with soggy tart leftovers I am not excited to have for lunch, and a painful burn on my arm. Not exactly the way I imagined our Paris life.

Luckily, Friday is always an easy day for cooking. We arrived in Paris on a Friday, and all we could manage to put together for dinner in our jet-lagged stupor was a plate of bread and cheese. We enjoyed it so much that we’ve kept up the tradition of having bread, cheese and wine for dinner on Fridays. This week we also roasted some cauliflower garnished with truffle salt, but it was still in the oven when I took this picture. This week’s cheese was brie with truffles, and it more than made up for whatever the rest of this week’s meals were lacking.

Four months

January has passed so quickly! We started out the year (or really, ended last year) with a late night walk around the city on New Year’s Eve.

J took a Friday off and we spent a great day having lunch out, exploring the Musée d’Orsay, and taking a leisurely walk back to the apartment along the left bank of the river.

We became members of the Musée du Louvre and have already started working our way through the museum's many rooms.

I took our visitor to Spain with me before sending him back to Illinois with a few souvenirs.

And we had some fantastic meals...

Pizza al taglio at 40/60

Steak frites and coq au vin at A la Biche au Bois

Gorgeous, fresh, modern small plates at Au Passage

Tiny peppers stuffed with goat cheese and tortilla on pan con tomate with pink cava at El Xampanyet

Sushi at Rice and Fish

Lattes while studying for French class at Coutume (this was just me, but I brought home coffee beans for J)

Continuing the hunt for Mexican food in Paris at Bodega Bay

And enjoying the occasional guilty pleasure cheeseburger at Café Charlot or Pause Café (though those options may be abandoned in favor of Le Camion Qui Fume when the weather warms up)