I don’t like to make promises I can’t keep, and last week I promised myself that I’m going to eat pesto every day for the rest of my life. So far, I’ve made good on that promise. The only thing that might thwart me is a lack of big, copious bunches of fresh basil, which are a bit of a rarity in Paris. (Most of…
When I moved to Paris, I moved a whole ton of stuff with me. Plus one yellowed scrap of paper. It was a recipe that I tore out of some newspaper eons ago, for Goat Cheese Custard. I had high hopes for the recipe, enough to schlep it with me across the Atlantic and look at it wistfully every once in a while, guarding it…
One of the things I promised myself when I moved to France, was not to buy cheese in the supermarket. It’s not that you can’t get good cheese there. You can. But if people continue buying cheese at the supermarket, eventually les fromageries will lose business and disappear, which would be a terribly sad thing for France. And even sadder for me, since I’d probably…
When I was in Méribel avoiding the steep slopes waiting in line at the cheese coopérative, I wasn’t alone: the joint was seeing more action than all those gasp-inducing ski runs. And just about every person ordered a nice hunk of Beaufort. And since they were in front of me in line, being France, of course each person had to have a 5 minute conference…
After dinner at a friend’s apartment this weekend, they rolled out a sizable wheel of cheese to eat before dessert…which since moving to France, has become my favorite course of the meal. But usually you present one or a few selected cheeses, not a big round. Nevertheless, they slapped it down in the middle for the table where the host took a hunting-type knife, started…
There’s lots of feta-like cheese out there, but only cheese made in Greece is considered true feta nowadays and you can’t call it feta anymore unless it was produced there. Like Champagne, which has to be made in Champagne or Brie de Meaux which has to be made is Meaux, it isn’t feta unless it’s made where it’s supposed to be made—in Greece. Although I’m…
It’s pretty overwhelming visiting a fromagerie. After years of trying as many French cheeses as I could, I’ve settled on a few favorites that I go back to over and over, which include moist, piquant Roquefort de Carles, which I like drizzled with chestnut honey, little rounds of tangy chèvre and ash-covered Selles-sur-Cher, and nutty Comté from the French alps, which if you taste one…
Yesterday, I decided that since I was the last person in the world to be using Safari as a web browser, I should switch to Firefox. Everyone says it’s better and since I use Movable Type for the blog, Firefox has little buttons to make things bold or to italicize, so I don’t need to type in a bazillion symbols everytime I do that. About…
“Can I bring that back?” I’ve been asked that question a lot by visitors to France, wondering if they can bring certain items home. Here are some articles and posts about what can and can’t be brought back into the United States: –Think Twice Before Stuffing Your Suitcase (USA Today) –Transportation Security Administration –Importing Food Products into the United States (FDA) –Travelers Bringing Food Into…
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