Foodie Friday - Eating Out

I absolutely love eating out and, I must add that it is something that I do mostly when I travel, since there are basically no decent restaurants in my little Western Pennsylvania town.

I do not have many memories of eating out when I was growing up in France, because my parents constantly complained about the state of their finances, which leads me to infer that the cost of dining out was prohibitive. A few do come to mind, though:

1. I remember my maternal grandfather once taking my brother and me for lunch to the restaurant Le Meunier, near the train station in Lille. That was his favorite restaurant. I had leg of lamb (gigot d'agneau) with flageolet beans, a meal that remains one of my favorites. Interestingly, Le Meunier still exists, and it is a restaurant where my brother and his wife eat very often (possibly as frequently as once a week), and they even have their assigned table there. We dined there together a couple of years ago, and I thought that the food was extremely good. The prices are very reasonable as well.

2. Whenever we ate at a restaurant, my father, who worked as a chef for some twenty-five years of his working life, would literally dissect the food and be overly critical of everything that was served. It was downright embarrassing, and made dining out extremely unpleasant. The only restaurant where he usually abstained from doing that was the one owned by his friend Lucien, who catered my confirmation banquet. And I have to admit that Lucien was a pretty good chef.

3. My happiest family dining experiences is when my parents, my brother and I ate at a fondue restaurant in Annecy. I was about 15 or maybe 18 years old at the time. We had a traditional cheese fondue, with which we drank a copious amount of local white wine. I think that we all got a bit tipsy, because we laughed very hard during the entire duration of this dinner.

4. I remember my first experience with so-called "exotic" cuisine. My brother and I were teenagers, and we were visiting my godmother, who lived in Saint-Maur, a suburb of Paris. She took us to a Vietnamese restaurant, and I was wowed by the food I ate there. Thus began my long-time love affair with Asian food.

5. Once, my family went to a restaurant where we ate a huge paella, and my mother got sick as a dog (neither my father, my brother, nor I got sick.) I assume that she must had stumbled upon a bum mussel (something similar happened to Marty when we were in Florida last March.)

When I came to the U.S. for a year, I was introduced to a different eating protocol, one that is typical of American restaurants. I discovered that many restaurants could be very dark, to the point where it was tough to see the food on one's plate. I also learned that the salad is served before, rather than after the main course, and that you are asked what dressing you want (in France, you get a vinaigrette, and that's that.) Of course, I thought that French dressing was extremely weird, since it does not even exist in France. At that time, a salad at most restaurants consisted of absolutely tasteless iceberg lettuce, a few bits of tomato, some cucumber slices, and maybe some onion. The portions were enormous, especially steaks. I also realized that the waiter or waitress constantly comes over to your table to ask you if things are OK, which never happens in France, where the staff assumes that, if anything was wrong, you would let them know immediately.

During that year, while living in November and December 1973 in Albany, New York, I stayed at the house of a woman (who must have been in her early sixties) who was a math teacher at the school where I was helping with the French program. This woman couldn't cook to save her life, and, everyday, we either ate a hot dog with baked beans or a TV dinner, or we'd eat at the local Howard Johnson's, where the food was beyond abysmal. That's where I discovered, to my greatest horror, that gravy could be sickeningly gloppy.

After I got married, my husband and I dined out once in a while. We had a very favorite Chinese restaurant where we used to go, it was located on Concord Pike in Wilmington, Delaware. We also used to go to The Charcoal Pit, a great hamburger joint where you could also get amazing milkshakes (and I am not especially fond of milkshakes!). We never ate at very expensive restaurants, except that we once ate at a fairly posh and trendy Philadelphia restaurant named Frog (which closed down years ago.) After we moved to Pittsburgh, we barely ever dined out.

As I mentioned it above, there is no really good restaurant around where I live, so I usually eat out only whenever I travel. Marty and I are rather fond of dining out, although we also love cooking meals at home. We never really go to super expensive restaurants either, I have never seen the point of spending in excess of, let's say, $200.00 for a dinner for two anywhere. If I had to mention a couple of eating places that I really love, I would say Kaya and Point Brugge Café in Pittsburgh. I also try to eat at as many exotic restaurants as possible (Thai and Indian are my favorites, I am not fond of Mexican cuisine) whenever I am in a big city.

An interesting fact is that, after my mother had met Roger, the man who became her second husband, they both would go out to expensive restaurants in Lille and its vicinity. A funny anecdote about this is that Roger would like to make the staff at those restaurants believe that he was a food critic. So, right after my mother and him had been seated at their table, he would pull out a little notebook and a pen and put them next to his plate. I am not so sure that the staff would fall for it, though. Every time I would visit them, Roger and my mother, possibly to impress me, would take me to a different local top-notch restaurant. My favorite still remains L'Ecume des Mers, an excellent and very fine seafood restaurant. They also once took me to L'Huitrière, probably the most expensive restaurant in Lille, and one where my mother had always dreamed that she would eat one day. I would say that the place was way too chichi for me, and that, although the food was very good, it was not transcendent. All of those fine dining outings with my mother and her husband were meant to be total experiences, which always involved getting dressed up to the gills to go out. And I must admit that, once in a while, I do like an ultimate dining experience that involves getting totally decked out before going to a fine restaurant. However, it's something that I seldom do.

One last thought - about eating alone at a restaurant. I find myself having to do this on a regular basis when I travel alone. For example, for the past few years I have spent about a week in Paris alone each June, either at the beginning or the tail end of everyone of my trips to France. I also go to the yearly Popular Culture Conference (in St. Louis, this year, I am not overly thrilled about that location). In each of these circumstances, I eat out alone. I do find that a tad unpleasant, and I tend to eat too fast so as to be done with it already. I occasionally resort to hotel room service, which I like even less than dining out alone.

Now, I realize that I wrote an entry on this very topic sometime in September of last year. Interestingly, I repeat a lot of the same things, although I have added a few in this new entry. Still, I will publish this one, because I kind of felt an urge to write about this topic again, it seems.

Foodie Friday - Holiday Fare (Part II)!

Soooo... Picking up where I left off last week. I got married in August, 1975 and, by Labor Day of that year, I had settled permanently in the good old U.S. of A., and that's where I have spent every Christmas ever since. In fact, Rick and went to France only once around the holidays, it was ca. 1981 or 1982, and we did not leave until after Christmas, because it would have been unacceptable for us not to spend that holiday with his family (this did not bug me, because Christmas was never much fun at my parents' place anyway.)

The first thing that killed me about Christmas in the U.S. was how much fuss people made about the gift buying process - it actually astounded me that people would ask me, in early November, if I had started my Christmas shopping. Coming from a family in which you were lucky to get one or two small gifts, I was floored when I saw the obscene quantity of gifts that my sister-in-law and her fiancé gave each other that year. Rick and I had literally no money to buy gifts, and I think that we exchanged no more than three or four small gifts each. I have to say that, in later years, we became much more lavish with our gifts to each other, and we have also always tended to give our daughter way way too many Christmas gifts. She now gets money and, believe you me, she makes out incredibly well. But enough with gift giving.

My in-laws were Italian, and they considered themselves more Italian than authentic Italians living in Italy. Of course, that was total bullshit - their lifestyle was steeped into American-Italian culture, and that was that (neither my father-in-law, nor my mother-in-law could speak a stitch of Italian, because their parents were into the big melting-pot concept, not into asserting their own heritage.) My in-laws did not observe the Italian tradition of the seven to twelve fish dishes served on Christmas eve (which always includes baccala, or salt cod, but also crab, eel, calamari and shrimp.) In fact, we would go to their place to exchange gifts on Christmas eve, and we usually had spaghetti and meatballs, nothing fancy, that was it. The Christmas dinner at my in-laws was very much a repeat of the Thanksgiving fare: stuffed turkey, mashed potatoes, a green vegetable of some sort, and gravy. There was usually some pie for dessert (except that for Christmas 1975, I made that infamous yule log - it was great, but it was so tough and time-consuming to make that I never did it again.)

On thing that went on in Rick's family was that the women all baked zillion of cookies - I am not a sweet tooth, so I seldom ate any (one exception is chocolate chip cookies with nuts, which I adore), and, therefore, do not remember all the different types of cookies that they made. Of course, my mother-in-law made pizzelles, both anis and vanilla-flavored. My daughter grew very fond of those, but I do not know if she still likes them. Since I am on the topic of Christmas cookies, I might as well discuss now my own "baking Christmas cookies" tradition. Even though I thoroughly hate baking, as soon as Claire was old enough to be conscious of Christmas traditions - and this must have been around 1989, the year we moved to Pittsburgh, she was three then - I felt that I would flunk Motherhood 101 if I did not bake Christmas cookies with her. Well, the only kind of cookies that I was ever able to bake was chocolate chip cookies. So, that's the only kind of Christmas cookies that we baked that year and every holiday season thereafter. I think that we once tried to make the kind of cookies that you can cut out (I think that they are butter cookies), and it was a big flop. The dough kept on sticking to the rolling pin, and I could never get an even layer of dough that I could have cut out with Christmas-themed cutters.

The last Christmas that we spent in Delaware was in 1989. As I just mentioned it, we had moved to Pittsburgh in August of that year, but made the trip back to Wilmington to spend that holiday with Rick's family. Thereafter, we had our own Christmas dinner, which, for us, was also a repeat of our Thanksgiving fare, although we did not stuff the Christmas turkey. As long as Claire believed in Santa Claus, she opened her presents on Christmas morning, so there was no celebration on Christmas eve. After that, we started a tradition of setting up our Christmas tree (which was always natural) and trimming it on Christmas eve (while playing Christmas music fairly loudly), after which we had Chinese takeout (Chinese restaurants are the only ones opened on Christmas eve and Christmas day, it seems, and they tend to cater to Jewish folks on those two days.)

Claire, Rick and I continued spending Christmas eve and Christmas day every year after we had separated, until Christmas 2006. By then, I had met Marty, and we just stopped getting together for Christmas. I have spent Christmas eve and Christmas day with Marty since Christmas 2007, and, frankly, I cannot really pinpoint any culinary tradition that we may have for that holiday. This year, we are going to have a seafood dinner on Christmas eve, and will be taking off for Florida (we will be driving) on Christmas morning.

One thing that I like about Christmas and the holidays in general are parties, I like cover dish parties a great deal, especially when they involve appetizers and cool specialties brought by the guests. One thing that I absolutely hate is eggnog. It's absolutely disgusting. Just give me champagne, please.

Foodie Friday - Holiday Fare (Part I)!

I think that it is high time that I addressed what, for me, constitutes a traditional holiday dinner. And, of course, I should start with my years growing up in France.

I don't remember much of my family's holiday fare until we moved to the fish, poultry, and prepared foods shop that my parents bought in 1962. There were a few elements to our holiday food fare.

Christmas eve:

I come from a staunchly catholic family and, for my parents, Christmas was first and foremost a religious holiday. Gift-giving was only in the very remote background of our Christmas celebration and, in fact, my parents did not think that children should be misled into believing in Le Père Noël (Santa Claus), so they told us right away that he did not exist and that it was parents who bought gifts for their kids. As a result, going to midnight mass was a must. And I really liked it when I was very little and we used to go to this ceremony at the Grand Séminaire de Lille, of which my uncle Jean was the director. I loved the pomp, the beautiful singing by the seminarians, the incense, and all the highly ritualistic stuff that would go on for well over an hour. Later on, as I grew older and reached adolescence, I became jaded and indifferent toward the entire thing.

After the midnight mass, we would return home and, even though we were dead tired, we would have our traditional buttered coquille de Noël with hot chocolate. Coquille de Noël is some sort of a bread that looks and tastes very much like brioche, and is mostly popular in northern France and Belgium around the holidays. Now, I am not overly fond of either brioche or hot chocolate, but this meal was so ingrained in our Christmas ritual that I would have found it simply sacrilegious if my family had done away with it (we did by the time I was in my late teens, and it really didn't phase me one bit.)

My family was never into having a "traditional" réveillon, or late Christmas eve dinner. I think that this was due to the fact that my parents worked like dogs for weeks prior to Christmas day, and that Christmas eve was always a very busy day for them. They would have been too bushed to prepare a big evening meal on that day.

Christmas day:

On Christmas day, we would have a "traditional" Christmas dinner - which always included an appetizer of escargots and raw oysters. It is only much later on that my parents would occasionally serve foie gras at Christmas. A little note in passing on escargots and raw oysters.

1. Escargots - My parents sold escargots in their store, and my brother and I had the great pleasure of stuffing thousands of shells with snails that came in industrial-size cans. This was an amazingly disgusting process that might lead one never to eat another escargot for the rest of one's life. When the shells were stuffed, we would fill each one up - thus, covering the snail it contained - with garlic butter that my father had made. To this day, I remain convinced that escargots are absolutely tasteless and that the only good part of this dish is the melted garlic butter after they have been baked in the oven. My brother and I never got paid for doing this work, at which we slaved away during our entire Christmas vacation - even between Christmas and New Year.

2. Raw oysters - I really liked those. My mother, however, was highly allergic to oysters. If she ate only a very mild trace of oyster, she would be deadly ill for some twenty-four hours. Once, on a Christmas day, I got very sick in the late afternoon (some time after our Christmas dinner), and blamed it on the oysters that I had eaten. I never ate raw oysters for at least another ten years. At this point in time, I will no longer eat raw oysters, because I am afraid of food poisoning.

We would also have turkey - French turkeys are not nearly as plump as American ones, and you find them only in stores around Christmas, not really at any other time of year (although you can find turkey breast cutlets in the meat departments of supermarkets all year around.) Remember that my parents owned a poultry shop, so they sold lots of turkeys around the holidays. My family never stuffed the turkey, and we never ever had the "traditional" chestnut dressing, which I used to think would be dreadful, but now believe that it would be delicious, because chestnuts are definitely awesome. I was never a huge fan of turkey, so that particular Christmas dish left me rather cold, and I have no really vivid recollection of it.

I am not a sweet tooth, and dessert is rarely on my radar, so I don't even remember whether or not we had a traditional bûche de Noël, or yule log. Just a couple of words about that too. On the first Christmas after I had moved permanently to the U.S., I made a yule log entirely from scratch. It turned out very well, but it took me an entire day to make it. I have never attempted that feat again - besides, I do not care for baking. Some years ago, for the holiday meeting of the local chapter of the Alliance Française, I bought a yule log from a local pastry shop. It was the most horrible cake I have ever had, overly ladden as it was with über-sweet butter cream. I usually liked that baker's pastries, but the yule log is definitely not his forte.

Another great tradition that my family had around the holidays was a big extended family dinner that always took place closer to New Year than to Christmas. This was due to the fact that, since my uncle Jean, who was the "patriarch" of the family and also the Bishop of Annecy, had to officiate at Christmas services in his diocese. At that dinner, which was usually held at my aunt's house, because that's where my grandmother lived, all of my uncles and aunts and my four cousins were present (although my uncle Michel and my aunt Agnès, both religious stationed in Rome, were more often than not able to make it. We'd call them on the phone and took turn talking to them.) My father would typically prepare the entire meal and, most often, he would make his amazing pintadeaux forestière (a pintadeau is a "guinea fowl" in English, it seems, I've never seen or had one in this country.) My father's forestière sauce contained tomatoes, wild mushrooms, and bits of sauteed slab bacon. That dish, to me, still brings back memories of my happiest holiday-related times. After dinner, my cousins, my brothers and I would put on skits for the entire family.

Finally, another fact related to how the holidays were celebrated in my household when I was a child, teenager, and young adult in France: We always drank loads of champagne around Christmas and New Year, and many wonderful wines were served with all our dinners. There's no real legal drinking age in France, so I cannot even remember a year when I did not have champagne and wine around the holidays because I would have been too young to have any. If you were still a child, you just had less wine than adults did.

I will address my American holiday food traditions in next week's issue of "Foodie Friday."

Foodie Friday - "Z" is for Zucchini

zuc.chi.ni |zoōˈkēnē|
noun ( pl. same or -nis )
a green variety of smooth-skinned summer squash.

When I realized that I would have to write a "Foodie Friday" entry on a food-related item beginning with the letter Z, I have to admit that I was a bit miffed. I could not think of a single one! So, I proceeded to go through my computer dictionary, and discovered that, by God, there's a bunch of them - I even thought about writing an entry on Zantac, which is defined as a "noun trademark for ranitidine" which, in turn is "a synthetic compound with antihistamine properties, used to treat ulcers and related conditions." Antacids would be related to food, wouldn't they?

Another fun one was zabaglione, which - something I did not know - is "an Italian dessert made of whipped and heated egg yolks, sugar, and Marsala wine, served hot or cold." To me, of course, the word "zabaglione" suggests the image of a family of mustachioed and totally ripped Italian trapeze artists, as in "the world famous Zabaglione Brothers"!

I also ran across zakuska, zebra mussel, zest, suppa inglese, and zwieback, until I hit - bingo, why had I not thought about this one? - zucchini.

Zucchini. The ubiquitous summer garden vegetable. The one that seems to invade everyone's garden, and whose unruly proliferation leads folks to bring bags of it to the office, so as to be able to unload their green cucurbits onto their colleagues, and to look up all sorts of zucchini recipes online. One comes to wonder if zucchini is not, actually, a garden weed.

My introduction to zucchini happened exclusively through eating - and absolutely loving - my mother's ratatouille. To my utmost chagrin, I am still unable to make that dish the way my mother did (oh, and, by the way, while we're on this topic, the movie Ratatouille is absolutely wonderful!). Zucchini is one of the vegetables which, along with tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants, enters into the preparation of ratatouille. Before I came to the U.S., I had never had zucchini prepared by itself - and I had never imagined that there could be such a thing as zucchini bread.

Allrecipes.com boasts of having "510 trusted zucchini recipes," among which Sesame Parmesan Zucchini, Chocolate Chip Orange Zucchini Bread, Fabulous Zucchini Grinders, Summer Zucchini Casserole, Corn and Zucchini Melody, Cassie's Zucchini Brownies, Grilled Zucchini and Squash, Zucchini Hummus, Blueberry Zucchini Bread, and Zucchini-Chocolate Chip Muffins. So, if your garden overflows with the unwieldy gourd next summer, you'll know where to go to find 510 different ways to get rid of it.

These days, I use zucchini (along with yellow squash) fairly regularly, and all year around, as a side dish. either sautéed in extra-virgin olive oil (Rachael Ray would say "EVOO") with onion and garlic, or seasoned with a nice curry sauce. I am not a baker, so I never make zucchini bread, although I kind of like it, especially if there are walnuts in it. I really wonder what chocolate chip orange zucchini bread tastes like and, some day, I should attempt to make zucchini-chocolate chip muffins.

I wouldn't say that zucchini is one of those vegetables that I ever crave - in fact, as I mentioned it earlier, I did not even think about writing about it in this post until I found the word "zucchini" in the dictionary - but I do not dislike it either. I still like it best as an ingredient in ratatouille, because I think that it's a tad weak to stand alone.

Foodie Friday - "Y" is for You Say "Yaourt," I Say "Yogourt"

yo.gurt |ˈyōgərt| (also yo.ghurt or yo.ghourt)
noun
a semisolid sourish food prepared from milk fermented by added bacteria, often sweetened and flavored.
ORIGIN early 17th cent.: from Turkish yoǧurt.

The first thing that I could think about after I had decided to write this Foodie Friday feature on yogurt (not too many other choices for the letter "Y"...) was that, this past June, while I was in France, my cousin burst out laughing when I used the word yogourt instead of yaourt (both are correct in French) to designate what we call "yogurt" in this country. I most likely used yogourt, because it is closer to its English equivalent than yaourt is (I was basically resorting to some sort of anglicism - it's one of those linguistic quirks that happens to those of us, French expats, who have lived in this country for too many decades...). My cousin then explained that nobody ever uses the word yogourt in France anymore, and that my using it had really dated me, and could make me pass for some kind of really weird time-traveler.

I come from a country where walking through the dairy aisle of any super- or hypermarket is a sheer delight. I was literally raised eating all sort of cheeses - some I loved, and still do, like my favorite, Roquefort, and others I did not like so much, like aged Mimolette, which my mother adored - and imposed on us constantly. Growing up, I also ate my lion's share of dairy products, such as petit suisses (for which I still feel nostalgic, since we don't have anything like that in the United States and, by God, did I love them!). I also ate plenty of yogurt, which I liked pretty much only in its "plain" configuration. My mother, however, used to make occasionally, for my brother and me, for our goûter (after school snack), a concoction of plain yogurt and fresh strawberries, when they were in season. I remember liking that very much.

Another thing that sticks to my mind whenever I think of yogurt is an incident that happened when I must have been about six or seven years old. I was, possibly, in the first or second grade, and had a cute little leather cartable (book bag), in which I took my books, notebooks, and pencil case to school. One day, my father thought that it would be a good idea for me to take a yogurt to school for my mid-morning snack, so he put one in my cartable. Well, the damn thing literally burst open in my bookbag, leaving everything in it gooey with its white, slimy content. The pages of my science book, which we had to kind of rinse, and then let dry overnight or even longer, were forever rippled after that incident. And it was one of the most embarrassing moments of my entire school career.

I also remember once applying for an internship with the local Danone plant when I was about 22 or so, and they never even got back to me. For years thereafter, I never bought any Danone (Dannon, in the U.S.) product.

The French currently market a brand of yogurt with a nostalgic twist. Called La Fermière, those yogurts are packaged in cute little stoneware jars, and I hear that the yogurt inside those jars is really quite delicious. I should, perhaps, try to taste it next time I am in France.

I am NOT a big fan of yogurt. However, I know that, as a woman, I should eat a lot of it because it is an excellent source of calcium. As a result, I regularly buy a few yogurt containers at the store (Okios organic Greek yogurt, usually plain, or vanilla-flavored), but then, I always postpone eating said yogurt before its expiration date, and end up dumping it in the garbage. As much as I try to convince myself that I should LOVE yogurt, I can never bring myself to do so. I admire folks who, like my colleague Nell, make their own yogurt and eat that stuff on a daily basis. I also admire those who, like my brother and his wife, eat a yogurt every morning for breakfast. The mere thought of that makes my stomach turn.

Foodie Friday - "X" is for Xanthan Gum

xanthan gum |ˈzanθən; -ˌθan|
noun - Chemistry
a substance produced by bacterial fermentation or synthetically and used in foods as a gelling agent and thickener. It is a polysaccharide composed of glucose, mannose, and glucuronic acid.

Well, I hate to tell you this, but there's not a great deal of choices for a Foodie Friday on an item beginning with the letter "X." However, I know of xanthan gum, a slimy gel produced by the bacterium Xanthomonas campestris, which causes black rot on vegetables like cauliflower and broccoli. It is a food additive used as a thickener and stabilizer. It is found in most salad dressings - it is, in fact, the ingredient that "solidifies" salad dressings to stabilize their emulsion, but it is such that, if you shake the bottle before pouring the dressing, it liquifies again. Except that, well, in very cheap salad dressings, there might be a bit too much xanthan gum, which gives it a very weird consistency, somewhat like that of rubber cement. Interestingly, it is an ingredient in even so called "natural" salad dressings.

According to this article, xanthan gum can be bought for home use and is a great way to thicken and stabilize soymilk-based and rice milk-based sauces, dairy-free soups and non-dairy ice creams. It prevents ice crystals from forming in ice cream, and also gives a satisfying texture to low or no-fat dairy products. Xanthan gum is an ingredient in toothpaste and in gluten-free baking. It is, according to Wikipedia, also used in fake blood and gunge (or slime) recipes.

A lesser-known use of Xanthan gum, which has nothing to do with cooking or food, is in the oil industry, to increase the viscosity of drilling mud, which helps keep drill bits lubricated.

Some folks are allergic to xanthan gum which, if they are exposed to it, may lead them to experience flu-like symptoms, or to suffer from intestinal cramping and diarrhea.

Overall, I am not too sure about what to think about xanthan gum. it is a food additive, but somewhat natural. I often use bottled salad dressings, although I prefer to make my own - because, hey, why use products with all kinds of crappy additives when you can make the same product yourself without using any additives at all? However, for those who are gluten-intolerent, xanthan gum may be a blessing.

Foodie Friday - "W" is for Water

There's not much else that I could think about for this Foodie Friday. Of course, after I decided on "water," I realized that there was wafer, waffle, Waldorf salad, wasabi, wax beans, wieners, wiener schnitzel, Welsh rarebit, wild rice, wine, watercress, Worcestershire sauce (if only because of the way it is pronounced!), and wurst. I could also have given a well-deserved nod to Weight-Watchers, an organization to which I am very grateful for having helped me shed about 25 lbs from roughly September, 2008 to June 2009.

But I think that there is a lot to be said about water. Water, or H₂O, as we sometimes call it, is a vital element found in nature, and it is, as my online dictionary tells me "the basis of the fluids of living organisms." Without a constant supply of potable water, human beings die (drinking water in excess, especially when it is combined with fasting, can also kill you in about a week's time!). As such, it is an essential and, probably, the most precious of all natural resources - I strongly believe that it is even more valuable than the earth's oil supply. Water also carries deadly bacteria, and it is essential to keep it clean - not only from said bacteria, but also from pollutants. I assume, my faithful readers, that you all know that pollutants that penetrate the soil of this earth contaminate our water supply because they eventually reach the water table (I once helped edit and entire presentation with its accompanying manual on ground water hydrology as it relates to the protection of the environment, so I may even know a bit more than I should about this.) Therefore, if you keep a garden in the summer, try to avoid using pesticides and chemicals - use only natural fertilizers.

Water happens to be my favorite non-alcoholic drink, and my second favorite potable - after beer.

I was born and raised in France, where people tend not to drink tap water, although tap water is all I drank when I was a kid. I think that my family did not have the financial means to buy mineral water. I am not sure when this happened, but, at some point in time, my family switched to bottled mineral water. And, at first, my parents, if I am not mistaken, would buy Evian water. Now, I do have a story about Evian water. When my uncle became bishop of Annecy, during his first year in his new position, he had a summer residence (nothing luxurious, but it was a fairly big place) in a little hamlet called Publier, up the mountain from the city of Evian, by lake Geneva. Right across from that house, where we spent a month in the summer of 1962, there was a natural spring - and that water was basically the same as Evian water, the kind you buy at your local supermarket. The water would flow non-stop into a huge stone tub, and that water was ice-cold. In fact, my parents would chill bottles of white wine by leaving them in that tub of cold water for a few hours. We would fill containers with that water, which was our drinking water for lunch and dinner. This is probably one of my favorite memories of our many summer vacations in the Alps (after that year, my uncle's summer residence was no longer near Evian, but up the mountain from Lake Annecy, in a little hamlet named St. Germain de Talloires - Talloires is a posh resort on the lake itself.)

Mineral water is a huge business in France (2.2 billion euros per year. On the average, a French person drinks 203 liters of mineral water per year.) If you go to any hypermarché, you will see dozens of different brands of mineral water, from Evian, to Vittel, to Volvic, and many, many others. Some of them are regular water, some are naturally sparkling, such as Perrier, Vichy, or Badoit. Most of those mineral waters are named after the spa town where the natural spring from which they come is located. And most of those waters are supposed to have some sort of medicinal property - Vichy water is supposed to be good for your digestive system, Volvic may be good for your kidneys, Evian once ran an advertising campaign claiming that it was good for your respiratory system, because it could help you breathe at an altitude of 3,000 meters (roughly 10,000 ft.) Personally, I became very attached to Evian water, probably because of my experience with it when I was ten years old. It remains my favorite French mineral water. One French mineral water that I really do not like is Vittel - it does have a funky, overly "mineral" taste. My mother and her husband used to drink God knows what mineral water, Saint-Amand comes to mind (it's a mineral water from the town of St. Amand-les-eaux, in northern France), but, whenever I would visit, my mother would purchase bottles of Evian water, just for me!

These days, I kind of drink a mix of tap and filtered water (I rarely drink spring water.) I am also very fond of sparkling water. In fact, I remember liking Perrier water very much when I was a kid, and I've always thought that Perrier bottles were very cool. Interestingly, San Pelegrino and Badoit seem to have taken over the French sparkling water market (although Perrier remains the foremost world producer of bottled carbonated water.) Badoit even comes in two types of carbonation - in red bottles, the carbonation is very intense, and in green bottles, it is normal. Here in the U.S., I never drink Perrier or San Pelegrino (unless I am at a Starbucks), because it's too expensive. However, I always have cans of sparkling water at my place, because that's what I drink most often (I do not drink alcohol during the week.) I like lemon or lime flavored sparkling water, but my local Wal-Mart no longer sells the lemon-flavored kind, so I buy the lime-flavored or the orange-flavored (I hate the raspberry-flavored water.) In Indianapolis, where Marty lives, they sell La Croix sparkling water in various flavors, including lemon and grapefruit, and Marty always brings me four twelve packs, two of each, when he visits me. I especially like the grapefruit-flavored water!

Now, how much water should we be drinking each day? When I went on the Weight Watchers diet (which I still follow fairly religiously, although I no longer attend meetings), it was stressed that we had to drink the equivalent of eight cups of water per day. I typically do not have any problem drinking four 12 oz bottles of water per day, and that's 48 oz, two cups short of the daily recommended 8 cups of 8 oz each. I just can never get there.

Finally, there is the controversy of drinking water from plastic bottles - because they leach harmful chemicals into the water. For one, I try no longer to buy cases of regular water in plastic bottles, both because of that harmful chemicals issue, and because plastic bottles are bad for the environment. Instead, I drink tap water (I should really buy one of those water purifiers that you attach to your water faucet.) For last Christmas, my daughter bought me an aluminum Sigg bottles, which I use religiously when I go to the Rec Center (not the same as the one of the photo, which I think is cute - I gave one just like that one to Marty.) I bought a knock off (which is very cute and bright red) at CVS back in August, and I use it at the office.

Well, I hope that you are fairly impressed with all I could write about plain old H₂0.

Foodie Friday - "V" is for Venison

venison |ˈvenəsən; -zən|
noun
meat from a deer.

Well, at least this Foodie Friday has the merit of being in season. I am not sure when the deer hunting season begins and ends in Western Pennsylvania this year, but I know that it is fairly soon. Just visit the local Wal-Mart, and you'll see the hunting supply department filled with camo outfits, guns, bows and arrows, and all kinds of cool hunting gear. Burly guys with mullets, whose lives revolve around shooting at wildlife haunt that area of the store. In Western PA, a man is not a man if he does not love the Pittsburgh Steelers and does not hunt deer. Hell, they even close the public schools on the first day of the deer hunting season, and a good number of my students cut classes on that day to go hunting. And they do it just because it is a "family" tradition. Deer hunting is a thing that men do with their sons (and sometimes daughters, I once had a female student who was an avid deer hunter.)

For one, I think that deer hunting is a very good thing, because the deer population in these parts is completely out of hand. Nearly everyone I know here has hit a deer or been hit by a deer while driving on back roads or highways. No less than a week ago, a friend of mine was driving his girlfriend to work - it was about 6:30 a.m., when a deer rammed into the driver side of his car. The door got pretty banged up - I am not sure what happened to the deer, if it survived or got killed. About eight years ago, I was driving home from the outlet stores with my daughter, when out of the blue, a deer appeared right in front of my car (it was already dark.) There was nothing I could do to avoid it, so (and this probably saved us, because I didn't try to veer off the road to avoid him), I rammed into him. He took a flying leap some 100 feet behind my car, and I believe that he was killed (I never really checked, I was a bit too shaken up.) Neither Claire nor I were injured, but my car sustained about $1,400 worth of damage.

So, yeah. Shoot all the deer you can. As far as I am concerned, they are humongous pests.

Well, people shoot deer, kill deer, and, eventually, eat deer. I know that it's big business around these parts to skin, gut, and butcher a deer. All the people (well, actually, they are mostly men) who deer hunt know someone who will do that for them for a good price, after which they bring the meat home, and freeze it. Then, for a number of weeks, I guess, they prepare dishes that feature deer meat - also known as venison.

The first time I had deer meat was close to thirty years ago, and the deer meat I ate then was not American, but French. At the time, my uncle was married to a woman who was from a very wealthy family involved in the cattle feed industry. And her folks were hunters. One year, when Rick and I visited my family in northern France, we were invited to my uncle's house for dinner - and the entire dinner was venison - deer pâté, and deer steak or stew (I forget.) Now, I liked that deer pâté a great deal, I generally love any kind of pâté, unless it begins to taste too much like liver. And the one served that night was particularly good. However, I remember that the meat in the main course was not much to my taste. I ate what I had on my plate, but definitely did not have any seconds. I think that it was a bit too dry and tasted too gamy.

A bit over a year ago, a member of the local Alliance Française had prepared a deer stew for the cover dish that he and his fiancée (they are now married) brought to one of our monthly meetings. Well, that was a delicious stew - no dry, gamy meat this time around! Then again, this guy is quite a cook.

When it comes to deer meat, I have not yet made up my mind about it - i.e. whether I like it or, well, it's just kind of so-so (I know for sure that I don't really dislike it.) I think that it's a little unusual, probably because it's not the kind of meat that one eats very often, especially if one does not hunt. I just googled "venison recipes," and got lots of hits. So, yes, venison is big business - from the gear you need to hunt deer, to the guy you need to hire to skin, gut, and butcher your dead deer, to whatever it takes to cook it.

Oh, and one thing I forgot is that taxidermy is also a thriving business in Western Pennsylvania. If you get a 10-point buck, needless to say that you'll want his head stuffed and mounted on the wall over your fireplace. I have been to many homes since I have been living in Western Pennsylvania, in which you will see hunting trophies (i.e. buck heads) all over the walls. Here again, I googled "taxidermy" and the name of the town where I live, and I got a decent number of hits. Locally, it costs roughly $500.00 to get your deer head stuffed and mounted on a plaque. Personally, though, I prefer the plush trophy variety shown here.

Foodie Friday - "U" is for Utensils (as in "kitchen utensils")

I am a big fan of cookware and kitchen utensils. Strolling through a kitchen store sends me into some sort of quasi-orgasmic state. I don't believe that one can ever have enough kitchen utensils. Unfortunately, my kitchen cabinet space is somewhat limited and, therefore, I have to refrain from buying more stuff.

I think that I am fairly well equipped, but let's review the state of my kitchen:

• Cookware - I own a very decent set of stainless steel pots and pans, which serve my cooking needs more than adequately. I also have a number of non-stick frying pans of different sizes, and I use all of them very frequently. I even have a cool crêpe pan that a friend brought me from Belgium, but that I haven't yet used. recently, I bought a Dutch oven (basically a Le Creuset knock-off from the Martha Stewart collection - no way I would spend $200.00+ on something like that!), which I have yet to break in. Oh, and, yes, since it is made of cast iron, it weighs a ton.

I do not really know where to fit this, so I'll mention it here, but I also own a crock-pot. When Rick and I got married, back in 1975, crock-pots were all the rage, and we got two of them as wedding presents. We did return one, of course. We used our crock-pot for some years, and then quit using it - literally for about twenty-five years. Needless to say that we got rid of it at some point. Then, maybe five or six years ago, I realized that, for the yearly Christmas luncheon that we have for our students, I could prepare mini-meatballs in tomato sauce in a crock-pot (all it takes is one bag of frozen mini-meatballs and a large jar of prepared spaghetti sauce, dump both in the crock-pot, leave it on for a few hours, and the trick is done!). So, I bought a crock-pot, which I now use quite a bit in the preparation of winter dishes.

• Cutlery - This is one area in which my kitchen is sorely lacking - only because I have never felt that I could afford springing the cash that it would take to purchase top-notch cutlery. However, I plan on remedying this very soon (Christmas is coming, right?). One regret that I have is that I never inquired properly about the fate of my father's knives. My father, you may recall, was a professional chef who had a splendid set of knives, which he maintained with great care and deep love. It seems that my mother got rid of them when she sold her house, never asking either my brother or me if we wanted them. Oh, well. Sigh.

My two favorite knives - the top one was given to me by my father, and my uncle bought be the bottom one this summer, it was not very expensive, but it's great, and I love it. Both hold an enormous sentimental value.

• Appliances - I think that I pretty much have all that I can handle on this front, although one of those multi-purpose Kitchen Aid super-mixers would be cool to have (they cost at least $300.00, maybe a bit more...). The only problem is that I don't really have enough counter space in my kitchen to house one of them. I have a cheap mixer that is perfectly adequate (I never really bake anyway, so I use it very rarely), I own a very cool immersion blender that I use a lot to make blended soups, I also own a decent blender, and a food processor which I find a royal pain to use and clean, but that comes in very handy once in a while. I have a toaster, of course, and even a coffee grinder that I have not used once (it used to belong to Rick, then went to Claire, and now it's mine.) I had a toaster-oven, but I never used it and gave it to my daughter. Recently, I have been contemplating the purchase of a bread machine, but, here again, I wouldn't know where to store it.

One of my favorite small appliances is a kick-ass grater that Marty bought for me last Christmas. I use it to grate cheese and carrots, as well as celery root whenever I can find it.

• Spoons, spatulas, tongs, whisks, and the like - I am well-stocked when it comes to this area of my kitchen. I do have two favorite wooden spoons that I use constantly - one is named Sylvia (as in "Sylvia Spoon"), and the other is Spatula Clark (Spatula Clark is not really a spatula, but a wooden spoon.)

Sylvia Spoon (top) and Spatula Clark
(having a semblance of wooden spoon lesbian sex...)

I have a large drawer full of all sorts of things like measuring cups, miscellaneous spoons and knives that I rarely use, etc.

Gadgets - Among gadgets are things like thermometers (I own a meat thermometer), egg slicers (I don't have one), garlic presses (I have one), pepper mills (I have one that I don't like that much...), cork screws (my brother gave me a dynamite, "endless screw" one this summer, but Marty took it upon himself to bring it back to the U.S., and, because he had left it in his carry on luggage, had it promptly confiscated at the security check at the Paris airport. Needless to say that he was very contrite about that. Well, I'll buy a new one next time I am in France), etc. I feel that I have everything I need on this front.

Well, except that I think that I have never owned a manual can opener with which I think that I have been 100% satisfied. I replace my can opener every couple of years or so, always hoping that the next one will be "it" - but it never is.

I may have expanded here what the term "utensils" encompasses when it comes to the kitchen, but I came to the conclusion that, apart from a decent knife collection, my kitchen is pretty well equipped, thank you.

Foodie Friday - "T" is for Table

Let us discuss today the fine art of setting a very nice table, and let us also dwell a bit on table manners (about which I wrote, way back when, I will just plagiarize my own prose!).

I am one of those folks who loves to take time to eat - well, at least dinner. I typically eat my breakfast (a bowl of cereal or a piece of toast, and a banana) at my computer in the morning, and my lunch (a sandwich and a piece of fruit) at my desk. And I do like eating at a table, although, because I live alone, I eat at my coffee table, in front of the TV, most every night. I am sorely aware that it's not a very good thing to do this, but I can never bring myself to having dinner all alone at my dining room table.

I have always loved tables that are beautifully set for lavish dinner parties, although I believe that I am not capable of achieving perfection in that particular area of my household management. One reason is that I have never spent the money necessary for reaching this goal. Let's face it - to do so, you need to buy:

1. Beautiful, high quality table linens, if possible in many seasonal configurations. I basically do not own gorgeous tablecloths, napkins, place mats, etc. Of course, I do own tablecloths, napkins, and place mats, but they are rather pedestrian-looking.

2. Expensive porcelain tableware. I actually own one such set, a lovely set of Haviland tableware (the pattern is called "Muscadin") that I was given as a gift by the then director of Haviland New York, for having served as interpreter and guide for two Haviland Limoges employees who had spent time at the Franklin Mint (to train workers in its porcelain plant.) It was a totally unexpected gift. I suspect that each table setting (of which I own six) is worth a small fortune - according to a website that I just found online, one dinner plate alone is worth $239.95! Needless to say that I do not dare use those dishes very often and, for that matter, I do not have frequent dinner parties anyway.

I do own a very nice set of Dansk tableware ("Bistro"), which I use at most semi-formal dinner that I give at my house. It is very adequate, simple, and nice.

3. Nice crystal stemware. I actually own nice stemware, crystal water and wine glasses which, I believe, were imported from Sweden. Rick and I bought them (quite a few of them, I must add, so I do have spares) years ago, and I got to keep them when we separated. Their design is very sleek and plain - utterly Scandinavian. I love those glasses!

4. Good silver flatware. I basically do not own great flatware - I use flatware that I bought at Ikea some years ago (that pattern has been discontinued.) It's cute, but not exquisite, that's for sure. My friend Mary-Jo, who can set a superb table like no one else can (except, perhaps, Martha Stewart), brought back this amazing set of flatware from Thailand, and I swear that if I go to Bangkok next summer, I will buy the same, or a similar set. This past summer, I asked my mother's husband to locate her family silver flatware (which she had inherited from her parents, it was simple, and quite lovely), but it turns out that it was - surprisingly - nowhere to be found (my brother and his wife were not interested in it, by the way.) It's a mystery that I will never quite understand, because I am quite sure that my mother did not get rid of this flatware when she sold her house ca. 2000 or 2001.

5. Great table accessories, such as candlestick holders, candles, vases with flowers, napkin rings, knife rests, etc. Even though I own candlesticks, candles (I am not a huge candle freak, as many women are), and vases, I do not own what it takes to bring amazingly classy, or gorgeous seasonal accents to my dinner table.

I think that I can set a very nice table whenever I have company - again, that does not happen very often, and it's been fairly rare since Marty moved to Indianapolis, because, in this blasted town, no one ever invites a single woman - no one ever invites me to their dinner parties, so, of course, I invite no one either (I know, I know, it's sort of a vicious cycle...).

One more observation about setting a dinner table. Even though I have often thought of doing so, I have never purchased Christmas tableware. I don't think that I will ever make that purchase, because I am basically never home for the holidays anymore. I wonder how many of you, my faithful readers (who celebrate Christmas) own holiday dinnerware...

Finally, I will repost here part of an entry that I had written on August 31, 2007 - which had to do with table manners (and I have reposted the same cartoon that I had posted then, because it is very funny! - it reads: You forgot good manners, Fred. One does not put one's elbows on the table.):

When I was a kid, of course, we were taught table manners by my parents (I should say, mostly by my mother.) What we were taught at home would probably have been sufficient for us to be deemed "polite, well-mannered kids," but I also went - for three years, between the ages of nine and twelve - to a fairly posh catholic boarding school (attended mostly by girls whose parents were quite well-off), where I had to sit through weekly "lessons de politesse" (manner lessons.) During those lessons, we learned how to behave properly in society - from how to curtsy (I never really got good at it, and it's a skill that I never ever used, except when encountering that school's principal, whom we were supposed to greet by curtsying in front of her) to how to set the table for a dinner party, and how to eat properly. I remember my mother being genuinely impressed by what I had learned in school, and congratulating herself that she had sent me to the Institution Sainte-Odile, where I had been able to be taught the very best manners that would differentiate me from ordinary French girls.

So, yes, I know how to act refined when circumstances demand it, but I prefer to let my hair down (OK, my hair is short, but it's just a figure of speech) and eat my chicken legs with my fingers. On the other hand, good manners are so ingrained in me that there are bad table habits that I just don't have, and that I can't stand - I always eat with my mouth closed, I don't speak with my mouth full (unless someone at the table says something to which I must react right away. But then, I catch myself, and immediately stop talking until I have swallowed my food), I don't slurp my soup or my drink, or chew my food noisily, I wipe my mouth before drinking from a glass, etc.

My school actually gives manner lessons to seniors - who can take workshops during which they learn how to behave during a business lunch or dinner. Honors students are required to take those workshops, and the Director of our Honors program told me recently that most of our kids have no table manners whatsoever, and have to be taught even the most rudimentary elements of proper dining etiquette. But this may be the case at many other universities in this country, since I found pages devoted to dining etiquette on the websites of a number of American universities.

What about you, my faithful readers - where did you learn your table manners, and, if you do have children, how did you teach them, or are you teaching them proper table manners? This seems to be more and more difficult for parents to achieve in this country, where traditional family dining has fallen by the wayside. Kids (and their parents) are involved in so many activities that there is no more time for family dinners, the very setting in which table manners are taught to children. Instead, everyone grabs something from the fridge, nukes it, and eats it either standing up at the kitchen counter, or in front of the tube. Is this why there has been some sort of a decline in good table manners?

Foodie Friday - "S" is for, well, for "Six things."

When I thought of the letter "S" for this entry, I could not come up with something that would be substantial enough for a full-blown post, but several came to mind, so I will write on six food items that popped up when I thought about edibles that start with the letter "s."

1. Sardines - I don't believe that I have ever eaten fresh sardines, but I sure loved to eat canned sardines when I was growing up, and seldom eat them now. It may be because I love sardines the way they are sold in France - they are small and extremely tasty, whereas American sardines are (in my opinion) way too big and they are fairly insipid. According to Wikipedia, "Sardines are rich in omega-3 fatty acids, which can help maintain a healthy heart" and prevent Alzheimer's disease. According to the same source, it is in Brittany that sardines were first canned, and sardines from that area of France are still the very best in the world (which may explain why I liked them so much!). Well, maybe I should try to find some sardines imported from France somewhere near where I live...

2. Salad - To me, until I came to the U.S., salad was the course that you eat between the main course and cheese. Most of the time, in my household, it consisted in Boston lettuce with minced shallots, oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper. Once in a while, it was escarolle, salade frisée, or, my very least favorite, Belgian endive (I do like braised endives - called chicon in northern France - but I dislike them raw.) An anecdote related to the salad course at my house is that when my grand-aunt Agnès lived with us for a while (she was in her 70's, had never married, and had basically no resources), she would always prepare it, but never put salt, oil and vinegar in it. Just pepper. And she would say, rather loudly, to my mother: Micheline, j'ai mis le poivre!. We always speculated that she would put the pepper in the salad because she was afraid that my mother would be too heavy-handed with it, and that it would cause her digestive problems.

In the U.S., the first thing that I discovered is that Americans put tomatoes, cucumbers, scallions, onions, carrots, radishes, olives, and possibly other things in their salads. Back in 1973, the common lettuce used in salads was iceberg, and I still cannot understand why people would punish themselves by eating such a tasteless variety of lettuce. Oh, and I also discovered "French" dressing - hell, that was a funny moment! (I still don't like it, by the way...).

Little by little, America became a bit more sophisticated with its salads and, these days, you can buy bags of baby lettuces of all sorts - arugula, mesclun, spinach, etc. My daily fare (I have a salad close to every night) is some of that mix, to which I add chopped green onion, tomatoes, and avocado. To that, I add 2 tablespoons of salad dressing, usually some sort of balsamic vinaigrette (which I make myself some of the time), but I also like light Caesar. I hate, by the way putting fruit in my salad - so, no dried cranberries for me.

Finally, I really like tuna salad. I make it simply, just canned albacore with mayo and finely diced celery, no onion. I am also very fond of chicken salad, but seldom make it. However, our local, independently owned coffee shop, Michelle's, makes the very best chicken salad, ever. I always have a cup of soup and half a chicken salad sandwich on whole wheat bread, with lettuce and tomato whenever I have lunch there.

3. Succotash - My online dictionary defines succotash as "a dish of corn and lima beans cooked together." I am not overly fond of kernel corn, and I really hate lima beans. Needless to say that I really do not like succotash.

4. Salmon - I love salmon, but I will not discuss it in length here. Unfortunately, I live in an area where all you can get is a fairly lame, farm-raised variety. I try to eat fish at least once, preferably twice a week, and salmon is one of the fish that I buy regularly. For the record, I never buy canned salmon, although I know many folks who do. And, of course, I absolutely love, love, love smoked salmon - for breakfast, on a bagel with cream cheese.

5. Salt - Probably one of the world's most important food commodities - since it was used for years to preserve foods. I had to mention it, because I have a propensity for liking salty foods (conversely, I do not have a sweet tooth.) I like sea salt, and that's what I try to use most often.

6. Salsify - Salsify is a root vegetable, and, frankly, there are very few root vegetables that I really like (I like to make céleri rémoulade with celery root - which is close to impossible to find where I live -, I like putting turnips in couscous, and I am not overly crazy about cooked carrots, but I love shredded carrot salad.) When I was growing up, my father would prepare salsify fairly regularly, and I used to dread it whenever he did. To me, there was nothing that you could do to this vegetable to make it appetizing. On the other hand, salsify is seldom on my radar these days, I have never seen it anywhere near where I live.

Foodie Friday - "R" is for "Restaurant"

As you know, my dear faithful readers, I love reading books about food, and the one I just started is Mimi Sheraton's memoir titled Eating My Words (for those who do not know this, Mimi Sheraton is a renowned American food critic who worked, among other, for The New York Times.)

In her introduction to this book, she writes:
Since childhood, I had considered restaurants to be wondrous places. No matter what class of eatery my parents took me to, I had to clean up and change clothes, and en route in the car, I was reminded of manners. No wonder I considered the event special, as, in vastly different styles, we were greeted, seated, and presented with menus, after which I could take the measure of my appetite.

I can honestly say that I generally love eating out, and that I developed a love affair with restaurants when I was a child. The only problem was - my family seldom ate at restaurants. As soon as my father started working as a chef, he decided that no restaurant was capable of producing decent food. If we went to a restaurant, he would embarrass us by dissecting and critiquing every single dish that was served - thus putting a huge damper on whatever pleasure his wife and two children could have possibly derived from the whole experience. The only exception was a restaurant owned by his friend Lucien in the little town of La Bassée, located about twenty miles from Lille. "Mon copain Lucien," as my father called him, could truly cook - and I actually agreed with my father on that.

I remember being taken at least once, with my brother, to the restaurant "Le Meunier" in Lille (next to the train station), by my grandfather. That restaurant was his very favorite and, in a very interesting twist of fate, my brother and his wife have now become huge "regulars" at that place - I think that they dine there once a week, they even have their "table," and the owner treats them like royalty. It is not a very fancy restaurant by any means, but it is what one could deem in French as beyond "correct," and the food is very good and its quality consistent. My grandfather loved gigot d'agneau (leg of lamb) with flageolets beans (tiny, light green, very tender, and utterly delicious!), and that's what we had.

I remember going to the restaurant also with my godmother - she once took my brother and me to a Vietnamese restaurant near her apartment, and it was the first time that I had ever eaten any kind of Asian food.

Going to a restaurant when I was a kid was, then, not a very common event - it was something that one did for a special celebration like a wedding, a communion, or a funeral. And then, it was not a "real" restaurant experience, but more like a banquet one.

When I came to the U.S. for a year, I was taken to restaurants a number of times by various individuals. Restaurants - if they were fancy - tended to be very dark, so dark that you could barely see your food, which was OK, but never what I would call "gourmet" (I never really went to any extremely exclusive dining place.) For a period of two months, in November and December, 1973, I lived with this woman who was a science teacher at Cardinal McCloskey High School, and this woman could not cook at all (her husband was a railroad engineer who was seldom home, due to the demands of his job.) So, she would either serve boiled hot dogs with baked beans from a can, or we would go to the local Howard Johnson, where the food was absolutely horrific. Later on, when I met Rick, we used to call that kind of food "plastic." It just looked totally fake, and I am quite certain that everything came out of cans. Fine dining, it was not - far from it!

After we got married, Rick and I ate out fairly frequently - also never in very fancy places, but we often went to a couple of very nice Chinese restaurants that we liked a great deal. One of our favorite places was also The Ground Round on Concord Pike in Wilmington, Delaware. Those were the days when I didn't need to watch my weight, and we would have a huge burger (their burgers were phenomenal), fries, and a milk shake. When Claire was maybe a year and a half, we went there with her little friend Annie and her parents, and both girls trashed the place so badly (there were cheerios all over the floor - it was the most misbehaved Claire ever was at a restaurant) that we never went back there for months.

We did go a couple or three times to nicer places, such as Frog in Philadelphia, but that was rare, because we could not really afford to patronize expensive restaurants. In fact, to this day, I have never really been to a very fancy restaurant in this country.

However, I did go to a few very nice restaurants in France, after my mother had met her second husband. This guy really loved eating, and he had money to spare and could afford to go to the best places in town. One of the most "chi-chi" restaurants in Lille is a seafood place called L'Huitrière and both he and my mother took me there some years ago (the previous year, he had taken us to another fancy seafood place called L'Ecume des mers, which was very good. My mother told me, when we went to L'Huitrière, where Roger had already taken her a couple of times before, that she had always dreamed of dining there and that never, in her wildest dreams, had she ever thought that she would eat there one day. And yes, the place was extremely fancy, I would even say a bit pretentious. It is the only restaurant where I have ever been where a waiter pulls your seat out, and where there is a sommelier. The food was very good (and, I assume, very expensive, they have special menus with no prices on them, usually for ladies.) We had, as a dessert, crêpes Suzette that were flambéed with great panache by the head waiter - it was quite a show.

I cannot say that I felt fulfilled by this experience. It was obvious that Roger (my mother's second husband) took me there to impress me. My brother and my uncle told me that Roger used to immediately pull out, after he had been seated at a table in any fancy restaurant, a notepad and a pen, which - he thought - would lead the staff to believe that he was a food critic. Supposedly (according to him) that tactic often proved very successful, and he would be treated like a king. Both my brother and my uncle (who never really cared for Roger) thought that this behavior on his part was absolutely preposterous. I would tend to agree.

Nowadays, I live in a little town that has no good restaurant. When an Applebee's opened a couple of years ago, it was a huge event! This past Wednesday, my friend Cindy from Philadelphia was here for a workshop that she was giving yesterday to local librarians, and we went out to dinner. We went to a place called The Wayside Inn, which is located just about a mile from where Marty used to live when I first met him. It is one of the best restaurants in the area, and the food that we had was very decent, but not what I would call stellar. In fact, at this point in time, I cannot really recall any really stellar restaurant where I have dined over the past several years (although Gobo, the vegeterian place where Claire and I had lunch in Manhattan was probably an exception - the decor was beautiful, and the food exquisite.)

My preference still goes to exotic restaurants - Southeast Asian, Thai, and Indian. I also like Tapas bars (Barcelona Tapas in Indy is quite good and fun.) I can take chain restaurants if need be, but I prefer avoiding them - I just do not really like the uniformity that prevails in the restaurant fare that is made available to the suburban middle-class in this country. It hurts my sensibility that one can eat the very same meal in San Diego, Chicago, Phoenix, Saint-Louis, Philadelphia, and New York City.

Here are my favorite eating places:
- Barcelona Tapas (mentioned above), downtown Indianapolis.
- Spice Island Tea House, Oakland (district of Pittsburgh located in the vicinity of the University of Pittsburgh.)
- Point Brugge Café in Point Breeze (another district of Pittsburgh.)
- India Garden In Oakland, Pittsburgh.
- There is a place, not far from the Art Museum in Philadelphia where my friend Cindy took me (and Rick too) a few times - the food is phenomenal there. I think that it's Bridgid's. I highly recommend it, and they have an awesome selection of Belgian beers.

I can't really think of any other place right now.

Finally, I have never had a knockout dining experience in France, ever. Some day, I should really save money and go to some three star restaurant, but I am afraid that coughing up an obscene amount of money for dining at a restaurant - and I don't care if it is the ultimate mecca of haute cuisine - would cause me to choke on my food. I love dining out, but I do not believe that I will ever be able to bring myself to spend, let's say, over the equivalent of $100 per person (wine/alcoholic beverages not included) on a restaurant meal. I guess that I just keep myself happy about reading the memoirs of food critics who got to dine in the best restaurants all over the globe!

Foodie Friday coming to you by the end of the day

I only had time to get started on today's entry, but it will be done before the end of the day. Patience, my friends. I know that you're waiting for this feature with bated breath!

Foodie Friday will be on Saturday this week

Because I chose to post on the 8th Anniversary of 9/11 today, I am moving my "Foodie Friday" feature to tomorrow. And, yes, it will deal with food items that begin with the letter "Q." I bet you can't wait!

READ BELOW, TODAY'S POST FOLLOWS THIS ONE.

Foodie Friday - "P" is for "Pantry"

pantry |ˈpantrē|
noun ( pl. -tries)
a small room or closet in which food, dishes, and utensils are kept.

Now, this "official" dictionary definition of the word "pantry" messes me up a bit, because I thought that a pantry contained only food products. Anyway, I will limit myself to discussing only what food items are in my kitchen cabinets - a.k.a. my pantry.

My pantry is fairly well-stocked, i.e. I will not be starving anytime soon. I have a bunch of dry goods - rice (a large bag of basmati rice, my favorite, but also long-grain rice, jasmin rice, and even brown rice, of which I am not too fond and, for the life of me, can never cook to perfection. I also like to keep at least one box of arborio rice - for risotto - on hand), and many different types of pasta, couscous, and at least a bag each of lentils and black beans. I also have all sorts of canned goods - I like to keep my pantry stocked with stuff like tomato sauce, vodka sauce, diced tomatoes, canned corn kernels, kidney beans, navy beans, albacore tuna, canned mushrooms (just in case.) Whenever I go to Pittsburgh, I also stock up on jarred Indian and curry sauces which are excellent to prepare fast and delicious meals (no grocery store in my pitiful little town carry that kind of product...).

Of course, one's pantry should also include herbs and spices, and I think that I have most of my basic needs covered on that front. I use a lot of paprika and cayenne pepper, and I also use quite a bit of curry powder and turmeric, for some weird reason. I don't really care for Emeril Lagasse, but I always have some of his "essence" in my pantry, because I find it handy to season anything from a pan-fried steak or pork chop to sautéed vegetables.

I also have vegetable oil, olive oil, and extra virgin olive oil, as well as white, wine, and balsamic vinegar. One part of my pantry is devoted to cereal - which is one box of wheat chex (which I seldom touch - they must be stale by now), a box of Kellogg's Special K Plus, and Quaker Oats oatmeal (which I also seldom touch, because I really do not care for oatmeal, but my daughter, Claire, has been on a campaign to make me love it for the past two years or so - hence, I try it once in a while.) I have a bottle of maple syrup, but I never use it, because I never make pancakes or waffles, although I do own a waffle iron. I also have baking supplies but, hey, as you all know, I don't like handling flour, so I pretty much never bake.

There are some pantry items that are commonly found in France and that I wish I could find more handily in this country - for example harissa (I just bought three tubes of it in Brooklyn the other day, and gave one to Jeff and Claire; I had bought three tubes while in France this past June, but I couldn't find them when I unpacked my suitcase...). I would also probably stock up on good canned pâtés if I could, although it's not exactly recommended to eat pâté if you're watching your weight and cholesterol intake. There must be many other pantry items that I would get if I lived in France, but I can't think about them all right now.

Once in a while, of course, I go through my pantry to discard stuff that's expired, and I am always appalled at what I have to throw away. Since I am on the topic of pantries and expired stuff, the funniest anecdote that I can relate here about it is this one: In the last house in which I lived with my parents, there was a pantry kind of room right by its front door. My father immediately built very elaborate and sturdy shelving in that room, where he stored all sorts of canned goods, as well as bottled water, beer, and wine. One day, we noticed that there was gooey, browning stuff on the pantry walls and inner door, and wondered what the hell it could have come from. Well, we soon found out that a can of plums in syrup which had long expired had actually exploded in that room. Needless to tell you that the clean up job was rather fun!

Oh, and, once (this was years ago), Rick and I found our flour infested with small black bugs - I think that they were flour weevils, and it was a nightmare to clean up our entire pantry. It's never happened to me since, but I hear that it's a fairly common thing.

To find out what SHOULD BE IN YOUR PANTRY, click here. I like this list, because it is nicely organized. That list, by the way, also includes what should be in your refrigerator and freezer - which I did not discuss in this entry.

Final note: The photo is not of my pantry, since I am writing this from a hotel room, I will take a picture of my actual pantry this afternoon and post it here then.