Roast chicken/Poulet rôti
by shoshanna
OK, the rotisserie chicken I picked up at the market on Sunday DEFINITELY classes among the top 10 things I've eaten in France ever. I cannot even believe how good it is. Salty, juicy, rosemary-spiked, kissed with grease. Yum. The vendor also sells herbed baby potatoes, which are smooth, mild (flavored with parsley and rosemary, maybe?), the tiniest bit chewy, and the perfect starchy complement to the chicken. It is every bit as good as you'd think it is when you're walking through the market picking up fruit and you catch a savory whiff from the roaster, and you're like, "Dang, that smells good... but I have food at home, and what will I do with a whole chicken?" Well, you can also get a half chicken, and it is still kind of unwieldy, but it's worth it because it means 2-3 days of rad eating. Plus, it falls into the "old-world" food category, which garners an immediate thumbs-up from pretentious, romantic exchange students such as myself.
Le poulet rôti que j'ai acheté au marché dimanche dernier est sans doute une des meilleures choses que j'ai mangé en France. Je peux même pas croire comment il est délicieux. Savoureux, gras, parfumé au romarin. Super. Le marchand vend aussi des pommes de terre aux herbes, qui sont euhhh très, très bons, et qui vont parfaitement avec du poulet. C'est aussi bon qu'on imagine quand on se balade au marché pour acheter des legumes, quand on se dit, "Ah, ça sent bon, mais j'ai déjà de la nourriture chez moi et que ferais-je avec tout un poulet?" En fait, on peut également prendre un demi poulet, c'est encore un peu maladroit mais il le vaut bien parce que ça donne 2 ou 3 jours de repas excéllents. De plus, c'est comme de la nourriture du "vieux monde," ce qui plaît beacoup à une étudiante étrangère romantique et prétentieuse.
Posted on January 23, 2006 | Comments (0)
A complicated dissection of the least complicated part of French culture
by shoshanna
Something that seems bizarre in light of the French fixation with the composition of meals is the way they do breakfast. I am basing this analysis on two families I stayed with, the offerings in the shopping center cafeteria, and the back of bread packages. Rather than sticking to a formula like they tend to for lunch and dinner (salad, main course, bread, cheese, dessert, coffee, even at the cafeteria), the French seem to take a casual, non-commital approach to breakfast. Elements like bread, jam, yogurt, fruit, cereal, and juice will be available in some combination, scattered on the table in their original packaging. They don't do plates. They just clean the crumbs off the table afterwards. Breakfast here is nationally sanctioned bachelorette living. You just kind of randomly pick at whatever catches your eye until you are full. Also, it's not necessarily everyone at table all together, but more like whoever is hungry at the moment. Some people eat jam and butter on bread or on pre-made, dry, crunchy toast things that you get in a box. Some people put jam in their plain yogurt. You can eat clementines or kiwis or litchis. The funny thing is that things like waffles, pancakes, omelettes, and bacon exist here, but you don't eat them for breakfast.
The bread takes various forms. On a Sunday morning, the family we stayed with outside of Paris bought fresh croissants from the bakery around the corner. In Lyon there was brioche. Not the little round pastries in our high school French textbook, but the same idea - soft, eggy, buttery, slightly sweet white bread - in a Wonder Bread-style loaf from the supermarket. Still totally yum. At the school cafe you have your choice of pastries: croissants, pain aux raisins, chausson pommes (apple slipper) or pain au chocolate, all baked right there in one of those clear ovens where you can watch them puffing up as they slowly spin around, and thanks to which a whole wing of the Arts and Letters college smells like yummy, buttery pastries. At the supermarket you can get various types of pre-toasted dry toast things at the supermarket, or "breakfast cookies," which are not that special, they are just cookies that are officially OK to eat for breakfast. I guess sometimes they have more whole grains and are slightly less sweet, but really they are just cookies. Which means I am liable to eat the whole box instead of saving them for breakfast, so now I am kind of grossed out by them and don't buy them anymore.
Of course there is always also coffee, also in various forms. In keeping with the cliché, the Paris family accompanied their croissants with coffee, tea, or hot chocolate out of those little bowls with two handles. In Lyon, it was black drip coffee, poured from a thermos into the cut-glass water glasses, with every meal. In the United States, if a cafe were to have an espresso machine, an automatic hot chocolate dispenser, and next to that an automatic "capuccino" dispenser dispensing an odd, artificial melange of milk, sugar, and coffee flavoring, you'd probably be confused, like the place couldn't make up its mind whether it was a yuppie establishment or a strip-mall convenience store. But that's what they do at the campus cafe. They also serve the coffee in tiny paper cups, which makes you feel kind of virtuous, reasonable and French. In the "Why France is better than the US" dogma spouted by those who have experienced both cultures, the comparison is indefatigably drawn between the Americans and their ubiquitous huge, sugary coffee drinks that they take with them everywhere, and the French who drink only pure, small, restrained cups of "good coffee," and only within the context of a formal meal or a cool sidewalk cafe, implying their moral superiority over gluttonous, compulsive Americans. Whatever. The day I get back I am going to Stumptown for a soy mocha.
Where was I going with this... what were all of those rhetorical tools that I drilled into my head two weeks ago?
In summary, breakfast in France is cool because it is calm and relatively effortless and unstructured, while at the same time remaining vaguely ritualistic and pleasant. I mean not ritualistic like praying over a burning effigy, but ritualistic as in something you do every day that sets a pace for life. French breakfast is yummy, but doesn't make you feel like a sloth afterward. It is healthy, but doesn't make you feel like you're missing something. I like it because it is pretty much in line with the way I tend to eat anyway when left to my own devices. And I am sick of talking about it.
Posted on January 19, 2006 | Comments (0)
Harry Potter: The new Buddy Holly glasses
by shoshanna
You know what I don't get? The whole Harry Potter fanaticism thing. I think it's really annoying. It's not just because it's trendy. I like some trendy stuff, I'm not gonna lie. And it's not just because it's mass-market pop culture, because anyone who knows me can attest to my unhealthy Cosmopolitan addiction, and I'm not talking about pink drinks, although those are good too. But the Harry Potter thing is of the cultural texture that annoys me most: a weird blend of hip irony and cloying earnesty, which you'd think would be impossible, but unfortunately isn't. When people are like, "Whatever, I know it makes me totally uncool to be into this, but I don't care! It's just so great!" And when they seem to just be waiting for someone to criticize their fandom so they can proudly jump to defend it, pretending that their interest is nonchalant, accidental, and completely seperate from the fact that everybody else in their social demographic is doing it too. Like they had no idea it was famous and they happened to randomly pick up this book when they were browsing through Powell's one day. Sure. Sorry, but nothing you do exists in a cultural vacuum, so you're going to have to accept the fact eventually, or be pretentious forever. The annoying thing is that you have all these intellectual and progressive types, who normally read the New Yorker or the Vagina Monologues or whatever else that is trendy but on the appropriate intellectual level, and then they're all over Harry Potter - it's like the literary equivalent of slumming for kicks, or an overeager attempt to prove you're quirky and not too uptight and can laugh at yourself.
Maybe it's a symptom of what happens when people in a subculture start feeling too common among themselves and need to do something else to feel like an individual, even if that means doing something outlandish like being mainstream.
Or maybe they are just curious to find out what the big deal is. Maybe I am just overintellectualizing this and being too uptight and pretentious, and I should go loosen up and read some children's fantasy novels or something. Well, crap, so what if I am uptight? That's just who I am. I'm sick of all these messages saying "Just be yourself (as long as you agree with progressive dogma, like Harry Potter, and think everything is funny)." To heck with that. I am just going to be my crotchety, uptight, Cosmopolitan-reading self. That's just how it is.
That said, I do have a bone to pick with flakey "Just be yourself" individualism at the expense of group harmony and integrity (although I am its worst perpetrator), but that's a whole other rant. And I have things to do.
Coming up next: a post entirely devoid of the word "just."
Posted on January 17, 2006 | Comments (5)
The Joy Of Not Cooking
by shoshanna
Cooking is great and all, but living in a dorm has given me a deep appreciation for the simplicity that comes from removing it from your life. Not cooking generally takes two avenues: eating stuff the way it grows with little or no preparation, and eating stuff that somebody else prepared. Or rather, stuff people have been eating for hundreds of years and stuff you can heat up in the microwave. The former makes you feel all classic and cool and old-world, but a person can only eat so much fruit and cheese.
Top Ten Dorm Eating
1. best breakfast ever: some sort of fruit, some sort of yogurt or fromage blanc, some sort of bread, coffee
2. little toast things with laughing cow cheese and a pear
3. microwave crepes
4. baby pears that come in a box, for snacking on
5. carrots, in carrot salad or with the stems still on, for feeling like a bunny
6. mini quiches and tarts from the boulangerie
7. canned sardines
8. olives
9. microwave oatmeal
10. beet salad
Posted on January 16, 2006 | Comments (0)
Mission Accomplished
by shoshanna
Finals are over! Finally! Man, what a week. I think they went pretty well for the most part, even though I kind of messed up on the oral expression exam, which is so frustrating because I did much better on the practice test. Oh well, that's life. The most awful exam, ironically, was for English Lit. It was one of the hardest exams I've taken in my entire life. It was a four-hour in-class commentary on a subject we were given at the beginning of the exam, on Dickens' Great Expectations. You can't just whip out an American college style five paragraph essay; the French commentary format is really strict and structured and you have to follow this specific sequence of analytical steps. It was horrible, I had to take the whole four hours and then wanted to throw up afterwards. I think I did OK, but still. Luckily I will probably never have to do that again. From now on, finals at PSU are going to be a cakewalk.
Posted on January 14, 2006 | Comments (2)
Teeshirts in January
by shoshanna
Stuff is making me think of summer for no good reason. I think it's because the dorm is the exact temperature of late nights in summer and I am maniacally studying for finals. Summer is about as far away as it gets, not like that means anything, not like six months is a particularly long time these days. But it is long enough that it makes me really want to be running around in a teeshirt and shorts drinking beer in the sunshine, and long enough that the idea of doing so is positively ridiculous. Instead, it is the time to be lurking in cafés drinking hot wine and discussing the relative merits of obscure academic theories. The hot wine part isn't so bad, but I'm getting really sick of constructing rhetorically correct arguments. I can't wait to start writing about sandwiches again! I have nothing against working - to the contrary, winter is great for that because there is absolutely nothing attractive luring you outside - it's just hard to be serious sometimes when I just want to listen to the Pogues and write odes to white teeshirts and other stuff that belongs in adolescent zines. But the theory is that if I study these articulateurs rhétoriques hard enough, I will later get to write about sandwiches and teeshirts as much as I want, and be able to use fancy terms of restriction and opposition to do it. But is it really necessary for it to be that complicated? Sometimes a sandwich is just a sandwich.
Posted on January 9, 2006 | Comments (4)