Branching Out

Les Escargots

I ate my first snails last night. And it was fine. I mean, they were Cordon Bleu snails, so, really, how wrong can you go?

For Christmas this year, I gave Nick a food-and-wine pairing class at the Cordon Bleu, and since the first few focused on regions that he's not that interested in, I picked the one that happened last night. I swear, it was total coincidence that I moved here in the meantime (as some of you may recall, that part happened very suddenly) and could come along.

So. The blur in front of the mirror is the translator, a long-suffering and very British man who obviously disliked the sommelier:



I thought it was especially interesting that he didn't usually translate the jokes; he tended to make up his own. So half of the class would laugh at something that the chef or sommelier said, which would be translated to dead silence, or the other half would laugh at the translation of something that had gotten no response in the original.

He really was a bit on edge, though--he obviously knew a thing or two about cooking, himself (he was a chef, not a professional translator), and couldn't always resist adding his own $.02. "I've put a pâte brisée [savory crust] on the bottom, and a pâte feuilletée [puff pastry] on the top," said the chef (this blur at the bottom:)


"He's put a pâte brisée on the top, and a pâte feuilletée on the bottom," the translator announced (truth be told, I don't know if he mistranslated, or if the chef switched them by mistake, but this was quite visibly not the case either way). "His reasons for doing this are...mysterious."

It got cleared up. And it was sensational. Oh, and here are our snails (cooked two ways, and paired with a rosé that changed character according to which type of snail you had just eaten:


They were delicious, although the cabbage-wrapped ones were a bit too buttery for my taste (surprisingly, the other kind, the sauce for which the chef announced he would finish off by "just drop[ping] in a hunk of butter," were not).

Le Marché

In other news, I also made my first foray into our local farmer's market this morning, and was pleasantly surprised. I am, at the root of it, very shy, and it's a busy, noisy place where you have to really push yourself forward. And you have to be better with the metric system than I am (half of my browser's bookmarks now are conversion charts and translation pages). Plus, at the first (and last) one that I went to, I made just one purchase and my French got laughed at during it, so I kind of had a skewed impression.

But everyone was very nice, and I got exactly what I wanted (including gariguettes: thin, tart miracles of strawberries that I just can't seem to stop eating now). Even the one hitch (the butcher blatantly trying to oversell me) was something that Nick had warned me was likely, so I was prepared to firmly insist that he remove the extra veal from the scale.

Les Movers

Also, I don't think that I've mentioned this before, but French movers are really cool. They don't bother trying to get massive pieces of furniture in through ancient doorways; instead, they all come equipped with one of these:



They are these cool ladders that extend automatically, with a platform on top for whatever. Unfortunately, not all of the difficulty is avoided, especially when a person owns furniture that looks like this:



See it swivelling dangerously as they try to drag it through the window? So did the pedestrians on the sidewalk. The whole ladder was shaking. We were really relieved not to be on the sidewalk. So then this guy (in blue, on the left) got out there to help it along:



Suckiest job ever, right???? We were placing bets. But he eventually turned it upright:



And then they both disappeared:



And now our new neighbor and her armoire can live happily ever after. As can we, with our veal and strawberries and snail recipes and tiny digital cameras that make our fiancés complain that people will think that we're tourists even though the people who were taking pictures of the Cordon Bleu meals were just doing it so that they could cook them for themselves, and what tourists take pictures of their neighbors, anyway? They would have to be nuts.

The End.