Bon Appétit!

I think I have mentioned that the kids have both become much more adventurous in their eating during their stay in France. Some has been by design: we have forced the kids to go to la cantine 3 out of the 4 school days each week. And while at first there were some complaints and general resistance, by the end I have been scrambling to try to get recipes for Cordon Bleu etc so the kids can keep eating in the fashion to which they have grown accustomed.

Some of the kids new-found adventurousness has been not by design but by pure old-fashioned stubbornness. That is, before coming to France, Jasper would tell us (in order to get us off her back for being a picky eater), “When I am in France, I will eat all sorts of new things.” And, as is very much like her, she has stuck to her word.

And lastly, some of the adventurousness has been just plain strange. Maddox “I wish I could keep a hammer in my ear” Schaller is nothing if not the king of non-sequiturs. It turns out this ability jumps to food preferences as well. A few nights ago, apropos of nothing, Maddox asked, “Are dogs made of meat?” And after we cautiously answered that they were, he happily said “Maybe someday we can eat a dead dog for dinner.”

I explained that we probably wouldn’t. That dog is served only in parts of Asia, but not typically considered appropriate in North America and Europe. Meanwhile, Mark told Maddox the story about how, while traveling in China, his father was once famously served a dinner dish with a large cooked horse penis draped across the top. I’m glad Mark distracted him with the horse penis; I am not sure I could have possibly explained why lamb and veal and rabbits (to name a few cute animals) are OK to eat, but dogs are not.

Even though the French don’t eat dogs, they are famous for their Great Food. And while I knew this before coming here, and I knew that lots of people come to France to eat; until living here I never really appreciated how deeply rooted food is in the culture here. And I am not just talking about having food holidays (such as Le Chandeleur – the crêpe holiday, I blogged about early on in our stay), which I love. It goes deeper than that.

Maybe most emblematic of the importance and appreciation of food here is the phrase Bon appétit! If you think about it, there is no English equivalent for wishing a person an enjoyable meal. (The closest – but so much coarser – might be “dig in”.) And people say it, and mean it, ALL the time. We have regularly had strangers delightedly say “Bon appétit!” when they have seen us having a little family picnic.

My favorite example of this happened months ago. Mark and I were hanging out near a playground while the kids played. He and I were having a little fruit and nut snack at the side of the road while we waited. A pack of adolescent boys came running by (they were all on some type of team and looked to be doing a practice run of some sort). They looked over and cheerily shouted, “Bon appétit!” Seriously. Just about each and every one wasted some of their much-needed oxygen wishing us a “Bon appétit!” It was so sweet, and came as such a shock. In North America one would expect, at best, sullen silence and at worst some sort of rude comment from a pack of adolescent boys. But here, they spy our pathetic little road side snack (fruit and nuts! – a real French person would have bread and duck confit and a small pique-nique sized bottle of wine) and cheerily shout to us to enjoy ourselves.

If I were a worthy Francophile at this point I would be able to wax poetic about the cheeses and the wines available here. All I can say is, “Oh, les vaches!” (Holy cow!) Les fromages! Les vins! I know I will miss what is available here. So many varieties and so cheap. We have been pretty provençal about our approaches to wine. We have mostly enjoyed the ever-present (and so VERY cheap) local rosé wines.

Exploring cheeses here has been pretty fun, though occasionally irritating. The irritations have been quite specific to one woman (we call her the Cheese Nazi) who runs a great cheese stand at the weekly Cotignac market. Until recently, every single time we went to order cheese she gave us a long tirade (in French, of course) about how to store the cheese (never in plastic), how to eat the cheese (always take it out of the fridge 1 to 1½ hours prior to eating it), etc etc. And then at the end of the tirade (some of which I would understand, some of it went over my head, especially in the beginning) she would wish us a Good Vacation. She did this each and every week for months and months. Finally I got savvy enough, both in terms of what she was going to say, as well as in my ability to express myself in French, that I was able to cut off her tirade by ordering in a specific way. I think she finally got that she could trust me with her cheese! And, in the last couple of months, she finally FINALLY stopped wishing us a “Bonne Vacance!”

One thing the Cheese Nazi never lectured to us about was the sacred way of cutting cheese. I think this is ONLY because we never served cheese to her, or I am sure she would have had a lot to say about it. You see, it turns out there is a particular way to cut each and every type of cheese. It depends on a variety of factors including the size of the wheel (both width and height) of cheese, the firmness, the type of rind, etc. It is too difficult for me to try to describe the different shapes one makes while cutting. Lets just say it is almost always different and that the rules can be pretty baffling.

So, today is our last day as residents in Cotignac. Tomorrow we hit the road for our European tour (Switzerland for 3 days, Paris for 3 days, Bruges for 2 days, and then one last night in Amsterdam). Mark and I enjoyed one final long leisurely lunch today on the main Cours here in Cotignac. There is something really nice about sharing a pichet de rosé under a blue Provençal sky. It was a very nice finish to an amazing 6 months!

Once we get back home we may have one or two blogs in us about our European tour... Check back in if you want to!

Au revoir!