20 January 2003

Learning to Make Fast Food in France

I am lucky…I get to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner with my family around a table that does not compete with the television set.  The great thing about television here is that it’s all in French so we don’t understand most of it.  TV has taken on a new meaning…hearing French…nothing more, nothing less.  I am so excited to finally find a use for television.

Of course I am the person who must think up all of these taste-tempting meals, which can provide quite a challenge since I do not have one single cookbook.  Thinking back to my childhood menus does not help.

My grandma, who was from the U.S., cooked good basic food like pressure cooker green beans with pot roast or city chicken (the junked parts of chicken, pork and other things I don ‘t want to know about all tied onto a stick).  She was a great cook.  My mom cooked everything out of a can. The only thing I remember that I could actually identify was fried liver, spinach and asparagus.  They tasted much like I would imagine horse dung tastes like.  Everything else pretty much tasted the same.

When I first arrived in the little town of Senlis we ate at McDonalds (McDo) a few times.  It wasn’t too bad because they had “salade fromage” a green salad with blue cheese.  But non-food in France tastes just as bad as the non-food in America or the UK so when we moved into the house McDonalds ceased to exist for us.

On Tuesday and Friday morning I can shop at the wonderful street market downtown.  There is everything you can imagine including fresh eggs, meat, bread, vegetables and fruit.  The downtown super market is called the Franprix.  It has most everything and I can walk there, but then I have to drag home the groceries.

On special occasions I go to the Intermarche.  This store is on the edge of town and has clothing items and household things along with groceries.  There is a huge version of one of these “hyper” stores about 15 minutes away by car.

The glorious thing about the supermarkets is the tremendous variety of cheeses.  Someone told me there are 654 different varieties of cheese.  I believe it.

Besides all of the cow cheeses, there is goat and sheep cheese as well.  There is one whole isle of fromage, which is the word for cheese but it is really a kind of sour cream.  I have yet to find cottage cheese, which is a huge disappointment.

The meat section has the normal stuff, but no ground turkey.  However, you can buy ground horse (cheval) meat.  The French think horsemeat brings color to your checks.  If I ate horsemeat I would have more then color in my checks.

Everyone swears there are lots of soy products here, but I haven’t seen them.  I did buy soy hotdogs once but then I never saw them again.  I also haven’t found sweet potatoes, cinnamon or pumpkin. 

Our new fast food comes from a wonderful shop on the corner in downtown Senlis.  A short 5-minute walk away brings us homemade carrot salads, apple tort, lasagna and various other dishes that I can’t identify.  Sometimes we try new things.  All we have to do is to take the items home and heat them up.

There is no real fast food in rural France.  For some reason that’s fine with me.  We sit down to long leisurely meals and share our day.  Life is good in a small town in France.