French Valentine's Day

So, I've got this le french boyfriend. He's pretty awesome. Hot, nerdy, and very very nice, but not in that way where you want to punch him. You know how some people are too nice and you want to punch them? In general, a very quality guy with a lot of un-french qualities. He doesn't like cheese (lame, I know), doesn't smoke, and doesn't like soccer.

Anyway, he lives in a city two hours away, because, unlike a lot of French people our age, he has a job. So this weekend was our Valentine's Day.

He took me out to dinner at a restaurant called Wok&Cie, which was supposed to be Asian-Provençal fusion. We ordered a sushi appetizer (the rice was HORRIBLE), which had tuna and salmon, and it was nice to eat raw fish again, which was very fresh, but cut poorly. There was also a piece of foie gras maki with a sprinkling of sea salt, and so I guess that was the fusion part. It was good. He got this egg noodle dish, and I got a stir fry (un wok) with soy bean sprouts (nice to eat sprouts again) and duck magret, which is like a part of a duck you don't want to know about. It was a really chic restaurant, and the decor was all fancy, so it was kind of funny that it was food you can get from California Crisp at the Paseo Colorado in Pasadena for, um, waaay cheaper. Except the foie gras maki maybe you couldn't get. But obviously I still had a great time going out with le boy, eating something half-way resembling Californian food, being at a "cool" restaurant, and making fun of my le awesome French boyfriend who is decidedly not le awesome with chopsticks. I guess it's not fair to laugh since I've been using chopsticks since I was 7, right around the time I mastered my small motor skills (I was an ham-handed clumsy child. Can you imagine?).


Then le boy bought me a nutella crepe, which is one of the greatest French pleasures there is. Gastronomically speaking.

My Valentine's day for le boy consisted of taking him to the covered market this morning (called les Halles, with all sorts of small vendors who have permanent stalls) for café and chocolate-filled croissants. Walking there, a homeless man we passed asked "les jeunes mariés" for some spare change, which I didn't really realize he said, but the le boy was like, he just called us 'the young married couple', and as much as I am a fan of all things concerning my le petit ami, I shuddered a little. Ick, marriage. But I think that's probably an impolite reaction. So, oops.

I told le boy I would get him whatever he wanted from les Halles to eat for later, and so we enjoyed an early dinner of Rasteau red (a Côtes du Rhône wine), arugla salad in basic mustard French dressing (the type of dressing French people regularly make in their homes has absolutely no relation to so-called "French dressing" you find in American fast-food restaurants), and we ate the salad with wild hare terrine, which is like pâté, that I got from the deli guy with glasses, with sesame grain sourdough bread that I got from the über-popular sourdough bread people. (French sourdough is not anywhere near as strong as San Franciso style sourdough, but you can get pain au levain made with all sorts of great hippy-type flours). Then I made fresh gnocchi we had gotten from the pasta lady, and I made a Mark Bittman-influenced tomato sauce with zucchinni, chard and topped by a cherry tomato coulis. Except I am not sure if mincing cerry tomatoes and sautéing them for a hot second actually is a coulis, but whatevs. We also watched 9 episodes of Arrested Development this weekend.

So, I don't think our weekend was typically French, and I don't think our relationship is typically French either, but it's pretty awesome, and I thought I'd just do some blogging/bragging about it.