French Food Weekend

I leave France in a month. Wow. I need a job.

Anyway, last weekend was spent with le boy on his turf, in Lyon. We ate a lot. A lot of (évidemment) French food.

French food is actually highly regionalized, and I'd say the things most Americans think of as "French," are either tourist snacks or Julia Childs recipes. Crepes, duck à l'orange, snails.

In reality, the French do eat those things. But they also eat a lot of pork, pork sausages (the aged kind), creme fraiche, yogurt, potatoes, eggs, lettuce with a little home made vinegarette, fries, and what Americans would say are "weird" parts of cows.

Really, though the French love three things:
French wine
French cheese
and French products

That last one is to say that there is a stunning nationalism applied to the agribusiness and food service industry. Hence, the reason I once had the opportunity to eat a foie gras maki.

Anyway, back to last weekend, we ate a stunning variety of very French foods.
We ate:
a cherry and strawberry tart I made with store-bought crust (they love tarts, sweet and savory, and women having entered the workplace, there is a wide variety of pre made doughs at the supermarket).

Sautéd potatoes and omelette. We used the mandoline for the potatoes. Dangerous and fun.

Toast with nutellla

Bouchon food. In Lyon, there are these little traditional restaurants called bouchons. That means wine cork, or literally mouth plug, since a mouth/opening whole is a bouche. Bouchons serve hearty country farmer food, influenced by both the cold winters but also by diverse agricultural offerings. That means we enjoyed:
House cocktail of wine and fruit liquers
Pork saucisson (little salamis eaten as hors d'oeuvres)
French onion soup, which is just called onion soup in France
Onion tart (they love the tarts) which was sublime and I think the onions were browned in duck fat
Some weird part of a cow in a delicious shallot gravy
Andouillettes, which are pale thick tripe sausages.
AND potatoes au gratin, which are sublime and creamy and baked with cheese on top, and you can feel them preparing you for a hard day in the fields or for a heart attack. The dish is called gratin dauphinois in France.

We also went to a gypsy music festival. The French love gypsy culture, music and food, but not the actual gypsies. Anyway, we lined up with hordes of French to buy plates of cabbage stuffed with rice and gound meat and onions. Delish. Not technically French food, but it represents a certain facet of French bourgeois fetish.

We also made tomatoes stuffed with sausage meat and wine. V. home cooking, and summer is here, and tomatoes are about a euro thirty a kilo. If you had five friends and ten dollars, each person could drink a half bottle of two buck chuck and eat a kilo of tomatoes. OR, since this is France, each person could drink a WHOLE bottle of 99 euro cents wine AND eat a kilo of tomatoes.

I can picture July in LA, going to Ralph's supermarket and being digusted by the produce: all big, shiny, modified and tasteless.

I'll think of you, America, this weekend as I eat homemade cherry tart that le boy's mom makes. Bon appetit.