a 2 euro meal

We're broke. We have 60 euros to last us the next 10 days. So I've been trying to come up with the cheapest, yet still delicious dishes that I could make. Since I recently had an altercation with our new Italian neighbors, I thought that I should celebrate their arrival in our lives by dedicating a meal to their home country, which proably expelled them for being a bunch of non-bonjour saying, bike-hating, incomprehensible accent-having jerks. I encourage you to join me in celebrating their arrival. To do so accurately, here's what you'll need to get:
a kilo of macaroni for 44 centimes at the discount store, a half of onion, a half of a red pepper, a half of a courgette, and a clove of garlic, a half a can of peeled and pureed tomatoes, salt, pepper, lemon juice, capers, and a can of albacore tuna. Oh, and it helps to have bought a ton of basil at the farmer's market before you realized you've got no money.
Ok, so the first step is boil the macaroni so that they're al dente (yes, even cheap pasta should be well prepared). Rinse it with cold water so it stops cooking while you finish up the sauce.

B. is now my official blog photographer, by the way.

Meanwhile, sautee chopped onion, garlic, courgette (baby zuchinni), and red pepper, in a bit of olive oil. After 5 minutes or so, add tuna and the tuna juice (mmm...), follow that up with the lemon juice to taste, and as many capers as suits your fancy. The stuff in the pan should look like a faded Italian flag: green, red, and light pink.

Looks ok so far.

For the final step, mix in the macaroni. If you like your tomato sauce a bit spicy, add a teaspoon of Sriracha sauce (I always add at least a drop, because it adds a certain tangy taste that I love). Serve with some grated parmesan, fresh basil, and a nice big piece of baguette florentin.


Viva Italia!

I added up how much it cost to make this dish, and it came out to 1.97 euros. I'm three centimes under budget, eat your heart out Rachel Ray (40 dollars a day, my ass)! Of course I didn't count in my arduous labor - you really can't put a price on that.

Kebab Kebab

I was just looking through my photos and found this one.
This is from a year and a half ago, when Ninette was leaving France and we decided to go out for our last kebab. The great thing about kebabs is that after you have one, you resolve never to eat another again, yet in a couple of days that resolve successfully crumbles. They are delicious fast food marvels, mostly owned by immigrants from the Near East or North Africa, and are expertly made to be everything that a burger and fries would like to be: salty, meaty, doused with sauce, crispy, full of crunchy, soggy veggies, and terribly bad for you. I wouldn't even dream of making my own kebab, since 5 euros will get me a veal or chicken sandwich (in a faluche - an oval-shaped soft bread, or in a galette - a burrito-style wrap in a house-made 'tortilla'), a huge pile of fries, and a soft drink. And most of the kebab places in Dijon are open late, in case some tipsy language assistants come by for an early morning snack.

Apples of the Earth

Potatoes Au Gratin are the ultimate mac and cheese of France. The perfect pots au gratin have all the same wonderful caracteristics that a nicely made, oven-baked batch of mac and cheese will provide: the chewy yet tender starchy base, a creamy cheesy sauce that bubbles and thickens as it cooks, a cheesy topping that crisps up nicely in the last few minutes of baking and adds the perfect crunch, and an immense capacity to contain 1,000 calories in a single serving. Formidable! I decided to make some to accompany a turkey burger dinner, as I was wary of fries and ready for something that packed a more solid caloric punch. I went scrounging around the internet for a good recipe.

Simply Recipes
had a great recipe that looked simple enough, but did not leave much room for invention, so I made room.

Instead of whipping cream, I used crème fraiche. Instead of gruyere, I used reblochon that was handily sliced for a raclette, so I had a really hard time grating it. Then I sandwiched some sliced and blanched baby zuchinni, or courgettes as everyone, even the Brits call them, between the two double layers of red, not Yukon, potatoes. The creamy sauce that I cooked up had a flavor base of home-made roasted garlic, then crème fraiche, then milk, salt, pepper, and a dash of nutmeg, and finally flour and cold water gruel for the eventual thickening. I followed Elise’s recipe and sprinkled some salt and pepper, as well as grated parmesan halfway through arranging the potatoes, which provided and nice, milky bath for the courgettes to mellow out in. After leaving the gratin pan in our itty-bitty ‘oven’ on oven setting 71/2 for 30 minutes, I added a bit more reblochon and some crumbled cheese straw-type crackers (a touch gleaned from B.’s grandma’s mac and cheese recipe) and broiled that mofo for 5 minutes or so. The onions, the cheese, and the crackers made a crust worthy of being turned into one of those “it looks like an apple pie but it’s really a candle” things. I wish I had pictures, but I had to taste my creation while it was still excruciatingly hot and by burning my mouth and hand was incapacitated until it had gotten cold and a bit shriveled, i.e. not at all suited for a photo op. The only thing my potatoes au gratin lacked was a sufficient amount of salt for my taste; otherwise, they were très bon!

Coming up soon: the mystery of Mami Nova yogurt.

Oh, but here's a link to In Praise of Sardines : he's got great photos of everything and a link to a Flicr slideshow of a dinner at the Spanish Wonder Restaurant, El Bulli, as well as some amazing pictures of food period.

I had a premonition

I miss Russia and I miss this little girl - Mihalya is a daughter of my mom's friend who's also a piano teacher. She's got some 'tude and is the cutest child ever. She will not do anything to please anyone and is very strongwilled. In other words, she's awesome. In other news, I still have not heard anything from Fulbright, although it is too early, I've begun thinking about the possibility of not getting the grant and how disappointed I would be. Hm. Today was incredibly unproductive. I went to bed full of ideas and woke up without any energy to acomplish anything. Classes went well, my premier european class got to write their own blues songs and they did really well. At the end of each class I treated them to a rendition of my own blues song entitled "I'm stuck in Kansas City," you had to be there to appreciate it. The regular terminal class was in intellectual hibernation as usual, and only a few brave souls dared to open their mouths, even though we played a game similar to TABOO during class. Fashion TV, the channel, has been ever since after dinner and it lulled B. to sleep with its techno beats and gaggles of attractive Slavic-looking women parading around and getting made up. It's such a strange channel idea - just various fashon shows, line launches, and photo shoots, filmed along with make-up and hair sessions. And at midnight, there are lingerie shoots, where you get to see boobies. Hoor - a - fucking - ah. At least now I know how Fashion Week in Milan differs from Fashion Week in Madrid. Oh wait, IT DOESNT. It's silly and it's like PBS for the mentally drained fashionistas, one of which I'm not. The mystery of why I watch it remains. Perhaps I do so because it is not a French talk show, of which there are thousands on our 18 free channels courtesy of Orange, three being in Arabic, one in Portuguese, one in Spanish, and two in English (one of those is a China channel though). I'm slowly getting used to the French' penchant for boring, roundtable discussion shows that come on from morning till night, but that does not make me want to follow that debate or the other. The majority are either focused on the candidates for the presidential election, or on what is wrong with France today. I'll let you guess.

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Deux mois

It's been two months (and eight days) that we've been here and I thought I'd summarize some things I've learned about France.

1. French people do not move out of your way as you walk toward them - in fact, most stop in the middle of the narrowest passageway in order to talk about urgent world crises just as you're in a hurry to get to class. If they also happen to be students, they will ignore you so well that you won't be able to get their attention and to get by them until you're hoarse from screaming 'Pardon' and 'excusez-moi.'

2. French kids are adorable and most are very well dressed.

3. French dogs are adorable and most are little and very obedient. Yesterday in the park we saw one in a bike basket riding with its owner, and another in a little wagon attached to the back of the bike, being the cutest little passenger. Très cute, as the Quebecois say.

4. The baking of baguettes is best left to the boulangeries, those from grocery stores like Monoprix or Carrefour suck ass.

5. Diet drinks get really exotic here - my favorites are apple litchi and lime melon, they're fizzy, tasty, and sugar-free. Three cheers for aspartame!

6. 14-15 year olds are retarded and are a complete waste of time no matter what country you're in.

7. Failing to say bonjour / bonsoir as you walk into a store is a criminal offense and you might as well be ready for the firing squad if you do not do so.

8. You cannot pay attention to people's intonation as they talk to you, especially if they're French speaking English. The intonation has thrown me off dozens of times and I've assumed so many nice people were just being assholes because they sounded weird or sarcastic as they spoke. Being direct with someone is absolutely impossible if they're French, so you might as well just give up and get tangled up in a confusing web of implications and pragmatics involved in a conversation.

9. Free softcore porn on at 11 pm every night does get boring after a while, even if it's surrealist French porn.

10. Although being the smallest cog in the machine of a giant high school sucks - you get villanized by the computer lab people for printing pages out and then get hateful looks from the copy room people for copying them - having a position where you are free to teach whatever, without the possibility of being fired, is kinda nice. The majority of your students are just relieved you're not walking into the class with the intention to cane or humiliate them. The rest are a pain in the ass (see pt. 6).

Too Many Friends

My great and wonderful friend Ninette sent us a package full of movies burned on DVD, as well as three full seasons of Friends - which were very wonderful at first - but are now taking over my life. I've seen all of them before, the last time I was in France actually, and yet I cannot stop myself from watching. The cold temperatures and the short days are even more of an encouragement, since I don't want to go out and it's so freaking cold. The show is funny, of course, but all this watching has got to stop. Seriously. The best part is that I get to hear Bill crack up at every joke - even the ones that aren't funny.