La Grasse fin de semaine

Faire la grasse matinée is a French expression meaning "to sleep in". It translates literally as "to do the fatty/greasy morning"; however, if you're being a little more generous with your translation of grasse, those extra hours of sleep could instead make that morning "generous", "rich" or "abundant". It's a great expression because you can either feel guilty or rewarded ... you choose!

For us, our so-called grasse fin de semaine, or "long weekend", in Grasse and Nice did not feel at all guilty. (Ok, so I admit it, grasse fin de semaine isn't actually an expression in French -- we just wanted to use it since we went to Grasse.) We, and by we, I mean James, who hasn't really had a break from work for over a year, got to do some much-needed relaxing and sleeping in.

We started off in Nice, where it was surprisingly snowy and alpine.


No, actually, that was a backdrop of fake pine trees sprayed with fake snow at the Nice Christmas market. It was really cold and windy that day, so if we look cold, that's real.

But then it got sunny and instead, Nice looked like this.


Some people thought the sun made it warm enough to swim, but we kept on our winter coats.


Nikaïa was founded around 350 BCE by the same Greeks who founded Marseille. Despite its modern-day status as part of France, from the 7th century until the mid-19th century (although not continuously -- Saracen and Barbarian invaders intervened!) Nice had some strong ties to Italy and was even part of it, which influenced the culture and architectural style of the city today. So you see brightly painted buildings that are reminiscent of the Italian riviera.


This stands in stark contrast to Antibes, just across the bay, which always sided with France (against Nice and Italy). Despite their divergent political views, however, they certainly seemed to share the weather.


You can actually see Nice, way in the background, over my right shoulder, and better in this shot with the crashing waves.


While we're on things Italian: food!

We had a delicious dinner at a vegetarian Italian restaurant called La Zucca Magica, or The Magic Pumpkin. As you can see from the pictures on the website, the Italian owners have a thing for pumpkins. And, in fact, we ate some pumpkin that night.

And James discovered the virtues of Nutella (it's peanut-oil free here ... and, as I've just learned, it now is in the States too -- yippee!) ...


We also took a train ride on the Train des Pignes, a little two-car diesel train that makes four round-trips between Nice and Digne-les-Bains up in the Var valley. The website about the train is in French, but even if you can't read about the history of the line, which has been in service in some form since 1911, it's still worth looking at for the pictures.

The idea for a train along this route was proposed in 1861 (the year after Nice was finally annexed to France) in order to connect Nice to Grenoble by a more direct route; however, it took twenty years before authoriziation for the line was given, and another ten before any of it was built and another twenty before the line was completed. That's 50 years in the making.

Part of the initial delay seems to have been about rail technology. Because the train passes through some extremely mountainous territory and has to make some sharp turns on its 150km route, they had to develop a narrower guage for the rails. Then there was also the building of 25 tunnels, 16 viaducts and 15 metal bridges to get the train from Nice to Dignes-les-Bains. So maybe 50 years isn't that long after all.

The longest tunnel is la Colle-Saint-Michel, which measures 3457m (2.15mi) long and also includes (well almost, it's actually just past the tunnel on the Digne side in Peyresq, which is close to Thorame-Haute on the map) the highest point on the line at 3356ft. The tunnel seems to be totally straight (no curves) because as you go through it, you can look backwards and watch the other opening get more and more dim -- and sort of reddish through the diesel exhaust.

The views were unbelievable -- but as with lots of natural beauty, the photos (taken through a train window with an automatic camera) don't capture all of it. It's really some rough looking country.

Right outside of Nice, it's already dry, rough, cragy mountains. The craziest part is that there are medieval villages perched up on top of the cliffs and when you see them, you really wonder how they could have been built.

Then it gets really cold. For a good portion of the ride, all the trees, bushes, houses, etc. were covered in thick frost. It looked almost like an ice storm. I took one really horrible picture (including glare from the train window), and it turned out so poorly I gave up. You'll have to take my word for it. But look how cold the water looks -- when water looks blue-green like the Var did on this day, you know it's cold. Or that it has a certain mineral content.

Then, the distances between towns get farther, and many of the stops become "optional" -- as in you have to flag down the train. And there's no conductor or operator at these stations, it would just be you. Having been on the train I can say that it's never going that fast, so maybe this isn't an issue. Still, it's not exactly like hailing a taxi.


We took the train most of the way, to St-André-les-Alpes, and got out and walked around a bit and then turned around to take the train back down. There are lots of hiking trails that leave from all the towns up high in the Var valley, and St-André-les-Alpes has a really nice lake, but we'll have to come back for that.


And to ride the train à vapeur, or steam train. On Sundays from mid-May to mid-October, a 1925 steam train makes a short portion of the trip (so if you were coming from Nice, you'd have to take the train we did and then get out and take the steam train and then get back on the other train for the rest of the trip). The train website I linked to there actually belongs to (according to the welcome page) a militant group dedicated to the protection and promotion of the train line. I don't know if the train really needs a militant group defending it anymore, but the association was started in 1975 after there were, apparently, some serious threats to close down the line. They had some cool posters in Provençal though.

Another highlight of our trip (although we have no original photos of it) involved Niçois street food: socca. Socca is made from chickpea flour, water and olive oil (like panisse, but in different quantities, so it has a completely different texture). I don't know what the batter looks like when it's raw, but it gets baked in a hot, hot oven (think pizza) in a gigantic cast iron pan like the one in this photo (originally uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by P. Downey) from Chez René Socca, where we got ours.


Chez René is really just an open kitchen that makes socca, pissaladière and a couple of other pizzas, spicy conch fritters, vegetable fritters, french fries and fried sardines. Here's a picture of it, originally uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by P. Semeria. I have no idea when this photo was taken, but it was not 2005 because the prices on the board are clearly in Francs -- a portion of socca was only 2€ (not 10) and our whole dinner including pissaladière and conch fritters was only 7€.


I walked by Chez René a few different times and I never saw it without a line about twenty-deep. It always filed around the corner. You can get your food to go (in which case they wrap it up in paper for you), or to take across the alley to the tables and benches that comprise the restaurant (in which case they pile it on a paper plate, as in this photo originally uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by P. Techamuamvivit).

Now, I thought we'd be able to try socca when we got to Marseille, but no dice. And when we finally got the socca and the rest of our food, it was hot and delicious looking, and we were hungry, and we'd been waiting since mid-September to try it so we dove in before we remembered to take photos. Sorry. But at least none of these photos involves our weird black plates. You should all be happy we were on vacation.

Here's a picture of the Place Massena at night. Those white arcs are part of the holiday lighting, but the sitting/kneeling humanoids on top of the poles are always there. They change colors if you watch them long enough.



After Nice, we went on to Grasse: the center of French perfume-making since the late 1700s! However, its fame as a town of flowers has a more complicated origin. Back in the Middle Ages, Grasse was famous for its tanneries, which are well known to be a stinky (and back in the day, dangerous) business. According to the tour we went on at Fragonard (named for Grasse's native son, the famous painter J-H Fragonard), it was because the nobility demanded less stinky leather goods, especially gloves, that the perfumeries started to take off -- they could perfume the leather.

And so Grasse, with its very special microclimate that allowed it to grow hundreds of tons (and yes, I really mean hundreds of thousands of pounds) of jasmine and other precious flowers every year became known for its perfumes rather than its stinky leather. Just think of how many flowers it would take to make a ton. The tour guide said a jasmine-picker can harvest 3-5 pounds a day and it takes tons and tons of flowers to yield enough essence to make a perfume.

We also learned about fragrance extraction over the years. Enfleurage was a common technique developed in the early days of the Grasse perfume industry because it allowed the perfumers to extract the volatile compounds from flowers, which would be damaged or destroyed by methods that involved heat, like distillation. So, the essences of flowers like jasmine and tuberose were captured by placing them "face" down into some beef tallow that had been slathered on a metal screen. There are new techniques now.

And at the Musée International de la Parfumerie not only did we learn more about the creation of perfumes, but also about the history of perfumes (and cosmetics, which were often perfumed) since the times of the Egyptians. It was absolutely fascinating. If I knew in 1992 what I know now, I would have paid more attention in organic chemistry and then gone to school to become un nez, literally "a nose", or perfumer. After three years of formal training, you do 5-7 years internship. To become a master perfumer, well that takes some skill, but still. Linguistics, schminguistics I say.

Here's a panorama from the B&B we stayed in which was up on the hillside overlooking Grasse. That bay you see in the center-right of the collage is Cannes.


The B&B is only a few years old, but apparently it's on property that was formerly part of the gardens of Austrian baroness Alice de Rothschild. She spent a lot of time in Grasse at the family chateau and planted gardens over a huge portion of the hillside. The current owners are very apologetic that their gardens are not as pristine as in the days of the baroness, but it's still a really beautiful garden with citron trees ...


irises...


other exotic plants...


and a secret passageway that the baroness liked to use to leave the gardens and walk into the town of Grasse. I feel like a baroness in this shot (Elsa Schräder, of course, not Alice de Rothschild).


We walked around the very picturesque town dodging surly youths with too much time on their hands over the winter break, toured the perfume factories and did our best to avoid peanut oil, which seems to be ubiquitous in Grasse.

We had a quiet new year's eve in our B&B with a crémant (it wasn't from the Champagne AOC) ...


Into which we put candied rose and violet petals ...


And we got to go on a hike in the hills on New Year's Day. Here's a picture of James above Magagnosc, a neighboring town.


It was a good start to the new year and a nice end to our grasse fin de semaine.

Guimauve

Marshmallows only taste good over a campfire, and whatever anyone says about toasting them gently until you get a nice taper from a dark toffee color on one side to their original whiter-than-snow state on the other, they're wrong. And I can say that since this is my post. As far as I'm concerned, they only taste good when you burn them, pull off the charred outer layer and pop that in your mouth as you return the remaining marshmallow to the fire to be re-toasted (read: burnt). That way, they're delicious.

To me, raw marshmallows are the stuff that lives on a high shelf in your parents' kitchen, hardening to the point that you really couldn't eat one if you wanted to. Or they're the stuff that freezes in the cold Ann Arbor football season and gets thrown on the field ... until one puts someone's eye out and they're banned. For me, they're really not to be eaten. Nor is Fluff, or any chocolate covered candy that contains marshmallow (except, possibly, Le Vrai Petit Ourson, which I've been told is the pièce de résistance of chocolate-covered marshmallow candy ... I just can't bring myself to buy a whole package of them in order to find out).

At least that's what I thought until a couple of years ago when I learned that my great, great grandfather was a confectioner who made marshmallows in his candy shop in Plattsmouth, Neb. It's kind of silly I guess, given my general opinion of marshmallows, but for the past few years I've been more than a little wistful for the days when marshmallows were made somewhere other than a big factory, and were hand-sliced rather than extruded. And more than that, I've been really curious about how they tasted. (I'm convinced that at least one of the three jars with very blurry white things in them are evidence of said hand-cut marshmallows, but it's hard to say. And what was Photoshopped out of the left side of the photo way back in 1915 anyway?)


I'm sure that there's a candy shop somewhere in the US that makes marshmallows on a small scale, and as I learned from a quick google search, technically, you could make them yourself; however until I came to Aix, I had never seen hand-cut marshmallows. At Pâtisserie Weibel (or Au Pêché Mignon -- I'm a little confused about what the name of this place actually is), the marshmallows come in lemon, licorice, mint, orange, orange flower, strawberry and violet flavors, so I got some for James.

Here are (from top to bottom) the violet, lemon and orange flower guimauve.


So where these marshmallows are concerned, I take back what I said about toasting. I think toasting of any kind is a bad idea for these marshmallows because I really doubt they'd hold up. These are light, billowy, tender and very pleasantly flavored. They also have kind of a funny sour smell which may come from the gelatin -- despite my hopes for old-fashioned marshmallows, there is no extract of the real marshmallow plant in these -- but it didn't seem to interfere with the taste, which I know because James was kind enough to share. We liked them well enough and to be honest, I would actually consider buying them again in order to taste the other flavors (and to taste the orange flower again). However, I haven't been converted into a marshmallow lover yet.

And besides, there are so many other sweets ...

Il neige!

It snowed here today. And I mean it really snowed. I can't find the info online anywhere, but it looks like 8 in or more. If James didn't have the camera with him in Berlin (he's at a conference), I would take some pictures because it's beautiful, and from what I hear, we may not get to see this again. People say that most winters it snows a little here (with relatively little accumulation) but there's been nothing like this for ten years (or 20 if you read the article I posted below).

I've never lived anywhere that people were quite so unequipped to deal with snow. I tried going into the lab, but the way I usually go was closed off and there were university students milling about playing in the snow and not going to class. I figured the university, like many businesses in Aix, was just closed today. The market in the Place Richelme didn't even happen. I learned later on that as early as 8h30 this morning, with 4 in of snow, they closed down the regional airport and that the mayor of Marseille advised everyone to stay home and not drive. What's a bit scarier is that this huge amount of snow has led to a major problem with power -- over 17000 residences in the département lost their electricity this afternoon. If that happens here, that would include our heat.

On the brighter side, I've also never lived anywhere that people were so delighted by snow. After nine years in Chicago, where this kind of weather is expected, this is pretty fun to watch. I don't know if the mayor of Aix weighed in on the weather situation, but here, people didn't stay home. Instead, they went shopping at the stores that were open (it's sale season) and took pictures and video of the snow as if they'd never seen the likes of it before. Their dogs ran around and played in the snow (although none of the dogs tried to eat as much of it as Aleppo does), they pulled each other in makeshift sleds down the Cours Mirabeau, threw snowballs at each other and then sat outside at cafés under heat lamps to warm up.

For those of you who speak/read French, click on this link to a piece about the 7h36 train between Marseille and Aix (a 20-mile trip) that got stuck part way through the trip and returned to Marseille eight hours later.

Clementines!

It seems, from what I've overheard at the markets, that Corsican clementines are prized over both Spanish and Italian varietals. I ought to do a side-by-side taste test, but I have to say that all have been good and all have been disappointing -- around here, the vendor seems to matter more than the fruit's provenance.

This batch was particularly delicious and juicy (for clementines, which are obviously pretty small so not always so juicy) ...


so I made some clementine-coriander pudding ...


To be honest, the ground coriander didn't add much -- except a darker color that I wish it wouldn't have. As James said, it was just a slightly different version of clementine and could be what clementines taste like on their own.

Le gros souper de Noël

The Christmas Eve dinner was quite an affair. Dinner started around 8:00 with some drinks and snacks and then progressed into a multi-course dinner that lasted until after midnight. All the while accompanied by a warm fire in the fireplace.

I don't have pictures of everything, but I do have pictures of a couple of F-M family/French traditions. The first is the main course: gîte de chevreuil, or leg of roe deer, a kind of deer that's only found in Europe and Asia. The French are very clear about distinguishing it from other deer and someone at dinner even tried to tell me it was a goat. However, it's not. It is a relatively small, squatty deer, which I guess makes it more goat-like, but I think the real reason I was told it was a goat is because chevreuil sounds a lot like chèvre (goat). There definitely is something a little funny looking about the animal, though, as you can see in this picture originally uploaded by Sylvain HAYE to the Wikipedia entry. Interestingly, the distinction between biche (doe) and cerf (stag) is also relevant even to non-hunters, who find it odd that doe, stag and chevreuil are all grouped under the category "venison" in the US. Whatever you call it, it was tasty and absorbed the flavors of the garlic and herbs it was roasted in.

The second traditional item was the bûche de Noël. There seems to be some question about the origins of the bûche and its ties to celebration of the winter solstice, but eating a rolled cake that is decorated to look like a log has been a Christmas tradition for just about as long as anyone at the table could remember. On this night, we had two: the one in the photo that was made by the hosts and a more abstract ice cream "bûche" that with its pale color and squared-off corners bore no resemblence to a log, whatsoever. It was, however, also very good.

We had a wonderful time and felt right at home with some very kind new friends.

Christmas in Aix

La Fête de Saint Nicholas on December 6th officially starts the holiday season in Aix. You can tell things are about to start in the week leading up to St. Nicholas' day because, well, besides the buzz in the air, the extra bustle on the streets and in the shops, there's a mise-en-place of metal traffic barricades and little wooden huts on the Cours Mirabeau.

The Cours Mirabeau goes right through the center of town dividing the Vielle Ville to the north from the Quartier Mazarin to the south. (Incidentally, many of the hôtel particulier in the newer Quartier Mazarin were built in the mid 1700s, which shows how relative "new" can be.) The Cours, which didn't get its current name until the 19th century, was first opened in 1651 as a carriage road where the old, crumbled ramparts of Aix had been. Today it's a famous thoroughfare that I've read is called the Champs Elysées of the south. That could be wishful marketing on the part of the Office de Tourisme, but it is indeed a very attractive street lined with sycamore trees, nice shops and cafés. And it's punctuated by some nice fountains, which seem to run all year long because it's significantly warmer here than in Chicago. It's also the center of town, so it's the perfect place for a Christmas market.

The wooden huts eventually turn into stalls selling wares ranging from weird fluffy pink things...


to lavender...


to mulled wine, pretzels and doughnuts...


Actually, food is over-represented in the stalls: chocolate, cookies, truffles (the tuber variety), jams, honeys, churros (yes, churros, and they're really popular) and barbe à papa ("grandpa's beard") or cotton candy, with a choice of flavors. That last one, especially, is a surprise to me. It doesn't really say winter or Christmas to me, but I've never seen more people (adults included) partaking of cotton candy. Not anywhere.


On the weekends, everyone is out strolling through the Christmas market (the wooden huts are the illuminated stalls over James' left shoulder). There are two amazing things about this photo. The first is that James is not wearing a coat -- it was cold enough that I was wearing a coat, but with a few layers, the sweater was enough. The second amazing thing is that no one in this photo is eating any cotton candy.

There's a separate area of the market for santons, which are Provençal nativity figurines.


The tradition apparently dates back to after the French revolution when live, public nativity scenes were no longer allowed. People started setting up their own scenes at home with santoun, or little saints (in Provençal). Nowadays, santons are made from fired clay (the red, terra-cotta kind) and then hand-painted by a santonnier, or santon artist; however, they went through a phase of being made of unfired clay, which was already an improvement over the original santons which were supposedly molded from the soft (non-crust) part of bread. In the photo on the left you can see the work of one santonnier in Aix whose figurines, which are also considerably larger than most (barbie doll size), are dressed in clothing rather than being painted.

What's different about these crêche is that there are lots of figurines that play a role in the scene. You should click on the above photo and see it in a separate window to see all of them. Basically, all the people in the village are there: the butcher, the baker, the fisherman, the fishmonger, the washerwoman, the basket maker, the miller, the olive seller, the knife sharpener and there are others that aren't professions, but which are still traditionally part of the nativity scene, like the village idiot and the old man and the old woman.

For our Christmas, we're going over to the home of one of James' colleagues in the lab for a big Christmas Eve dinner. And since they live in Marseille, we'll be spending the night and going for a nice walk in the hills on Christmas morning.

Merry Christmase Eve!

Path of the painters

While it sort of seems like it, this blog is not only about the food we eat. It's also about the things we do here, so for friends and family who aren't as enamored of cuisine as I am, I'm going to take a short break from pictures of food and cheese.

I mentioned in one of the earlier posts that Aix is the childhood home of Paul Cezanne and Emile Zola. They were even friends, although their relationship later became strained after Zola wrote some things that made Cezanne a little angry. Something about a thinly-veiled, and unflattering portrayal. In any case, there are lots of sites around here honoring them both, but the more obvious ones seem to be following in the steps of Cezanne and, in fact, as of 2006 he has held the title of the most famous artist of Aix-en-Provence.

A really nice thing to do on a sunny day is go on a long walk toward one of the borders of Aix proper. To be honest the northern, eastern and southern borders seem more scenic than anything westward, but I'm still exploring. One walk that I really like, which was so nice that I did it a second time with James (on a freezing cold day -- if you look closely at the picture, you may see that my eyes are watering and my nose is running it was so cold), is to take the rather steeply sloping Avenue Philippe Solari north to Avenue Léo Lagrange. Up to this point, it's just a pretty walk. If you look back down the hill you've come up, you can see some pretty views of Aix's rooftops and the Chaîne de L'Etoile range between Aix and Marseille. But when you get to Léo Lagrange and head east, you get a really great view of Mont Sainte Victoire, one of Cezanne's most famous subjects, off in the distance.

Behind me, to my right, you can see one of the Pillars of the Gate -- and as much of a mystery as they are to me, I only know their name. They're in the center of a roundabout at the intersection of Léo Lagrange and Avenue Paul Cezanne. I'm not sure what they were the gates of, or when. There are no special markings on them and there's no plaque that I can see commemorating anything, but clearly they were gates into and out of something. So I'm going to have to ask at the office of tourism about these. Anyway, they're not really the point of this post.

If you head farther north on Avenue Paul Cezanne, you get many other pretty views of the countryside around Aix (left) and views of Mont Sainte Victoire (right, below). Eventually, you'll pass the Résidence Paul Cezanne, which I thought was a residence he had lived in but which I discovered, when I approached the gate and tried (unsuccessfully) to get in, is actually a gated retirement community. It's on the same street as the Atelier Cezanne. Hey, it could be his house -- except that upon peeking through the gate that you can't enter, you can see it looks like an apartment building. Anyway, right across from the retirement home is a little pedestrian walking path that takes you to the end of the Terrain des Peintres, or Painters' Territory, and beyond. I think "Painters' territory" sounds weird, hence the revised title of this post.

You can take the path out of Aix, all the way to the Oppidum d'Entremont a Celto-Ligurian settlement dating from the second century BCE. I tried to go there on my first walk, but it was Tuesday, November 11th and the cite is closed on Tuesdays, and on certain national holidays like November 11th (and December 25th, January 1st and May 1st). So it was doubly closed.

Right before you get to the Oppidum d'Entremont, there's a little interpretive center with information on the surrounding countryside. The only thing is, the view from the interpretive center of said countryside is quite obscured (by trees). So you can't exactly tell where you're looking, which is a little frustrating. From further down the path back toward Aix, you get an unobscured view of the Plaine de L'Etang de Berre, the Chaîne de l'Etoile (where there are lots of indigenous species, including some rare orchids, and where as recently as the time of Cezanne there were 326 more species than there are now) and the Roquefavour aqueduct. I'm not sure where the first two begin and end, but you can see the aqueduct with the naked eye -- although not with the camera, which reveals it to be a long, pale, barely visible smudge. According to the interpretive center, it's the largest in the world and it looks impressively large even from a distance. It was built in the 1840s as part of a project to bring fresh water from the Durance river to Marseille and is still in use today.

The countryside around Aix really is beautiful and the pictures don't do it justice -- and this is already fall/winter when a lot of things are brown. It's also really agricultural, and you see some examples of that in unexpected places. For instance, on my way to the Oppidum d'Entremont, I passed by what looked like a public green space/small olive grove. On my way back down to Aix, I learned, from a man who was harvesting the olives, that it was actually a functioning olive grove. Actually, of all the agricultural surprises I could have found, this should probably be the least surprising. According to the tourist office website, there are over 2000 olive growers and around 300,000 olive trees in Aix. I'm not sure who counts as an olive grower, but that's a lot of olive trees.

As you can see, he has a bright green tarp spread out under the tree he's harvesting from. He seemed to be picking the olives by hand rather than shaking the tree, but I guess he puts the tarp down to catch any that fall by accident. He had a basket full of mostly green and some purple and green olives that he had already harvested. He said he was going to take them to a local cooperative and get them pressed into oil. I haven't seen him selling at any of the markets but maybe he uses the oil himself.

(From the tourist perspective, it's really too bad that you can't zoom in on this picture more because he was wearing one of those French striped sailor shirts that I didn't think French people actually wore. Maybe they only wear them when harvesting olives.)

Market fare

The markets still haven't ceased to be exciting. There's still so much produce, and it still looks better than what you can get at the grocery store. One thing that's interesting (at least for us as Americans) is that both at the markets and at the grocery store, the produce is still predominantly from this part of France, (except citrus, which comes mainly from Spain and Corsica). Being a "locavore" isn't that difficult here, and you have a much better idea of what's in season.

Obviously the markets are dominated by root vegetables, cabbage relatives and citrus these days, but there are still lots of lettuces. I like this vendor a lot because they have a lot of different kinds of root vegetables, and lots of different lettuces. In the foreground of the picture on the left, you can see black radishes in a bin with carottes rouge (which, despite their misleading name are not carrots, but chioggia beets), golden turnips, and then in the next bin, topinambour or sunchokes/ Jerusalem artichokes. It reminds me of Green Acres. And, despite the fact that we don't have an oven, we've been able to take advantage of these root vegetables through pan roasting.

There has also been something of a resurgence in mushrooms, although it's still not like when we first got here. Here are a couple that we got a while ago when things were at their peak. This first kind is called lactaire délicieux, or saffron milk cap. I prefer the English name because I really didn't think they were all that delicious. The ones here are pretty young and very fresh. They actually turn green when bruised, and the last time I saw them at the market, they were mostly green. (You can see a little green on the cap of the one on the right in the front, but like I said, these were in really good shape.) People were still buying the green ones, though, so I guess that bruising doesn't change the flavor. I, however, won't be buying them again. They have a nice texture and stay pretty firm when cooked, but they have a strange mildly sweet flavor that seems out of place -- maybe it's piny? What's kind of interesting about these is that when you cut them, they release a milky-orange liquid. It's not a lot, but it's enough to coat the knife and to collect on your fingertips. And there's something about the coloring that does not get broken down by the human digestive system and even seems to intensify in the body. I won't go any further than that.

A mushroom that we did like a lot were these chanterelles grises. These had a good earthy, mushroomy flavor and they were nice in a wilted escarole salad with fresh croutons (courtesy of our France-aquired non-stick pan) alongside some squash soup. It was a really nice fall meal. Not that you'd be able to tell from the pictures. We're still working on the food photography. And our weird octagonal black glass plates don't help the situation.

One thing that's not in season anymore that we just caught the end of when we first got here were currants. A couple of vendors had them approximately twice, and then they were gone. These beautiful little red jewels were really tart so James had the great idea to mash them up with honey. Then we served them over faisselle, which is a fresh cheese that actually tastes more like greek yogurt than cheese. On a day like today, when it rained really hard all day long and only stopped raining about an hour ago, it's nice to remember summery things.

The beginning of better days in France

Once we found the apartment, it was a huge relief. We moved in on a Tuesday, which is one of the market days for the Place des Prêcheurs (along with Thursday and Saturday), which is right around the corner. It's an even bigger market than the one in the Place Richelme.

One thing that I now regret is that I didn't take tons of pictures of all the delicious produce that I found at the market as the seasons were changing. It seemed like there were enough tourists there with cameras and I didn't want to annoy the people I'd be buying my vegetables from for a year or two...it's better to get on their good sides. As a result, we don't have a record of the perfect figs that were everywhere for our first month, or the beautiful tomatoes, or the sweet tart plums that we really enjoyed eating. I do have some pictures though, and I'm going to try to take more.

Our first day in the apartment we took advantage of the delicious wares of one of the rotisserie trucks at the market. The one I went to roasts (among other things that I'm forgetting) whole chickens, chicken legs, guinea fowl, rabbits, lamb shank, sausages, corn-on-the-cob, pork loin, jambonneau (pork knuckle, or the rear leg) and what I got, jambonette de volaille.

Literally, this translates as "little ham of poultry", which didn't make a lot of sense to me or James. In fact, we thought we were eating ham because it was savory and smoky just like ham; however, jambonette de volaille really is poultry. It's a gigantic turkey thigh that has been smoked and roasted. It's called a jambonette because it's the analogous cut of meat on a turkey that a ham comes from on a pig. (Let that be a lesson to us about not knowing where the meat comes from!) When you get anything at the rotisserie stand, it's accompanied by fabulous sliced, herbed potatoes that get roasted in all the chicken drippings (which might sound disgusting, but it's not -- they're not oily and grease-soaked, they have a really nice, waxy texture and are rich and more flavorful than any potatoes I've ever tasted). It's a perfect meal. We decided to be French and have some wine with our lunch. You may recognize said wine from the picture with the ravioli, but it was a much better pairing with the jambonette de volaille. And this time, we really did have something to celebrate.

The celebration continued with dinner that night because it was high mushroom season and at the market in the Place des Prêcheurs there is a mushroom vendor (who also, oddly, also sells avocados as you can see in the picture). They have several kinds of dried mushrooms and they have an excellent selection of fresh mushrooms too. The fresh mushrooms were a little picked over by the time I got there with the camera, so no great picture. (And probably no great picture until next year because the fresh mushrooms are really limited these days.)

In particular, the girolles, or chanterelles, looked great. (You can see some cèpes, or boletes in the foreground.) So to clarify what might seem like a naming oddity since "chanterelle" sounds like a French word, here, what you probably think of as a chanterelle is called a girolle, but chanterelle is used in the names of other mushrooms in the same family like chanterelles grises or chanterelles jaunes (gray or yellow chanterelles, respectively).

I've never been sure about the best technique for cleaning mushrooms, so I asked and was told that I should just rinse them in a colander and sauté them in a pan with some parsley (I ended up adding some shallots too). And then the vendor actually pinched his fingers together and kissed them and said "c'est super!" It turns out most of the people at the mushroom stand are kind of grouchy, but on this day, this guy was pretty excited.

The celebration of finding an apartment also required more cheese. This time we got a half of a fleur du maquis, another Corsican cheese, whose name literally translates to "flower of the scrubland", the scrubland being a major part of Corsica's landscape. It's a raw ewe's milk cheese covered with dried savory and rosemary and topped with chili peppers (and sometimes juniper berries, although this one didn't have any). The cheese itself is a little sour tasting, which is actually really nice with the herbs and chili peppers. It has a soft, creamy texture that's completely unlike the soft, creamy (but slippery?) texture of, say, a brie (even though they have the same fat content). It's drier, somehow, but not like an aged cheese, either. In any case, it's great and you should try it.

The best part of the meal, was that we got to eat it outside, on our terrace.