I like to think of myself as an adventurous person.

As in, I’m not adventurous, but I like to think I am.

I am generally opposed to physically uncomfortable activities. Here are some physical activities that I consider to be uncomfortable: riding a roller coaster, swimming when it is colder than 80 degrees out, eating food while not seated at a table, overnight flights, running literally any distance, etc.

But yesterday, I rode a bicycle 34 miles. That is the greatest distance I have ever moved myself under my own physical power.

And I did it all for fancy baked beans.

This is the face of someone who rode 34 MILES and feels she fully deserves the cassoulet featuring duck confit that she is about to eat. Also, we were eating at 7:30, which is basically like eating dinner at 4:30pm for French people.

We rode from Port Sud south of Toulouse, where Nic’s lovely mother Nelly lives, to Castelnaudary, which is one of the three cassoulet towns of southwest France. The other two are Carcassonne and Toulouse, and each has a specific, traditional version of cassoulet. Toulouse cassoulet features duck confit, pork and Toulouse sausage. Carcassonne’s includes pork, pork sausage and mutton. Castelnaudary’s is made with duck confit, pork sausage and pork shoulder. I believe the Toulouse version is traditionally baked with breadcrumbs on top, but the other two are not. All feature perfect, creamy haricots blancs.

That is duck confit on top. It’s a good example of why, when Nic asks me what part of the roasted chicken I want as he’s carving one for dinner, I say “the skin, please”.

Castelnaudary is beautiful, isn’t it?! The water you see is Le Grand Bassin that forms part of the Canal du Midi, and was a very busy port on the canal from 1681 when the canal was opened.  I’m including it mostly to prove that it was VERY WINDY on our 34 MILE BIKE RIDE.

This photo is so you know I’m truly the worst for complaining and that riding 34 MILES was a lovely time and we had a really nice picnic on the way. Nic made delicious sandwiches and we had a short nap in the sun on a dock on the canal.

Did I mention it was 34 miles?

Working title of next post: What’s With All the Hotdogs in Copenhagen? An In-depth Investigation

– Potato

I’m the kind of person who likes to live seasonally.

As in, I like to live during only some of the seasons.

Winter, for instance. It’s not for me. Winter is insidious too, because you can feel bad for weeks and months without realizing the cause. You’re like “maybe depression has finally found me” but in fact it’s more “the world is literally dark and cold and inhospitable and all things have their season and the thing during the winter season is feeling bad about everything, I guess”.

So anyway: winter makes everything worse. Everything I want to eat this time of year is a grilled thing because I can’t have it. In the summer, I’m like “WHAT ABOUT BRAISES” and in the winter, I’m like “NIC CAN YOU GO OUTSIDE AND GRILL BULGOGI WHILE I STAY ON THE COUCH WEARING HEAD TO TOE SWEATER”.

A good compromise are these bulgogi meatballs I invented this week. Meatballs are a perfect food. Endless combinations of flavors, easy to make/freeze/cook, everyone likes them. Anyone who doesn’t enjoy meatballs I would encourage to undertake some soul searching. Is the problem that you won’t let yourself be happy? Think about it.

Bulgogi Meatballs

1 lb ground pork

1 lb ground beef

1/2 a ripe pear, peeled and grated

1/2 an apple, peeled and grated

1/2 a small onion, diced finely

2 cloves of garlic, minced finely

2 tablespoons of soy sauce

1 tablespoon gochujang (if you don’t have it, buy some, it’s worth it and you can use it in a lot of things. If you don’t have it and can’t buy it, use sriracha instead. If you don’t have sriracha, what on earth are you doing reading this blog)

3 green onions, sliced, reserved to sprinkle on top

Bulgogi Sauce

1/2 a ripe pear, peeled and grated

1/2 an apple, peeled and grated

2 cloves of garlic, minced finely

2 tablespoons of soy sauce

1 tablespoon sesame oil

2 tablespoons brown sugar

1 tablespoon gochujang

2 tablespoons rice vinegar (or white vinegar or apple cider vinegar)

a couple tablespoons of water

Method:

So you’re making meatballs and a sauce for the meatballs. Luckily, it’s a lot of the same ingredients. What I do is get out a big bowl I can mix the meatballs in, and a saucepan that I’ll use to cook the sauce on the stovetop. As I grate the fruit and mince the garlic, I can just put half in each container. For the meatballs, dump all the ingredients together and form your hand into what I have named Meatball Claw and fold the two meats and other ingredients together gently but thoroughly. The idea is to incorporate everything together without working the meat too much and making it tough. Basically there should still be pretty visible flecks of fat when you’re done mixing. Form the meat into roughly golfball sized balls (or whatever meatball size you prefer) and set them on a plate or something. If you want to freeze some of them, which I strongly encourage, you can set the balls out on a cookie sheet so they’re separated, then freeze the whole sheet. Once they’re frozen, transfer the meatballs to a big ziplock bag to keep in the freezer and cook whenever.

Freeze them! Also, you should dice your onions smaller than I did. DON’T BE LIKE ME.

At this point, you can cook the sauce too. Set the saucepan full of stuff on medium heat on your stove. Cook it until it boils, then reduce the heat to low and let it simmer gently until you’re ready to eat.

For the meatballs, I use a cast iron pan. You should also use a cast iron pan. If you do not have one, any saute pan is ok, I guess, but you should know that cast iron pans are like $15 and can be found at Goodwill for even cheaper than that. Put a really good glug of cooking oil in the pan (a few tablespoons of vegetable, olive or avocado oil) and turn the heat to the low side of medium. Let the pan heat up for 5 minutes. Then put a layer of meatballs in the pan, however many will fit, so they are close but not touching each other. Let the first side cook until you see the balls browning, 6 minutes or so.

They’re browning! And the angle of the shot doesn’t show that it spit drops of oil literally all over my stovetop. Glamorous!

Turn the meatballs over and cook until the other side is browned too, another 7 or so minutes. I turn my meatballs a third time at this point and cook them on a third side for 3 -4 more minutes. After that, remove the meatballs to a plate and let them rest for a couple minutes. Pour the sauce over them, sprinkle with the sliced green onion and serve with some stir fried vegetables (I made roasted mushrooms, brussels sprouts and broccoli).

I ate these for breakfast, because I actually cooked them for dinner last night, but you gotta have daylight for passable pictures. Thank the gods for unemployment.

– Cat

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about Europe in the Middle Ages, because walking around in 13th century castles makes you want to read about how in the hell they got big fucking rocks 200 feet in the air but didn’t understand that maybe you shouldn’t divert sewage into your drinking water.

There are many references to various “itinerant courts”. Henry II’s “itinerant court”. Pope Clement V’s “itinerant court”. I picture a VW  camping van at a rest stop and a lot of people in tights standing around a folding table on which you would spread a vinyl tablecloth for a picnic. Which I think means I totally get history.

What I like about politics in the Middle Ages are things like “Henry mobilized the Poitou nobles for an attack on the French king. None of them wanted to do it though, so nothing happened and everybody went home.” Standing armies weren’t a thing then! So every time the king wanted to invade something, he had to walk there, trying to get people to come with him to war along the way. It’s like the world’s worst conga line. Just as embarrassing and horrible as a conga line someone tries to get you to join at your cousin’s wedding, but instead of it ending with you pretending you have to use the restroom (my patented method for leaving unsavory situations, because no one can dispute it), it ends with you dying in Jerusalem.

What’s the point of this blog post? I took a bunch of Benadryl because I’m allergic to France and a mosquito bit me and my arm swelled up a whole bunch and it’s gross and itchy and the Benadryl makes me feel loopy. Oh yeah, we went to Avignon and saw the Palais des Papes!

Palais des Papes!

Many interesting things have happened in Avignon featuring people with awesome names such as Childebert, Gundobad and Clothilde. It is probably most famous for hosting the papacy for awhile. At the beginning of the 14th century, Pope Clement V moved his itinerant court (!) from Rome to Avignon. He built the Palais des Papes, from which he and the next 6 popes (and 2 antipopes!) ruled. After about 70 years in Avignon, the papacy was moved back to Rome, prompting the Great Schism, which was when everyone in Europe claimed to be pope.  Avignon remained under papal control after that, though the Palace more or less slowly deteriorated for the next 400 years until the French Revolution, when it deteriorated faster.

The Palais des Papes is extremely grand and enormous. Also women weren’t allowed in it. :/

There are modern art installations in castles sometimes. I think this can be a cool idea but I hate this sculpture. It interrupts my ability to think of the pope walking through this courtyard wearing an enormous hat.

Here is a picture of the very beautiful Virgin Mary statue on top of Avignon cathedral next to the Palais des Papes. In case God is Catholic, I have nothing further to say about it other than that it is very nice. Amen.

Working title of next post: I Keep Waking Up in the Middle of the Night, Forgetting Where I Am and Thinking I’m in a Coffin, What Does That Mean

– C

Sometime between the ages of 14 and 30-almost-1, I grew a fear of heights. As a child, I would climb these giant pine trees in our front yard all day in the summer, and they were HIGH. You could get 30 feet up there. I had no problems then. Later my dad cruelly cut them down, but that’s a story for a different kind of post. I also remember climbing this rickety fence in our backyard to then climb a mulberry tree to eat 1297402 mulberries in the summer. Also no problem.

I suppose my fear of heights sprouted when I traversed the Canopy Walk in Kakum National Park in Ghana when I was 18. That thing is 1080 feet long, includes 7 bridges, and is 130 feet high. This is what it looks like. I did walk across the whole thing in the end, but it took me a very long time, and I’d rather not say whether I cried the entire time. (Ok, I cried the entire time. And not pretty tears, either. The kind with snot.)

So anyway. We’re staying the week in Chamonix in the French Alps, because Nic’s wonderful and lovable but crazy brother Chris is running a 62 mile race in the mountains. To entertain ourselves between trying to help Chris carbo-load, we took a train up a mountain, then we hiked down the mountain, walked across many stairs and bridges (RICKETY, METAL-GRATE STAIRS WHERE YOU CAN SEE RIGHT DOWN THE MOUNTAIN TO YOUR DEATH IN THE ROCKY VALLEY BELOW) and then:

Walked into an ice cave in a glacier.

I did my best to behave as though I do not have a crippling (though in my opinion totally practical) fear of heights.  Only 95% of the reason for this fortitude was because Nic’s mom would have called me a wuss otherwise.

This is the Mer de Glace glacier near Chamonix, France. It is the largest glacier in France. It probably will not be for long though, if they keep drilling frigging ice caves into it. On the hike down to the ice cave, which is maybe 1000 feet down, there are signs showing where the glacier level was during various years. I’ll sum it up: it’s receded a LOT in the last 100 years and climate change is ruining everything, the end.

This glacier moves, I shit you not, 1 centimeter per hour. There are signs in the ice cave being like “we do a lot of work picking the spot in the glacier for the ice cave to make sure that it is perfectly safe”. Buuuuuullshit.

Everything in the ice cave, including these sculptures of chairs (?), was lit with colorful LED lights. I guess to make everything seem like the college dorm room of a dude you were definitely never going to sleep with.

This is what the glacier ice actually looked like when not lit by absurd lights from 1996. I looked for ancient aliens entombed in the glacier, but alas, no dice.

Working Title of Next Post: Ultra-Running is a Thing, and the People Who Do it are Exactly as Nutty as They Sound

– C

Cat is obviously the funny in our relationship. Anyone reading this knows that. She’s also a better writer, which is why I’ve let my blogging ambitions be waylaid and have contented myself with doing all the driving to the interesting places Cat then blogs about. And that has been a lot of driving.

Recently, though, Cat has decided to learn to drive a stick. I know, right? I told her that probably something like half of cars in the US are sticks, so she argued in the way I taught her: she Googled it. It turns out it was something like 6% of cars sold last year. I’m sure those numbers were different in 1984, the year my trusty Volvo and I came into this world together, but I digress…

Well, we’re in France now, where automatic cars are still only something like 10% of the market, and we (I) didn’t want to pay the American tourist tax on an already expensive rental to get an automatic transmission. Plus, what better way for her to learn than on the clutch of a rental car?

So, yesterday, with nary 10 minutes of instruction on a back road, she was ready to give the open road a try. So she drove for an hour straight, up and down hills on windy roads, in and out of towns, around roundabouts… I was honestly impressed.

Which brings me to her willpower. She has proven time and again that she can and will do anything she puts her mind to. A week ago we visited Mont St. Michel, and I was trying my best to get a panorama picture of her, the monastery, and a rainbow that had fortuitously sprouted up as we were walking toward the monastery. Everything lined up perfectly, except for one thing.

She had made a terrible face for a picture with ample warning to make a decent one. She immediately defended herself when I brought it up, “I can’t help it! I always make terrible faces in pictures!”

“BULLSHIT!” I said, with more force than I would have been able to muster before meeting Cat. Back in those sad days before we had met, I thought quiet confidence was the best way to convey an idea. That was, of course, until Cat proved that she wouldn’t listen to a single thing I said unless it was said with vehemence.

Since I have learned well, I went on a brief yet passionate diatribe about how she could most definitely make reasonable faces, that she really had no reason not to, and that I was tired of her ruining pictures.

So in every picture since then, she has made very cute and reasonable faces. When I mentioned it a few days later, she laughed. “You really just have to show that you care about the thing more than I do, and I’m happy to do it.” Now I just have to figure out how to apply that to getting her playing video games with me.

Mont Saint-Michel is beautiful, and also overrun with tourists like ourselves. Still more than worth the visit, though. If you do go, eat a crepe at the Sirene restaurant, tucked in above a souvenir shop, with awesome cider and reasonable prices compared to the rest of the place.

– N

After a not-that-fun jaunt through Brittany (apparently we missed everything good except Mont St. Michele, about which Nic insists he will write a post, probably titled Hot Pics) and a few days in Dordogne (go there, it’s wonderful), we have arrived in Auvergne. Auvergne is one of the 27 regions of France, in the sort of lower middle. Also, I think it is my favorite.

Presented of course with comments are the reasons why:

I’m sure you think you’ve been to beautiful places. The Oregon coast! Italy! Flerp! You’re wrong. This is as good as it gets on planet Earth. Everywhere looks like the Shire!

The ruins of Apchon Chateau in the village of Apchon. Built sometime in the 11th century, it’s been abandoned since the mid-1700s, though according to a badly translated history I read online, it was active in a conflict roughly every 3 months in the intervening 700 years.

Here we are at the top of Puy Mary, one of the highest peaks of the Cantal Mountains. You drive up and then walk up a VERTICAL, UNPROTECTED, OPEN SLOPE for 1000 feet to get to the summit. I’m not *super* good with heights, so on the way up I used the word “barfy” perhaps a dozen times while grumbling at the 8 year olds sprinting up the slope without a care like god damned mountain goats.

Here I am, trying and failing to make it work in a hat again. You can tell from my face that I know the truth.

Ok. Finally. In Auvergne, they have a local specialty, called truffade. There are many ways to make it, but this picture is of the way that a particular restaurant, La Grange Aux Fleurs in the village of Sarran, made it when I had the best dinner I’ve had in France, both trips included. It’s potatoes fried in duck fat until golden and crisp, then a large amount of local Cantal cheese – Cantal is the aged and pressed version with a  stronger taste, Tomme is a fresher first pressing of the same cheese also used in truffade – is melted in the pan and folded into the potatoes. The whole lot is topped with a little persillade, which is chopped garlic and parsley. It is made “at will” or to order, so you eat it ripping hot when the cheese is melty and the potatoes are crisp and tender. GOOD GRAVY IT IS SO GOOD. Cantal cheese, by the way, is so famous that apparently both Pliny the Elder and Gregory of Tours wrote about it. That is a famous cheese.

Working title of next post: I See Kale in French Gardens, But Not On Any Menus, What is That About

– C

Perhaps you, like me, remember La Rochelle from the Three Musketeers. Upon visiting it, perhaps you, like me, would say incessantly to your husband “but which of them would you be? I’d be Athos. Porthos was such a windbag. I think you’d be Aramis, minus the religion.”

La Rochelle is AWESOME, and full of fascinating history. There are medieval towers to visit with graffiti from the 17th century (exactly as florid as the Three Musketeers), the 19th century (lots of pictures of women’s shoes, of all things) and WWII (it was the last city to be liberated by the Allies. Parts of Das Boot were filmed here!).

there were many prisoners in the tower over many hundreds of years. i’m not sure, but i think enemy sailors were routinely captured, imprisoned for 30 days and then set free? they could walk all around the tower and apparently were free to carve things into the stone, like LOUIS WEARS GIRLS’ UNDERWEAR. Just kidding. They carved things like WILLIAM BARRETT, CORK, 1741.

Today I spent a bunch of time reading to Nic about Eleanor of Aquitaine, an extremely interesting lady. She was queen of both England and France in turns, gave birth to 10 children, 3 of whom became kings, lived to be 82 and made La Rochelle a free city in 1182 (it would not remain so, and after being English and French and English and French, would finally become officially French after the Siege of La Rochelle in the 17th century – the backdrop of the Three Musketeers). She was queen regent while Richard the Lionheart failed at crusading and then came back for Kevin Costner’s wedding to that lady from the Abyss.

this tower is older than Eleanor of Aquitaine by about 350 years, but i feel like she would have lived in something like it

Also:  MUSSELS. Vagina-y looking, sauced with mariniere, curry, roquefort, cream, chorizo or garlic, served in a giant vat. Salty, beautiful, tasting like seawater. In French, moules.  La Rochelle is chock full of moules, and I only ate maybe 50 or so pounds of them! I love mussels. I will admit, however, that eating them is a bit like eating crab. You need a really big pile, because you do so much work to get them while you’re eating that by the time you’re finished, you’re basically ready to eat again.

ok, i didn’t take this picture myself, because i was too busy eating moules like a fiend to remember to take pictures.

Working title of next post: Turns Out Root Beer is Not a Thing in France

– Cat

The other night, Nic ordered a salad for dinner. While deciding, he said “I just had that steak last night, so I feel like a salad is a good choice.” Here is what was on the salad:

– Foie gras

– A confit duck leg

– Confit duck gizzards

– Several large pieces of cured ham

– A few pieces of extremely overworked lettuce

Across the way you can see what I ordered, a steak. Obviously.

– C

We finally went to the Musee D’Orsay! Much like my experiences with the Met in New York, it had seemed to me that the Musee D’Orsay was never actually open to the public. (Just now I went to the Met’s website to do some joke-checking and it seems that it is only closed 4 days a year. This is stymying because I have tried to go there on two separate occasions only to find it closed. I know for a fact one of those days was New Years Day, but I can’t recall the other. Perhaps it was International Too Hungover to Go Anywhere, We’ll Just Say It was Closed and Order a Pizza Day.)

Like literally everything in Paris, the museum itself is beautiful. It was a train station, the Gare d’Orsay, until the 70s when it was redesigned as a museum, finally opening in 1986. It has the largest collection of impressionist and post-impressionist pieces in the world.

Out the clock and across the Seine you can see the museum I wished I was in.

Perhaps I am just uncultured (I am definitely uncultured) but I can’t say the impressionists are my favorite (except you, Renoir). I believe Nic put it best when he said “if you scrunch your eyes, it looks like something”.

Impressionism: Just like a Magic Eye.

Based on the countless signs around the museum featuring a picture of a cup with a line through it (NON BOISSONS [my French is getting better and better!]), a picture of a hand with the index finger extended with a line through it (meaning either don’t point at anything because it’s rude and/or don’t touch the paintings- both good advice in my opinion) and pictures of both cell phones and cameras with lines through them, I gathered I was not supposed to take pictures of the art. I’m a rebel though, so here’s the best picture I took while visiting the Musee D’Orsay:

I couldn’t even say what this painting is or who painted it. What I do know is that I looked around real furtively before I took it while holding my phone in the vicinity of my belly button so no one would catch me. It’s photography a la the dudes in Eastern Europe who go to the movies and surreptitiously take video from under their coats and you can hear them laughing and muttering in Russian during all of Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, which you made your now-husband download illegally for you even though he said the quality would be terrible.

Working title of next post: I Think it’s Time to Graduate to Ordering My Steaks Cooked Bleu

– C