September 2013 – Duck and Potato

The French Have Perfected Pickle Technology

Posted on September 26, 2013 by potato

As an eater of large quantities of pickled things, I am frequently frustrated and annoyed by what I call Pickle Juice Fingers™. You want to get the olives out of the jar, but you have to dip your whole god damned hand in the jar to fish them out. You don’t want to dump out all the juice, because you’re not eating all the pickled things, so what are your choices?

1. Dip your whole hand in the jar, fishing around in the juice for pickled treasures and distributing your hand-germs to any other pour soul who also wants to enjoy delicious pickled things, like a BARBARIAN.

2. Use a spoon or something to daintily pick out one pickled thing at a time. This option is too ridiculous to contemplate.

The good news for America is that the French have solved this problem, with technology that is SO SIMPLE AND YET SO BRILLIANT, I cannot believe it has not always been a part of the pickle eating experience.

BEHOLD.

the pickles are CLEARLY too far down in the jar to avoid contracting Pickle Juice Fingers™

BUT OH THERE IS A PLASTIC THING SITTING UNDER THE PICKLES WITH A HANDLE THAT HAS LITTLE HOOKS ON IT THAT HOOK ONTO THE SIDE OF THE JAR TO BRING THE PICKLES TO THE SURFACE

You can bet I’ll be writing a strongly worded letter to the Vlasic company upon my return to the US.

Do you ‘get’ Dalí?

Posted on September 23, 2013 by duck

Cat has officially taken her longest vacation in over half a decade. Yes, it’s only been a week. Her work ethic is the kind of thing Europeans furrow brows and shake heads at. You can tell she was nearing burnout by this picture I snapped of her during a work videoconference just before our break:

Business up top, party down below.

In an effort to help recharge her batteries, I’ve been a most gentlemanly traveling companion. I’ve been doing all the ordering, asking, talking, paying. I mean, I speak French. She doesn’t. She’s been making up for that by repeating that she speaks some Spanish from the SEVEN YEARS she studied it.

I've even been carrying all the heavy shit.

I’ve even been mostly carrying all the heavy shit. With ice cream as fuel, of course.

So we arrived in España after a beautiful few days in Collioure, maybe my favorite town in the world. We had a couple hour layover until the next train left. That’s when I realized that in her seven years of Spanish, she learned how to conjugate dozens of irregular verbs, but not how to ask for the bill at a bar. We ended up with an extra round of beers, which in hindsight wasn’t such a bad thing.

It reminds me of the month I spent traveling around Mexico with my dear friend, Matt Acosta. Matt is mustachioed and half-Mexican, but never learned a lick of Spanish. Every single person we met would go off on tirades of Spanish toward my unsuspecting comrade, after which he would awkwardly point to me and somehow nonverbally communicate that my Franco-American ass was their best chance at getting a few words across.

It goes to show that a bit of conversational spanish followed by practice can be a lot more helpful than years of rote learning and testing. I found this reddit AMA from last year about learning languages fascinating. Alas, I digress. We made it to the Teatro-Museo Dalì in Figueras, where we saw some wonderful art.

Fairly tame, but a bit weird.

Getting weirder…

As we walked through the museum, as the weirdness reached a mind boggling crescendo, Cat stopped and asked me seriously, “Do you get it?”

“I don’t think I ever ‘get’ art, but I like it.” I replied. This turned out to be the best joke I’d ever told, as Cat actually laughed out loud. The best I’d ever gotten before was slightly a stronger exhale through her nose. I can’t express how gratifying that was.

Weirdest. Seriously. What the fuck.

Thankfully, after a couple days here in Spain, Cat’s Spanish has been coming back, and mine is even improving a bit. People actually smile at our efforts before immediately reverting to English!

Get it?

No Hablo Bueno

Posted on September 23, 2013 by potato

So, Nic is bilingual. As in, he is a fluent French speaker. He went to high school and college in France. He has introduced me to many people in France who say “you don’t speak ANY French?”, like the unfortunate affliction it is; akin to watching reality television, or not liking seafood . “Not unless you’d like to come to bed with me tonight”, is the joke I’d say if there were anyone to laugh at my jokes.

I defended my lack of speaking any French by saying to people, who, by the way, mostly speak pretty good English* “I took SPANISH in school, if you can believe all the rotten luck! If only I’d met a handsome half-SPANISH American, but I guess there aren’t as many of them in database development.”

*Point you, schools in Europe. America is still too upset over losing to Asia at math to worry about teaching kids languages, I think.

But then Nic and I came to Spain, upon which time he said “ok, we’re in Spain. Now you be in charge of talking.” AS THOUGH THE THINGS I HAD SAID ABOUT TAKING SPANISH IN SCHOOL INDICATED THAT I SPEAK SPANISH.

this is a picture of nic every time i don’t speak spanish.*
*actually i made him stand in a grotto at parc guell so i could take pictures of him and THEN i made him take his sunglasses off and his eyes burned out of his head because it was so bright. but isn’t the first version funnier?

As it turns out, I don’t speak Spanish. At all. Today I remembered how to say “can I pay the bill, please” and it felt like discovering fucking penicillin. Also, after thinking about it with as much concentration as I’ve ever used in my life, I remembered that the word for ice is hielo. I felt like I’d birthed a child.

Unfortunately, speaking a language does not just consist of vocabulary. Sí, EL HELADO. Sí! LA ABUELA! Not good enough. Rarely, if ever, when traveling in a country, do you get to reference both ice cream and someone’s grandmother in one sentence.

Not never, but rarely.

seeing as this post isn't really about anything, here is a picture of the ceiling at parc guell. it needs to be this epic and huge to hold up the weight of 12810 fat tourists, including us.

seeing as this post isn’t really about anything, here is a picture of the ceiling at parc guell for some actual content. the place needs to be this epic and huge to hold up the weight of 12810 fat tourists. sorry, 12812.

I Ate Tiny Fish Heads

Posted on September 20, 2013 by potato

In this picture, I am sitting next to something beautiful while drinking a glass of rosé. This activity has occupied approximately 70% of my time in France.

You just can’t be a food wuss in France. There’s no room for that shit. I have eaten:

salads with goose gizzards and duck hearts on them (DEEEELICIOUS)
steak tartare
interesting sausages
fois gras (It. Is. The. Finest. Thing. A. Human. Could. Hope. To. Eat.)
so much duck (breast, confit, etc.)
cheese so stinky that you have to not breathe in while you take a bite
chickens that are really scrappy looking, and also are delivered to you intact (head and all), in a clear plastic bag. Oh hai chicken face!
SEA SNAILS (“The tiny fork is to pry the snail out of its shell, it won’t come easy.”)

So as I said, I have no trouble eating all the bits and pieces of land-dwelling creatures. Duck heart? YES! Fois gras? HELL yes. Thing that appeared to be a seared piece of some kind of melty fat on top of a steak I had the other day, also served with a cream sauce made from morels, that may have been seared fois gras, I just don’t know, because sometimes when things are that delicious it doesn’t matter what they are? YEEESSSS.

But then I was confronted with friture. A big plate of tiny, WHOLE, fried fish. Like, you just eat the whole tiny fish. With garlic and lemon on it.

Here’s some bread! Maybe bread will make eating whole fish less terrifying!

Nic’s mom was all “I eat them, heads and all. But you don’t have to.”

Now look. I’m from the midwest. I thought seafood was popcorn shrimp until I was 25.

Once, Nic and I caught crabs in the ocean and he thought I should kill one of them myself, and I was all “Yeah! I’ve read the Omnivore’s Dilemma! I WILL kill that crab!” So Nic says “just whack it with the dull edge of this meat cleaver”, HUGELY overestimating my arm-strength. I hit the thing, it makes a smallish dent in the top of its shell, and the crab proceeds to aggressively throw its claws in the air, plainly yelling “COME AT ME, BRO”, upon which time I ran from the room shrieking and Nic had to kill it himself. I did clean it, though. The inside of a crab looks like a varied selection of things you apply makeup with.

So I ate a few fishes, not the heads. And they were delicious. Salty and garlicky and crunchy and lemony and not at all fishy. And then I hate one of the heads. Same thing! Salty and garlicky and crunchy and lemony and not at all fishy! Joy! I’m not a food wuss after all!! I felt like shouting, to the restaurant full of older French people and one table full of older Americans having an extremely dull conversation about how one lady’s brother is myopic, “I HAVE EATEN A FISH HEAD. ALL SHALL RECOGNIZE AND APPLAUD THIS FEAT.”

I triumphantly select another tiny fish and then notice that it is LOOKING AT ME IN MY EYE WITH ITS EYE WITH AN EXPRESSION I CAN ONLY DESCRIBE AS MILDLY REPROACHFUL.

you could put that much garlic on a rock and I’d probably eat it

Like “I understand my place in the food chain. Things eat me. I get it. But seriously, you wuss, you can’t eat my head? You’re gonna eat all of me BUT my head? That shit is insulting. You best grow a pair and EAT MY GOD DAMNED HEAD.”

So I ate its head. And it was delicious.

Finally, a Recipe: Poulet Ballotine de la Dordogne

Posted on September 15, 2013 by duck

We were taken to a beautiful store filled with the local fat of the land, where we acquired some sausage and a whole chicken, head and all. We decided to debone and stuff the chicken, a trick I learned much like I’ve learned nearly everything in my life, via internet searches and practice.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/kAekQ5fzfGM?rel=0]

Jacques Pepin on how to debone a chicken

PSA: I’ve deboned half a dozen chickens, and this was my first time doing so with a dull knife. It wasn’t fun. With $20 (a steel and a stone), a little technique, and some elbow grease, you can sharpen all your non-serrated knives easily at home. Once you’re used to using sharp knives you’ll never go back!

Poulet Ballotine de la Dordogne (Chicken stuffed with figs and pork sausage)
Prep time: 30 mins
Cook time: 1 hour

raw chicken, sausage, figs, shallots, and garlic.

The Fat of the Land

Ingredients

One whole chicken with giblets
One pound of bulk sausage
Ten fresh figs
Three shallots
Three cloves of garlic
Salt and Pepper

Deboning the chicken with a very dull knife.

Preheat the oven to 400°F / 200°C.
Roughly chop the figs.
Cook the figs in a small pot over medium high heat until sticky and reduced.
Add diced shallots, garlic, and chicken liver to the fig mixture, stir, and turn off the heat to cool.
Debone the chicken. Reserve the bones for stock.
Liberally salt and pepper the inside of the chicken.
Spread the cooled fig mixture all over the inside of the chicken.
Place the bulk sausage in the middle of the chicken and wrap the chicken around it.
Flip it over, bake in a baking dish for one hour.

This chicken was really delicious. The taste of the terroir really came out in the locally farmed ingredients and in the figs from the garden. Don’t be afraid to try your hand at deboning a chicken, and let your imagination run wild with the fillings!

Our tablescape.

16th Century Castle, Josephine Baker & a Bird Show

Posted on September 13, 2013 by potato

Today we visited a castle built in the 16th century, that was owned by Josephine Baker from 1947-1975. And those were the two least interesting things that happened. Sure, the castle was beautiful. Sure, it was cool to tour the renovated rooms where Josephine and her family lived, entertained and were generally fabulous. And, it was definitely cool to learn about how Josephine helped the French resistance during WWII, and spoke at the March on Washington with Martin Luther King, Jr. I mean, this is a badass lady.

BUT THEN THERE WAS A GOD DAMNED BIRD SHOW.

As in, they keep and breed birds of prey, owls and falcons and such, on the grounds of this castle, and they train the birds to fly around the trainer guy and catch stuff and generally be awesome and jaw-dropping for groups of elderly French and British tourists.

I am not sure how a 16th century chateau, Josephine Baker and TRAINED BIRDS OF PREY fit together, but they do. AND IT IS GOD DAMNED ASTOUNDING.

What’s funny is the lady immediately behind this bird was really scared of birds, and would jump up every time a bird got near her. Maybe skip the BIRD SHOW?

I thought that picture of Carcassonne at night was the raddest picture ever taken, but I was wrong. This is:

Big god damned owl, clearly photobombing Nic’s picture of the castle

AND THEN THIS.

Ok. So they have a lot of owls and birds of prey at this castle. They have snowy owls (many Harry Potter jokes were had, Linda, we took a picture for you), falcons, etc.

THEY ALSO HAVE A FUCKING BALD EAGLE.

THE BALD EAGLE CAN DO TRICKS.

IT FLIES BACK AND FORTH TO THE BIRD GUY.

I find this mind blowing. Apparently bald eagles aren’t endangered anymore, so perhaps America has become fairly lax about letting them out of the country. When I was a kid, we had bake sales to raise money to help the endangered bald eagles, for Christ’s sake. AND NOW, HERE IS ONE IN A BIRD SHOW AT A CASTLE IN FRANCE.

DEAR AMERICA, ARE YOU AWARE THAT THE FRENCH HAVE A BALD EAGLE. PLEASE RESPOND SOONEST.

Please excuse me while I go come to terms with the fact that not only can just anyone acquire a bald eagle, but they can also teach it to do tricks.

Don’t Worry, No One Lost Any Thumbs

Posted on September 13, 2013 by potato

My dad asked for more posts. HERE YOU GO, BRYAN. (I love you!)

We are in Domme, a fortified village in southwest France. I will not say anything about it, because I am now living here permanently. I’m never leaving ever.

So here is a picture of Nic cutting off the cast of a guy who lives in the village, who came by this morning to say hello and invite us to dinner. They did end up getting the cast off.

After this we did a blood letting

Carcassone: Looking to Defeat an Invading Army? Try Throwing a Pig

Posted on September 10, 2013 by potato

I challenge anyone who says this isn’t the raddest photo ever taken

Here are some things that happened during our trip to Carcassonne (if you are one of those rare souls who is interested in history and actually clicks the links, you might also be interested in this, this, this and definitely this):

– I ate the best cassoulet of my life and was not at all heartbroken when Nic said “we’re sharing, right?”

– We walked all around the outer wall of the city and I imagined what would have been happening at those spots at various points in history:

“I wonder if anyone will be mad if I make out with my hot boyfriend in a turret”

“Do you think there were little booths here where people sold bread and stuff? OR WHAT ABOUT A BLACKSMITH!!?!”

“Can you imagine being a soldier who had to stand in this little circle all day, firing arrows at the army down below? Do you think they shouted shit at each other during sieges? ‘Hey, asshole! Your momma is so fat they don’t even MAKE wimples in her size!'”

You see, arrows go out, but they do not come in

– We went into the cathedral, the Basilica of St. Nazaire and St. Celse, (which was breathtaking and solemn and I totally get why Catholicism took off, that shit is MAJESTIC) and lit candles which Nic said was to remember someone who’d died but I made a wish instead (I can’t say what the wish was, obvs, or it won’t come true, but I CAN tell you that it was snack-related).

I am artsy

– Nic kept wanting to buy a sword, and I kept telling him it would be so annoying (albeit awesome) to carry around.

– We discovered that Carcassone is where they filmed all of the Nottingham Castle scenes in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Having watched that movie a billion times as a kid, this fact brings me enormous satisfaction. (Also, there’s a part where Christian Slater fires Robin and Morgan Freeman over the castle wall with a catapult and when they make it over the wall, says “f*#k me, he cleared it” that when I was 9, I thought were the funniest words anyone had ever uttered in any language. WE SAW THAT WALL.)

This is where Robin and Azeem go flying over the wall to save Maid Marian, who was a bit of an idiot but she had curly hair so I will give her a pass

– There is a Tower of Inquisition at Carcassonne, making me think, for probably the 2381st time in my life, how much it must have sucked to be a peasant in the middle ages.

Imagine being up in that tower, hanging from the wall from your earlobes or something, because you made some herbs into tea or something equally SACRILEGIOUS

Ok, I made up that thing about the tea but I think we can all agree the Inquisition was, historically, even worse than a Black Friday sale at Walmart

Carcassone is amazing. Go there, if ever you can. And please, order cassoulet.

France: Not Gross

Posted on September 5, 2013 by duck

Great news: the nine hours of jet lag have finally subsided! We fell asleep at midnight last night and woke up at 8am. Now that that’s out of the way, we can devote 100% of our energy to the real reasons we’re here: eating food and looking at old stuff.

Yesterday, in an effort to appease Cat and her never-ending quest to not cook and eat every meal at home, we went on a little stroll downtown Toulouse and had lunch outside the marché de Carmes.

Of course we’re having wine with lunch.

On the food front, ingredients here are better. Of course the wine and cheese are cheap, plentiful, and delicious – that’s to be expected. The thing is, everything here tastes better! Soft boiled eggs are eggier. Butter is unpasteurized and delicious. Much like their human counterparts, French chickens are about half the size of American chickens and obviously spend more time outside.

Chicken roasting in a moulinex rotisserie.

I believe this rotisserie belonged to my grandmother.

There’s nothing like the sound of this rotisserie clicking away as it slowly turns, and the smell of the chicken roasting, to bring me back to my childhood. Thanks, Mom, for this most excellent Proustian trigger that puts madeleines and tea to shame! French chickens are a fair bit tougher and less fatty than the caged soulless chickens we’re unfortunately used to, so I brined this one for a day and stuffed it with shallots and a lemon before roasting. It was awesome.

This post is my first effort to make this blog about something other than jokes. I plan on posting a recipe or two soon, so comment with your favorite French dish you’d like to see us make! This weekend we’re heading to the medieval walled city of Carcassonne to get our old stuff fix, so stay tuned.

France: Not Ugly

Posted on September 4, 2013 by potato

We’re in Toulouse! It’s hideous and not at all charming but I am trying to give it a chance.

We arrived yesterday afternoon, and in the course of staying up for 28 hours in the interest of skipping lengthy jet lag, (no joke, I think this was the longest I have ever stayed up. Once, in college, I procrastinated writing a paper for so long that I had to stay up “all night” to finish it. I made a pot of coffee and got to writing. At 2am, I gave up and went to bed. I still can’t remember what happened with the paper. Presumably I turned in something and presumably it was acceptable, because I did manage to graduate from college eventually, but I honestly can’t remember) the best we were able to manage upon arrival was going to the grocery store.

And then also Nic made seared duck breast, for which I made a sauce of wine and fresh green plums. Which we enjoyed while sitting on the balcony looking at the boats in the canal as the sun set. Then we had a fresh peach tart for dessert. But that is neither here nor there.

Like I said, France is ugly.

Anyway. The grocery store. Here is a list of weird/amazing things they have:

The French don’t refrigerate their eggs. Not at home, and not at the store. Apparently they don’t wash the eggs when they gather them up (probably from really happy and cultured chickens who roam free around a 300 year old farmhouse) so it makes them never go bad. It’s amazing, and it’s funny to think about how much that would freak people out in America. They have anti-bacterial wipes so you can WIPE DOWN THE HAND GRIP OF YOUR GROCERY CART in the US. I highly doubt unrefrigerated eggs would go over.

This picture is awful because I was trying to limit the idiocy of taking a picture of something in a grocery store by doing it as surreptitiously as possible. But, as you can see, these eggs are on REGULAR, UN-REFRIGERATED SHELVES!

They have like 14 kinds of pate in the deli counter. They are also very casual about it, as though having many kinds of pate is not magical and rare like a unicorn singing karaoke while wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Also, pate is like $0.43 per pound. In America, pre-made pate is so expensive that it is stupid not to make it yourself, because somehow pre-made pate is $12.32 per pound, but chicken livers are $1.04 per pound. But here, in this magical fairyland of meat snacks, there are a million kinds of pate for no money at all.

Also there are a 492 kinds of cheese, and they are mostly as cheap as the pate. I don’t know how to say the names of any of them, so Nic orders while I stand there trying to look so French that I can’t be bothered to order cheese myself. It’s not that I CAN’T order cheese, it’s that I choose not to.

Also there are 29391 kinds of wine, and it is also painfully cheap. Painful because I drink wine on occasion (ahem) and here, really good wine is available for not very much money. Although, I did see a bottle of rose from Provence that I have bought a few (ahem) bottles of at Trader Joe’s, for roughly the same price ($6 or so). POINT YOU, AMERICA.

Tl;dr French grocery stores are awesome.

Working title for next post: Everyone in France is Fashionable and Attractive