The Heart Attack Grill

People ask me what I miss about the states.

Insanity, that's what I miss...

France seems to me to be a very self-conscious country, very concerned to be taken seriously and where no one wants to risk looking foolish. Ergo, there is a distinct deficit in over-the-top lunacy of this particular American variety:







Gigantic quadruple-decker hamburgers served by "Naughty Nurses" with cigarettes and beer.

God bless America!

(Note - I did not believe these pics at first, figuring they must be Photoshop fakes. Oh, the burgers I could easily believe, but not the cigs ,not in today's world of inane anti-smoking freakout. Then I learned the place was in Arizona, and it all made sense. Go Midwest!)

Super U has gone American on me

Wonder of wonders... I stopped by Super U to load up on junk food today and not only are they carrying Pepperidge Farm chocolate chip cookies now, but they've got Oreos! This was the first time I've seen Oreos on a grocery shelf for six years. As you can see, I bought them all. :D They even had microwave popcorn, albeit salted only, no buttered.

(BTW, the selection of beer in front was some random experimentation with Breton microbreweries, plus Chimay. I'm curious to try this MorBraz beer and see if it's any good...)

Burgers take Paris, with Philosophy on the Beach

A street scene from the river port of La Roche-Bernard, just up the road from us.


Haven't posted here for a while, but I did want to share two great articles I found online concerning life in France:

In Paris, Burgers Turn Chic

This is for anyone who ever wondered what a 35 € hamburger might be like. To me, they sound pretty good! Some examples -
“It’s not just a fad,” said Frédérick Grasser-Hermé, who, as consulting chef at the Champs-Élysées boîte Black Calvados, developed a burger made with wagyu beef and seasoned with what she calls a black ketchup of blackberries and black currants. “It’s more than that. The burger has become gastronomic.”
Yannick Alléno, who earned a third Michelin star in 2007 for his precise, rarefied cuisine at Le Meurice, serves a thick, succulent hamburger at his casual restaurant, Le Dali. Mr. Alléno’s baker, Frédéric Lalos, a winner of one of the country’s fiercest cooking competitions, makes the buns. With smoked bacon, lettuce, dill pickles, mustard, mayonnaise and fries, the burger at Le Dali costs 35 euros, about $56.

If I ever find myself in Paris, this place is on the list solely so I can check off "Ate a 35 € hamburger" as a life experience. And for something completely different, the other article of interest is-

France studies philosophy and sex on the beach

ONLY in France would you find an entire market of summertime beach books aimed at adults who want to refresh their school system education on Sartre. To quote-

This year, there's a splashy new category of best-seller -- the phenomenon known as cahiers de vacances, or holiday revision guide. The idea is that, instead of wasting your beach time with Steven King or Marc Lévy (French pop novelist of the moment), you use it to bone up on Nietzsche, quadratic equations, molecular science or some other discipline.

Sounds lovely, but I get enough creative and philosophical challenge from my working craft on a daily basis. I'll be a bumpkin and stick with Carl Hiaasen, I expect...

Herbignac in Spring, and the Ultimate Hotdog/Hamburger

Before I get to the pics, I really must post this link to the ultimate hotdog/hamburger combination creation. People always ask what we miss about the states, and when I answer, "Willful over the top insanity", they usually don't understand because they don't seem to have a culture here of things like restaurant chicken wings that are so hot that you get a free meal if you can eat just one. I am SO going to have to bug Emily into trying making some hamdogs as that recipe describes - the lure of a deep-fried chili-cheese hotdog wrapped in hamburger beef and topped with a fried egg is too potent to resist...

Now that it's sunny, we've been making a point to get out and take some pictures, so voila! (Note that while it is sunny, it is still cold, ergo our multiple sweaters and coats)



Anyone want to buy a butcher shop & home combination in the village center?



Busy downtown:



And nicely scenic:



The downtown cathedral never gets any less cool, even with bits of it blown off since the war:





Your humble narrator bids adieu!

Building the perfect homemade popcorn

Since microwave popcorn is unavailable here, Em and I have made a project of finding ways to make our own popcorn. We have a hot air popper and the store does sell corn kernels, at least. But the popcorn produced was always so boring and tasteless, and applying melted butter to home-popped popcorn was a disappointing experience, with the hot butter just melting its way down through the fresh popcorn and not spread around at all. After some experimentation, voila, our recipe for tasty homemade popcorn!

You will need:
A hot air popper
A bottle of butter-flavored popcorn salt
A sprinkle jar of Greek seasoning salt
A slab of Breton salted butter, or your closest equivalent
A glass pepper shaker

Slice off some chunks of the butter and cram them inside of the glass pepper shaker. With the lid off of the thing (put a paper towel over it or something to prevent splatter), microwave it until the butter is melted to liquid, then let sit until you can hold it. Pop the lid back on.

Start the popcorn popping. As it begins to pour out of the popper, you need two people on hand so this is a fun and silly family experience. One person runs the pepper shaker full of melted butter - just sprinkle wildly as the popcorn is coming out. The butter droplets are small enough that they won't melt the popcorn the way just pouring butter over will do, and you'll get evenly-buttered popcorn all the way through the bowl. Keep sprinkling butter till it's done. When you're finished, if you have butter remaining, you can just run water through the shaker lid (to wash out the butter from the pinholes, otherwise it will harden and block them all) and then stick the butter-filled glass back in the fridge for use again later.

While one person is manically sprinkling butter, the other is sprinkling Greek seasoning. Yes, I know it sounds weird. But Greek seasoning salt is tasty and has a yummy garlic flavor that goes really well with buttered popcorn. We tried to also apply the butter-flavored popcorn salt here too, but it is so fine that the air exiting the popper just blows it all over the place, so it has to wait.

Once all the popcorn is popped, turn off the popper and, while sitting the bowl around, apply the butter-flavored popcorn salt. You'll end up with homemade popcorn flavored with two kinds of butter and two kinds of salt, with a hint of garlic. Yummah!!

The Wonderful Miracle Pizza Box

Wow. It's been quite a while since the last time I updated this thing! Alas, the Christmas season will do that, but it's more than that, it's the growing degree of frustration inherent in trying to think of things to write about. We're going on five years here now, and there just aren't that many startling and strange adventures anymore. My observations of the differences between French and American cultures seemed to have reached their zenith with, "There are nice people and real assholes wherever you go. They just wear different hats." Without Indiana Jones-style tales of getting lost in Nantes to relate, the only purpose for this blog would seem to be to make it one of those ongoing loggings of the minutia of our daily lives, and that seems an awfully dull subject for reading, since most readers probably have quiet daily lives of their own.

So, I'm strongly considering just closing this blog down. Or perhaps I'll just turn it into a travel photo site with light comments, we'll see. It really will boil down to what I have the time for. But, I did want to post a pic of this new arrival in our fair village - the pizza vending machine!

France is awash in vending machines for things that I've never seen state-side, such as this video rental vending machine. When we moved here I had no idea what it was, having never seen such a thing before, and someone actually had to explain to me that one could rent DVDs from it without human interaction. I don't know why the French have such fondness for unusual vending machines, though I'd wager it's partly related to the French working hours. In the US, video stores are open till midnight. Here, nearly everything closes at 7, making life quite difficult for those working daytime jobs. Also, perhaps, it may be in part a sort of vast, chagrined realization that friendly customer service may not be the strongest trait in the French character, and such work might better be left to machines... ;)

In any event, the things are a wonder! I'm all in favor of anything that lets me avoid having to deal with other human beings, so naturally I've taken to them quite well. The new pizza machine is a real marvel of technology, offering a wide range of pizza choices and four minute cooking. You stick in your credit card, pick from the video window, and voila, within minutes you have a fresh, steaming, boxed pizza sliding out the slot and ready to eat. Good pizzas too, and very generous on the toppings (We like the "Ferrari", which is loaded with around six pounds of chorizo and other hot sausages). After thousands of years of human challenge and achievement, I'm very tempted to pronounce the instant pizza machine as the pinnacle of our accomplishments. Especially since it is within walking distance of my house... along with the video machine! Ergo, walk to the machine, rent a movie, walk to the other machine, get our pizza, go home and enjoy. Life is good.

Though, when pizza machines are the only thing I have to write about, blogs get quite dull...

Beware the Murky Frogpits

This is me up near the river dam at Arzal. For once I have a lot to write - yesterday we visited the dam for the first time and got a lot of good pics, and last night we went to Luna Parc, a traveling fair that stops here in the summers. It's a lot like a US county fair, but it's actually better in a few key ways.

That isn't today's post, though! :D

I thought this was worth an article after talking with our friend Marie-Blanche about the lack of fast food outlets in France. We often find ourselves missing easy fast food - There are only three McDonald's joints scattered across our entire region, and only one alternative chicken place. Ergo, when we find ourselves out running errands and we're hungry on the road, it isn't possible to just pull over somewhere for a quick bite. Everyone turns their noses up at fast food, but the lack of it can be a real nuisance on a very busy day.

Except that, according to our friend, it isn't lacking..... We just aren't seeing it. In France, she says, fast food is at cafés, not glittery McDo's, and if we want a quick bite we can just stop at any café for a sandwich. Unfortunately, trying to drag Emily to these places is like trying to get an iguana untangled from a fishing net - ever time you get one claw unstuck, another one hooks in, and when all is said and done, you've just wasted a lot of time and energy annoying the iguana.

Why the resistance? French cafés are scary. Emily is a lot more bothered by them than I am (bolstered by years of male restroom conditioning, where one often sees bacteria the size of Border Collies loping around). I'll try to relate our typical experiences so far.

Imagine if you will.....

You've just run errands to several different places and spent the afternoon driving through roughly thirty-five idyllic little stone towns filled with thatched roofs and all named 'Ker-something'. You're starving, and you spot a sign saying, "BAR - CAFE - SANDWICHES" (There are places like this in virtually every little village). You think, "Ahh, food!" and pull over. But the horror begins to set in quickly...

The creaking wooden front door hasn't been painted since the 70's, and when you open it, you're rewarded with several popping sounds as various bar tenants explode into dust from their first exposure to sunlight in years. The interior is dank, musty, shadowy, and no matter where you go, there are always at least four or five half-sodden locals lurking at the bar looking unshaven and disreputable. If you've ever wanted the "Cowboy enters the saloon" experience, this is the place, because all conversation will inevitably stop dead as these sullen characters all turn to inspect you. Except, of course, the owner/barkeep, to whom you do not exist, as his family has not known yours for generations.

Dare to pursue the experience further, and find a wooden chair. Your table is decorated with an unemptied ashtray containing the fuminous remnants of eighty-seven Gaulloises, and you are the center of attention for the room. France doesn't seem to have the, "It's rude to stare" code of conduct that the US has, as the locals will simply sit and openly goggle at you for as long as you're there. You may as well be wearing a motorized neon beanie for the attention you'll get. No smiles, no welcomes, nothing to suggest friendliness, just sulky glowering.

Of course, you don't know what to expect... Do you sit and wait for a waiter? Do you go to the bar and ask for a menu? Do you actually want to eat anything that is cooked here? Regardless of what you do, you're stuck, because a good thirty minutes will pass before the barkeep peels himself away from deep conversations on village incest to come and ask what you want. The choice is pretty limited, typically... You're not getting curly fries and BBQ roast beef sandwiches here, your options are more like: Sandwich. Beer. Fries.

If you haven't run shrieking by this point, you'll eventually (roughly 45 minutes later, after enough time for all the regulars to spit in your food) be served some sort of mystery meat in a foot-long bun of the most durable bread you've ever encountered. Chewing doesn't work, biting doesn't work - you're eventually forced to hold the thing in both hands and saw your incisors into it, really using your neck muscles to tear loose rough chunks, which you then chew for the next ten minutes.

And after a couple of these experiences, you'll never, ever want to go back to one of these joints again, and if you even start considering another try, your wife will threaten to set fire to you in your sleep because she is so repulsed.

So, that's been our experience with using cafés as "fast food". Why do I love American fast food places? Let me count the ways:

*Reliability. I can go to a Wendy's in North Carolina or Michigan, and know I'll get the same food.

*Variety! Hey, some of us like sourdoughbread hamburgers...

*Cleanliness. I've been in some dingy fast food joints, but no McDo I've ever seen even begins to compare to the Innsmouth-esque quality of some of the small-village cafés I've visited.

*Prices. Hamburger, fries, and a coke - $6. Mystery meat sandwich, frites, and..... Ugh.... "Zee Coka, monsieur?? You would not prefer un whisky wizh your lunch?" - 9 euros

*Speed. Go in, stand in line five minutes, get your food, eat. At café, go in, sit, wait fifteen to thirty minutes before your existence is acknowledged (if you're lucky, that is, and you don't look too British, in which case you may truly Never Be Served....), then another thirty minutes while they kill the animal in the back room, add the "foreigner's exxtra spice", and finally bring it to you. Tack on an extra fifteen minutes when you're done for trying to get the bill.


Maybe I'm being paranoid, but there's just something about having five unshaven, obviously drunken guys at a bar (at noon!!) watching you eat with all the rapt fascination you'd give to assembling a $3K home stereo system, that just puts me off a bit...

This has run a little long, so I'll wrap up here, with another part soon. We have found a couple of cafés that are....well, OK...even pretty nice... and they'll get their due in the next post!

Moule Quest 3

We did something entirely unusual today, and took a whole Sunday afternoon off, to go play at the beach and have dinner out at an oceanfront restaurant before the tourist hordes really descend after the 14th. Our summer experience is a shuffle game - pre-July 14th (and post-September 5th or so) we enjoy the tourist areas to the max, then through late July and all of August, we hide out at the smaller, less-known beach spots where the locals congregate while La Baulle fills with British Range Rovers.

When I moved here, one thing I missed terribly was chicken wings. They do have them here - we can buy three flavors at Super U - but they are not an ingrained, celebrated part of the food culture here as they are in the US SE. No one would ever dedicate an entire restaurant to chicken wings, for example, and forget spicy ones... the Magma wings from Davidson County (Eat one whole wing and you get your dinner free) are a distant silly memory. And, they're just not as good here, due to lack of the more interesting sauces. I found a replacement passion during my second year, however, in the form of "moules-frites"... that is, mussels and fries. This is served everywhere here.... in fact, it virtually is the area's version of hot wings, at least in terms of ubiquitous cultural placement. And mess! As with good wings, it's impossible to eat moules without covering yourself in sauce, which is half the fun.

I've probably eaten enough of these things to fill a hot tub since we got here, and have had them from utterly bland to positively orgasmic, with all shades in between (Though they are nearly always quite good, since they are mostly harvested right here off our shores, and extraordinarily fresh). They are very seasonal - they only really appear in force in the summer - and the region then descends into a moule-devouring frenzy comparable to a pack of hungry Lexington locals turned loose on fresh BBQ. We rove around trying them at different places in my ongoing quest for the perfect moules. To date, this restaurant holds the title - the Marie Galant, by the docks at La Turballe. Their "Moules-Frites Marie Galant" house specialty is so good that it actually made me dunk my fries in the sauce just to get more of it, and anyone who knows me will know the odds against my willingly mixing my foods.

Luscious.

Who's Better?

I came across this wonderful cartoon on this entertaining page about France and the US, and it inspired me for a blog post. What an accurate picture, eh? ;)

People are always asking me which I like better, France or the US, and this is an impossible question to answer with a Yes or No because there are so many nuances to both, and I find various bits of each more or less desirable than others. So, in the interest of cross-channel debate and a bit of fun, here is the start of my 100% biased (but observed through direct personal experience) observations on who is better at various topics:

Movie Theaters
France wins, hands-down. I stopped going to the movies in the US because I always seemed to be spending my $6 to sit next to some fat, loud mouthbreather who spent the entire film describing it blow-by-blow to his buddies on his cellphone, while cybersex-texting his girlfriend with his other cellphone. The last movie I saw in the US was Fellowship of the Ring, just before moving, during which I had to walk back and threaten the spinal cord health of a pack of teens who somehow couldn't resist talking in full volume about their friends and their date scene throughout the film. IMAX may be nice, but I don't think I could put up with an American theater audience just to see it. Over here, theaters are lower-tech (Our favorite just has two vending machines instead of a concession stand, for instance) and they thankfully haven't discovered the concept of selling chicken wings and steak dinners to moviegoers. Instead, you buy your little bag of malted milk balls and then go in and try your absolute damnedest to not rustle the plastic as you munch, because if you do, it will be the only sound in the theater. We went to see V for Vendetta a few months back, and there wasn't a cellphone buzz through the whole movie.

Cheese Variety
This one is closer but I'll have to go with USA, simply because you can get all the French cheeses there also, and you can actually buy cheeses from other countries as well. I don't know if it's economic protectionism or simple snobbery, but it's hell trying to find cheese from anywhere outside France here - Where do I get my Stinking Bishop? Doesn't seem to be an issue of taste, as every French person we've had over who has tried our imported Nacho cheese & chips has loved the stuff (Unlike their consistently horrified reactions to peanut butter). I'm prone to guess that there's a regulation out there somewhere spurred by the French cheesemakers to keep out all those dangerous imports that might actually compete with them. Who knows?

The Child Factor
Sorry to all my American friends, but France just has better-behaved kids. The old saying, "Better seen and not heard" is still in force here, and I am often amazed at how polite and deferential French children are. Our friend Claudie's teenage son breaks off from street soccer games with his friends just to come over and shake my hand when we visit, whereas it seems US kids have to be forcibly pried from their Playstations just to elicit a grunt. I've forgotten what it's like to go out for a nice dinner and have to contend with the undisciplined sprogs of mass breeders stampeding unchecked through restaurants. Between this and the movie theaters, it's like heaven.

More to come....

More Medieval, and the Brits still hate France

I ws very happy with this nice shot of an old Tabac sign at the Guérande Medieval Fair. Too cool! I still have a lot of photos to post, and a new selection of shots of the Dolmen of Kerbourg to upload some time in the distant future. For now, here are some more pictures from the fair:



The tents stretched around the walled city along the tree-lined path, and made for some nice photos in combination with the walls and the moat. I don't actually know the size of the walled city in square miles or kilometers - It is hard to guess at, because it isn't very large but the interior is such a maze of tiny twisting streets that it is difficult to get an idea of the overall scale of the place.

A fun open-air sausage vendor's stall. Complete with swarms of insects lighting on all the displayed sausages. Did it make a good picture? Yes. Did we buy any sausage to eat? No. I remain too deathly afraid of most French sausages to sample them - One look at the insides of andouille is enough to put anyone off - though I've grown to love chorizo. Also, our village butcher makes a yearly mountain of something he calls "Mexican sausage" which is fantastic. Where the "Mexican" part comes from is anyone's guess, but it is the only sausage I've had here which is really similar to what Southerners think of as sausage.

It was a blustery day, and we took many big blows of buffeting from the magnificent multitude of billowing blue and black dresses.

In other news, it seems the British still hate the French. Granted, I read just as much anti-anglo gibberish in the French press, but I really don't understand this poll. The French are the rudest people on the planet? I did get a laugh out of the Frenchman's defense that they were a nation of sulking romantics, but really... I've lived here for four years now and can categorically say that French people aren't any ruder than people back in the US (and at least they're polite enough to never walk right up to you and start talking about their religion!). Neither of our sets of visiting parents seemed to see much French rudeness, especially in such experiences as the big family dinners, the nice English-speaking locals who helped us evacuate the TGV disaster, the Fresnis and their bodacious breakfasts, the hotel staff, and on and on. I don't get it. Granted, Paris is a hell-pit of savage assholes, but that can be said for most really big cities on the planet. I'm sure Beate will be thrilled to know that the Germans ranked #2 for rudest, as well as Most Boring and Most Ungenerous. How anyone can call a 6' tall pipesmoking woman with purple hair "boring" is beyond me...

Oh, and one other thing - Do any of you techie readers know of any freeware utility which can batch-modify multiple JPGs to smaller dimensions? I have roughly six folders filled with photos taken during Emily's parents' visit, but each photo is 1600x1200, and quite a bear for them to download on their 56K modem connection. With 200+ photos, individual resizing and compressing is out of the question. I do most of my photo work in Paintshop Pro, which can do batch format conversion but not batch resizing, so if anyone can point me to a freeware utility that can handle this task, thanks in advance!

Get your French munchies here!

A very, very quick note today for our US friends. I was just browsing through the new Amazon.com listings for food, after learning that they were now moving heavily into dry goods to compete with the big supermarkets. Popcorn, obviously, was my motivation, but I discovered in the process that they have some really interesting sections on ethnic foods, and even a decent selection of French stuff.

(And yes, I know this sounds like a commercial, but unlike with my AdSense ads and book account, I don't get paid jack for this - I just wanted to post it for the interest of our francophile visitors who might not otherwise know that they can buy Brittany caramels from Amazon!)

These caramels, shown in the pic, are terrific. We can find them all over our immediate area but I never expected to encounter such a cardboard-boxed, homemade-looking candy on Ye Internet Megamart. If anyone wants a little taste of Brittany, there you are. Another very local item is this selection of Guérande sea salt, which is harvested by hundreds of salt flat workers not fifteen minutes to the south of our house. I've heard many chefs say it is the best cooking salt on the planet. Our friend Claudie's parents have their own stretch of salt farm in the marshes - I think I even posted a bunch of pics from our visit there sometime in the past, though now I can't remember for sure.

Madeleines have a special place in our hearts because they were our staple food for the first six months that we lived here. We found out early that they were plentiful, inexpensive, and we could eat them without suffering the upset stomach that nearly all French food gave us during our first year of adaptation. I can't say they're especially good snacks, and I don't think I ever want to eat another one myself personally, but they are an integral part of our "French Experience".

I don't eat a lot of foie gras because A) our budget doesn't allow it, and B) it is so rich (the good stuff, anyway) that I simply can't consume a lot of it without rolling into the floor. This foie gras with truffles, however, sounds tempting. I am, however, most likely spoiled forever on eating storebought foie gras because I've had the good fortune to be able to have some homemade by a French master chef. Marie-Blanche, if you're reading this, tell Marcel we want more! :)

Of course, for the genuine French family meal experience, there is Nutella. I read an amusing account on another expat's blog once about her encounter with a scolding French teacher, who told her that she was ruining her child's health by sending him to school with peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. He was supposed to be eating that healthy Nutella instead! The French revulsion for peanut butter is charming and funny - I can only hope they feel the same about my reactions to andouille sausage...

Adventurous souls can try rolling their own crépes using this buckwheat flour. From what I have seen, making crépes at home (of the non-microwave variety) is something akin to conducting a symphony under the duress that, if you miss a note, your orchestra players will begin burning to briquettes.

It is a strange world today, when Americans are ordering Breton caramels from Amazon while I, sitting in Brittany, shop for crates of Orville's Ultimate Butter Popcorn...

What I Crave

This is a photo of the honey maker's house in La Roche-Bernard. It's a sort of museum/factory/shop devoted to the art of making things with honey and beeswax, and really a neat place to visit. The fellow who runs it makes an award-winning Chouchen, which is a really sweet Breton honey mead... accent on "Sweet"! Chouchen is a bit of a Love-It-or-Hate-It drink, but I'm fond of it, especially since I can drink it from an authentic mead horn gifted to me by kind friends from across the border :)

As to today's title, here is what I crave. My French friends should find this amusing. They keep complaining about the quality of McDonald's "food", and I keep telling them that McD's is really the bottom of the barrel in American food, the problem is that the good stuff doesn't seem to get exported. What I would not give for a Ragin' Cajun, with spicy Pepper Jack and Cajun sauce, or a Firehouse Chicken or Red-Hot Buffalo Chicken sandwich. Arg!

It seems Chirac has made a fool of himself on the world stage again. I can't help but wonder that he does not realize such antics as this only make him (and France, by representation) look rather pitiable and pathetic, not proud and offended as he seems to think. Yes, English is the language of international business. The French can laugh at us once Chinese becomes the language of international business, but for the moment it would be better to just deal with it and use it to their advantage, rather than continually whining and trying to turn the clock back to 1900. C'est la vie...

And finally, my friend Steve sent me this link to what he described as "the scariest pictures he had ever seen on the net". No, they are not graphic or bloody - This is a professional photographer's page, but he does have a unique visual style with color and re-touching that lends the gallery a really disturbing look. If only I could make pipes this creepy...

Crepes and Christmas

I realize I haven't been posting as much lately - Alas, the impending holiday season has taken its toll, and it seems as if most of our time has vanished into gathering fits and Christmas cards and making lists. Bleagh! And people ask me why I hate Christmas... You never have to do this sort of time-devouring crap for Halloween!

Our relation to Christmas has changed from when we lived in the states, though, and in many ways it is much more peaceful here. Christmas season in the USA starts sometime in middle October, and once past October 15th it was hard to find a store not chock-full of Christmas junk, with jinglebell holiday muzak playing in every grocery. Here, the toy aisles are out, but I haven't heard "Winter Wonderland" yet. In general, the whole marketing assault is turned way down in France, allowing a pleasantly cozy and understated Christmas - unlike my memories of Christmas in the US, which were like having someone screaming into your ear and hitting you on the head with a Tickle-Me Elmo for two months straight. I want to bring all my American friends here for December to see what it really can be like, just as I want to take all my French friends to the US for Halloween to see how it ought to be.

Today's pic has no connection to any of this, though - I just had no idea what to post and it looked like a good choice. That's a "fruits de la mer" (mixed seafood) crepe served at La Saboterie, one of the better creperies in our area. Like most of the best restaurants here, it is tiny, tucked-away, and unassuming, but deliciously good. The seafood pile is eaten atop the handmade buckwheat pancake - Delicious!

Popcorn Quest Continued, and Weird American "Food"

..... And I do mean to put quotes on "food", as some of what I will mention is pretty questionable (especially if one defines food as something needed for nutritional value). But first, a word on the popcorn quest. For three years now, Emily and I have depended on the kindness and forebearance of friends and family to send us the microwave popcorn that we couldn't find here. I can't imagine how tired they are of us begging for popcorn, and I'm certainly weary of bothering people, so we've recently launched a concerted effort to find our own sources of popcorn in Europe. Thanks to a very helpful friend in FumeursdePipe, we were pointed to the German website "United Lifestyles" - an online business catering to the strange and twisted tastes of British and American expats residing in mainland Europe. Suddenly, I can order beer online! (This was a really strange concept for an American - being able to visit any number of online wine & alcohol shops and purchase wines from all over France via the net... an unheard-of concept for the US, where alcohol sales are strictly controlled). UF has microwave popcorn, and our first order is on the way. Time will tell.

Unwilling to pin our long-term popcorn plans on one source, however, we valiantly pursued other avenues, and eventually found the two models of hot air popcorn poppers that were available in France. One visit to Boutique Plus and 25 euros later, we now have a real popcorn popper to try out (Seen in the photo above, along with all the other essentials of life for an expat abroad - caramel liqueor, giant bottles of Texas Pete, Pez, and a mead horn). We can get popcorn in kernel form here - just not the instant microwave bags that are so beloved of lazy Americans. Still, popping our own has its charm, and it is great fun to watch the thing firing hot popcorn randomly all over the kitchen. Makes movietime a lot more festive than just sticking something in the microwave, even if we'll miss all the amazing and sometimes-frightening flavors that our US friends have sent over to us. If our French and European friends are curious to see just how exotic the American snack food fixation can get, have a look at these links:

Orville's Pre-popped Chocolate Drizzler Popcorn
Orville's Cinnabon Cinnamon Butter Popcorn
Orville's Kettle Korn
Orville's Caramel Corn
Orville's Honey Butter Corn
Orville's Pour-Over Butter Popcorn
Orville's Pour-Over Cheddar Popcorn
Orville's Movie Theater Butter Popcorn
Orville's Ultimate Butter Popcorn
Orville's Corn-on-the-Cob Popcorn
Orville's Tender White Popcorn

And this is just a fraction of the variety produced by one brand! That doesn't even touch on the truly eccentric (to les francais) exotica such as microwave pork rinds, peanut butter cups, S'Mores, buffalo wings, not to mention our national fixation on really intense hot sauces.

Our French friends often ask us what are typical American "cultural" foods. I never know how to answer this question, because Americans don't really define ourselves culturally through cuisine - We tend to base our sense of cultural identity on accomplishments rather than regional dishes (This is probably a good thing), and most of the foods that I think of as uniquely American (hamburgers, chilidogs, corndogs, hot wings, etc) aren't the sort of "cultural" foods that I'm being asked about (Though personally speaking, I would just as soon have a really delicious county fairground corndog, dripping with grease, and some crunchy fresh onion rings to some of the haute cuisine we've encountered in our travels). So, si vous me demandez un example de cuisine americaine, don't be surprised if I look a bit confused and have to think for a while... especially since the inquiring person is thinking of something like gallettes avec fruits de mer and I am likely thinking of something like Chewy Sweet Tarts...

If any of our French or European friends ever get curious to try cooking some very "American" foods (and can translate recipes into metric), here are some good recipes:
Chili Cheese Dog
Chili Dog Chili
Pork Burritos
Cornbread
(Cornbread is essential. If one ever tries to cook Southern food, Ye will be Judged by thine cornbread)
And of course, plenty of other dishes I grew up with.

American Food through French Eyes

Last night I spent a solid hour searching online for sources of popcorn in Europe. Alas, I found some good sources in the UK but none that can deliver outside of the British Isles! Searching French sites was a challenge that bore little fruit, even after I figured out that the French spell it "pop-corn" or "pop corn" (two words) instead of popcorn. I found a few sources, but all were for that nasty sugared version that is inexplicably popular here - nothing like proper salted Orville's "Death by Butter". I'll keep trying. While searching, I came across this entertaining page. This is for our French readers, all en francais, about the sheer weirdness of US foods to French eyes.

Another Crappy Home-Video Director is Born

Thanks to a very fortuitous windfall, we were able to do something yesterday which I had not dreamed would be possible, and get ourselves a tiny (and rather simple) digital video recorder. These have long been on my want-list, but practicality and survival kept us from getting one even though the basic ones today are fairly inexpensive. The reason I wanted one now was to make a video of my parents' trip here next month, but I also hope to start adding more video to the website in the form of Brittany travel vids and pipemaking videos. The real question will be how to host them, since my server (and wallet) will balk at the bandwidth issues.

Yesterday was another all-day trip into Nantes, to get our new year's residency visas - a fairly painless process these days, and more of an occasion for a good wander around downtown Nantes than for the sort of panicking deep-jungle-expedition mentality we used to have. Our friend Camille took us to "the best shop selling pain au chocolat in Nantes" - a little corner breadshop that looked much like every other corner breadshop in any French city.
But...
Wow. Yes, very good. I've had pain au chocolat before from plenty of different places, and it is usually really uninspiring, but yesterday's was orgasmic. For those unfamiliar, pain au chocolat is a very buttery, flaky croissant served light and hot, so fluffy it melts in your mouth, and it is shot through with heated and melted chocolate chips. Argh, says the diet. Yum, says my tongue. I'll have another dozen...

Despite news media reports of riots in Nantes, we saw no evidence of any troubles and everything was as bustling and busy as usual. The only unusual event occurred while we were relaxing at an outdoor café in the city center - there was some yelling across the broad square, and police officers seemed to materialize out of every alley and side street and converge. After a few moments, we saw them leading away some very grungy-looking drunk, not a band of rioters. I suspect that, like flying in the aftermath of 9-11, we're probably safer on the city streets now than we were before, given the increased policing!

Here are a few more comments I've received from locals about the riots:

This first post is in reply to some questions I directed to the Herbignac community forum.
"To your question "Have there been riots close to here?", here is my answer: in Herbignac and in the area, there was no problem. With your second question: "Does the town hall have plans.?". Answer = No, the town hall does not have any plan of repression for hypothetical problems of this kind. On the other hand, the answer that I posted you on the forum explains the means which proved reliable in the past and which are to be developed for the future. These means are simple and are not reserved to the only elected officials (mayor and advisers) but they are to be put into practice by each inhabitant of the commune; to maintain and create relations of mutual aid, solidarity, good closeness between the inhabitants. How? it is to each person to find the ways of acting with others to take part in the work of collective interest, in a spirit of community."
(A votre première question "y a-t-il eu des émeutes près d'ici?",un internaute vous dit que si vous êtes de la région, vous devez sûrement le savoir.Voici ma réponse : à Herbignac et dans la région, il n'y a eu aucun problème.Quant à votre deuxième question : "la mairie a-t-elle des plans ..?". réponse = non la mairie n'a aucun plan de répression pour d'hypothétiques problèmes de ce genre. En revanche, la réponse que je vous ai postée sur le forum indique les moyens passés qui ont fait leurs preuves et qui sont à développer pour l'avenir. Ces moyens sont simples et ne sont pas réservés aux seuls élus (maire et conseillers) mais ils sont à mettre en pratique par chaque habitant de la commune; cela consiste à maintenir et à créer des relations d'entraide, de solidarité, de bon voisinage entre les habitants. Comment ? c'est à chaque personne de trouver les façons d'agir avec d'autres pour participer à l'oeuvre d'intérêt collectif, dans un esprit de convivialité.)
Yes, I live in Mayberry RFD, French-style...

And here are some comments from a German friend:

"When the riots started in Paris suburbs, I did not understand what it was all about, the connection to the death of those two kids seemed too far-fetched. Some few days later a third kid - survivor of the same hideout, as far as I understood the news intro - stated that they had fled without being pursued. So that cause for anger against the police was gone. Also I did not understand why they burnt pre-schools and lots of cars."
(I will interject here to voice my annoyance at government plans to spend MY tax money rebuilding where the rioters burned down their own schools and neighborhood services.  While it may sound a bit harsh, my reaction is very much, "You burned down your own grade school?  Well, gee, that sucks for you...")
" Maybe I see a pattern now: they have been unhappy a long time, and like with Rosa Parks in the US in 55 (or the police-killed Student Benno Ohnesorg in Germany in 68) it just needed a spark to explode... Also, the spreading looks like some organizing guys just looked for angry=unthinking followers...
Concerning methods to subdue those riots, I think our European ones differ from US ones: Sarkozy sure would have liked to go in with force, I guess, but that would only have roused the silent crowd that was not yet ready to use violent words or deeds. The French society of today was built upon a (The) Revolution, and the Marseillaise still asks every Child of the Land to fight for what is Right! And as recently as WW2 the French resistance fought powerfully and relentlessly against the oppressors. So I think the calmer way they choose to go works out slowly, but securely, and the split method of on one hand looking what can be done to relieve the living circumstances of the angered depraved, and on the other hand to separate the really bad eggs from the rest, and to cast out the bad ones fast, will help to calm the rage and the fires. "

October Blues, or Emily is Still Eating Tongue

Often when I post pictures, I will retouch the Fall and Winter pics to lighten them up and enhance the colors so they'll look better, but I thought today I would post something "au naturel" to give an idea just what Brittany looks like for most of October through March. In a word- bleak, oppressive, grey, overcast, brooding, etc (That's several words, but appropriate). The lighting makes everything go grey and faded, causing the colorful village square to look something like the abandoned film set from a black & white Frankenstein movie. I shot today's pic while out on a walk yesterday at about 2pm, the "bright" part of the day. Granted, it does get sunny sometimes, but a glance at the weather link to the right should tell you what we're experiencing the week that I write this. In the ancient days, it is recorded that the Bretons suffered from greater depression than the various other regions of France, and this was the land where the highest number of nightmares and "night terrors" (unable to sleep, waking in paralytic fear, etc) were experienced. While modern Brittany is all highways and bright cities and picturesque coastlines, the character of the land remains, and it seems to throw a thick grey cloak over all the modern flash and sparkle around this time each year.

One of the challenges we've had to grapple with since moving here was the reality of SAD, or Seasonal Affective Disorder - a type of depression that is caused by lack of sunlight. In the absence of normal daylight, the brain begins to produce more melatonin than normal, and melatonin is the hormone that drives us to sleep, go torporous, brood, crave starchy foods, and so on. It feels a bit like one is at the end of a very long day... but the feeling starts in the morning and lasts all day long! Our first winter here was a real nightmare because we were both not only suffering from SAD, but also from intense homesickness and vicious money pressure from all sides to get the business re-started FAST and generating income. Fortunately, a good friend with a similar problem suggested we look into SAD and study its effects, and that led us to eventually get ourselves a light box. This is nothing more than a tremendously bright portable lamp that produces illumination nearly as intense as the sun on a clear day - when we turn the thing on in our workshop, it looks as though the afternoon sun is shining in through the windows. Daily exposure to powerful light sources like this helps the brain to properly balance its melatonin production in the dark seasons, and I can attest that the difference is amazing for me personally - I sit and work by the light each day and my energy levels stay quite high, nothing like the sort of slothful brain-deadening that the dark months induced in us before. It's excellent on two levels, as the heightened spirits help one appreciate and enjoy the heavy days rather than being dragged down by them.... Now, I can quite look forward to stalking the cliffs with a pipe clenched in my teeth and a gleeful scowl.

On another topic, just for the record, Emily ate ALL of the tongue that I mistakenly bought. She reports that it never got any less disturbing in texture...
I must admit, after seeing her fiscal determination to eat even the most frightening of foods once money had been spent on it, I am now tempted to start bringing home other bizarre dishes just for the entertainment value :)

Oh, and I also heard from a friend that my class reunion was last weekend in North Carolina. I was invited, but wasn't too inclined to spend $1000+ for airplane tickets and ten hours on a plane just to see a bunch of folks I haven't talked to in twenty years. Plus, I must admit to some skepticism - while it would be fun to see a few folks and hear their stories, I have this mental image that reunions are mainly places where people gather to see who can show off the most, a sort of convention filled with used-car salesmen in rented tuxedoes brandishing gilded business cards. In any event, my friend (she knows who she is!) emailed me some photos of old friends today, and that was a lot of fun to see. Some people transform utterly (I am probably one of these), others seem to look exactly the same with extra crow's feet.

Today's Halloween movie suggestion is "Legend of Hell House", an excellent scare flick from 1973 starring "Peter Vincent, Vampire Slayer" Roddy McDowell.
(I must digress here for a second to mention that 1985's "Fright Night", also with Roddy, was IMO one of the best horror flicks of the 80's, and still holds up in all its entertainingly wicked silliness today)
"Hell House" was adapted from a story by the legendary Richard Matheson, and along with "The Haunting" was one of the very best haunted house films ever made. Next time you're in the video store, take a visit to "the Mount Everest of haunted houses" and you won't be disappointed.

I don't eat tongue

Grocery shopping here has gotten much easier over the past three years. When we first arrived, every trip to the supermarket was a small nightmare - aisle after aisle of stuff all tagged with incomprehensible French names (When you can't read the text at all, it's amazing how much drain cleaner looks like window washer looks like dishwash detergent). The organization here still seems bizarre to me but we've gotten used to it, and just accept odd things like putting half the chips on one side of the store with the nuts, and the other half on the opposite side in their own rack. It turns out that our local SuperU does carry popcorn after all (caramel popcorn, though.. all we ever seem to find here are sweetened forms of popcorn, never the buttery salty stuff) BUT the popcorn is logically placed in the vegetables area. With another selection of nuts, which for some unknown reason are not allowed to associate with all the nuts in the other aisle on the opposite side of the store. Ah well... But I digress. For the longest time, I was nearly totally incapable of shopping. I could find the colas and the beers and the chips and the frozen food area, but anything specific was a no-go - I'll leave it to Emily to describe my facial expression when asked if I could run to SuperU to pick up some hand cream, some fresh shrimp, and some veggies. I thought I'd grown past this, and begun to learn my way around, but Saturday I found I was still unsafe to shop. A quick run to Netto for chips and "something inexpensive and canned" brought me to some handsome cans of "Langue de boeuf" in various tasty looking sauces. I know now that boeuf = beef and the can picture showed nice thick slices of meat slathered in thick sauce, so I thought, "Excellent, looks delish and maybe I've found a new cheap food".... only to come home with two test cans and be met with a wide-eyed expression of fright from my wife. It turns out "langues", which I'd assumed just meant "slices" or something, actually means "tongues". I'd brought home two cans of sliced tongue. To quote Buffy the vampire slayer, "There's just not enough Yuck in the world". I was prepared to toss the stuff, but Emily, who has never wasted the last drop of sauce in the bottle in her life, determinedly cooked them up and ate them for lunch the next day. Her report? Tasty, excellent sauce.......and a very disturbing texture........

Speaking of disturbing things, our October movie of the day is Arachnophobia, a slick little B movie from 1990 about mutant spiders invading a small town. Definitely a movie to give one the itchies. John Goodman chews scenery like mad as the town exterminator, a character who brought back many fond (?) memories of the various HVAC contractors I worked with back in the days of having a "real" job.