Bad Weather = Good Food

Jube and I were hoping to go skiing this weekend after our last disastrous attempt. Unfortunately, the weather this weekend was terrible. On Thursday night it started to rain on the coast and snow on the high grounds. It was actually snowing near my little villa when I got home! Of course it didn't stick. Jube and I had been hoping for a snow day on Friday, but we didn't get one. With our skiing plans scrapped, what were we to do?

Hmmmm . . . We decided to pretend like we were in the Alps and eat a tartiflette. Tartiflette is one of the best French inventions ever. It is made of potatoes, onions, cubed smoked meat, and cheese. To quote an online recipe, "If you're looking for a balanced, low-fat meal to help you with your healthy diet, tartiflette is not for you*." Thank goodness Jube and I were looking for the fattiest comfort food in the world to help us with the depressing weather! We headed into Vieux Nice to buy some "farmer's" cheese**, which of course makes better tartiflette. When we got to the cheese seller's stall, Jube forgot what kind of cheese makes tartiflette! Luckily he had his American gourmande with him who remembered that it was reblochon. We bought our tasty reblochon and then went to the video store, where we rented The Tai Chi Master to watch. If we really wanted a themed evening, we should have rented Les Bronzés font du ski, but we didn't think of it. Here is a photo of the finished product:



Looks pretty good, huh? (Please notice the raw material used behind the tartiflette. Yep, those are the original potatoes!)

Now I would like to write an ode to Asian food stores in France. Oh, how I love them! They smell really good when you walk inside, and they have aisles and aisles of mysterious products. Sometimes these mysterious products are labeled in English, making my job easier, although sometimes they are translated into French . . . which is hard for me when the French word for "okra" is some strange Asian transliteration. But usually I get by fine, finding everything I need for my strange Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Réunionais, or Mexican (!) meals (or attempts). We usually also find something that we just can't resist, like Green Tea flavored Fig Newtons or frozen spicy meat-on-a-stick hors d'oeuvres. This time we bought sesame oil, bean sprouts, tiger cat shrimp, rice vinegar, and Chinese cabbage. Tonight we celebrated theChinese New Year with sesame shrimp, fried rice, and "fortune cookies." (Actually, these seemed a lot like gingersnaps, but since I made them according to the recipe I will continue to call them fortune cookies.) And that's about it for this weekend.

Tomorrow I go back to work. Only two more weeks and two days until vacation . . . wish me luck!

*My translation.
**When I was little, I thought that "parmesan cheese" was really "farmers and cheese." I just thought of it when I wrote that translation of fromage fermier.