My Life, My Food, My Places

At last summer is back! Bright blue skies, a sea breeze, and nature abundantly green and fresh after all those weeks of grey sky, drizzle and night and days of heavy downpours. Climate change is real and not a hoax as some world leaders are saying. Summer is back, there is no school anymore and Holy Week is just around the corner. And all this is changing life on the island. Holy week is the start of the vacationing season for the Filipinos. In the week before Easter, Holy Week, everything is different. Banks are closed from Thursday till the Monday after Easter.  You better prepare your cash because the ATM will be empty and nobody of the bank staff available to refill. Malls and grocery stores are closed on Thursday and Friday also. Even the market has less activity on those two days. Better get your provisions ahead. You can imagine the face of many, first time foreign tourists….no cash in the ATM, stores closed and your credit cards are of no use. The f

I love all the dishes the French prepare, ok nearly all. In this post I want to share with you my five absolute favorite dishes.  Dishes I ate so many times in restaurants in Paris and during my vacations in the South of France but I also prepared at home and enjoyed with friends and family. 1. Plateau de Fruits de Mer (Seafood Platter) A  plateau de fruits de mer  is a  seafood  dish of raw and cooked  shellfish  served cold on a platter, usually on a bed of ice. On the plateau you have periwinkles,oysters, mussels, clams, prawns, sometimes a crab and langoustines. If you are in a festive mood you can always order a plateau de fruits de mer with lobster too. The dish is always served with lemon wedges and two or three cold dipping sauces such as a garlic mayonnaise, cocktail sauce and when there are oysters on the dish, sauce mignonette. In France this is a sauce traditionally served with raw oysters and made of wine vinigar, shallots and pepper. With a glass of chilled

Paris and sandwiches.  A real love story for so many years and still going strong as every year the consumption of sandwiches is growing.  You can buy sandwiches of all kinds, with cheese, salami (Rosette the Lyon is really good), pate but the ABSOLUTE STAR of the sandwiches in France is the world famous ' JAMBON BEURRE', a sandwich of  fresh and crispy baguette with good butter from Normandy and high quality lean cooked ham.  My all time favorite. And obviously I am not alone! I did some research and I learned that in 2016 the French (and the expats and tourists too) consumed 2,350,000,000 sandwiches...yes far more than 2 billion! And 1,200,000,000 of them where 'Jambon Beurre'! If that is not the absolute star! Because the French are so attracted by their favorite lunch that even MacDonalds in his French restaurants is selling the Jambon Beurre, Says a lot about the popularity isn't it? But the French are also eating a lot of Big Macs an

Beer in France? Yes. And everybody thinking that all French were sipping wine all day long! But beer is very popular in Paris and the whole of France. Every bar/café will sell you ‘une pression’ a draft beer, at the right temperature in a clean glass. Mostly you can even choose between several brands, most of them French (of course) but in later years also Belgian beers such as ‘Stella’ and’ Leffe’, two brands of InBev, one of the largest brewers in the world. France has always been a ‘beer country’. A country with two totally different climates and crops; grapes in the south but no wheat, so only a wine production. In the north wheat and more wheat but no grapes so no wine but beer! Following the website of the Brewers Association of France, in 1910 there were 2827 breweries in the country, 1929 concentrated in the north of the country. Note that in 1910 the Alsace region was still annexed by Germany till after WW1. In these numbers of breweries those of the Alsace

When we lived in Paris all of us had, during the weekdays, lunch outside. My wife had her lunch with her colleagues at the school she worked as assistant teacher, the kids in school and me in the simple café/restaurant Le Barbusse across the street of the bank. Le Barbusse, by the way the same place I had my breakfast or at least an espresso in the morning, offered every day choice of ‘Plat du Jour’, mostly one fish dish and one meat, poultry or in wintertime a stew. The Plat du Jour are simple, rustic, grandmother–style dishes prepared with seasonal products and offered at a very competitive price. And they are not only prepared ‘grand-mother style”, they are grand-mother serving sizes and quality also! The variety of the dishes, the fact you can choose makes the Plat du Jour very popular and appreciated by the regulars.  In fact, most neighborhood restaurants like La Barbusse make their business with the regular customers of the offices in the street passing by for b

Our mothers always told us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and that we have to be sure we include all food groups or the ‘pyramid’: bread or cereals, fruits, dairy,… But breakfast traditions are different. In Belgium we were used to eat ‘heavy’ breakfasts with bread, butter, eggs, cheese, and ham. The British eat baked beans, eggs, bacon, mushrooms, black pudding, toast and marmalade and in Scandinavia fish is on the breakfast table. But not in Paris! Breakfast in Paris is, like lunch, mostly an ‘outdoor’ activity. Only few families have breakfast together during weekdays as most schools offer breakfast for the kids before classes and the parents have ‘something’ on the way to the office. During my stint in Paris, I usually took my breakfast in the bar/restaurant Le Barbusse in front of our office building. In every neighborhood with offices or workshops there are plenty of those small neighborh