My Life, My Food, My Places

Sunday was our lazy day. No rush to prepare for school or work and no stressful rush to the metro station (underground) to go to the office. After a slow breakfast, hot chocolate with ‘pain au chocolat’ (chocolate pastry) bread for the kids, coffee and bread or a few croissants for us we prepared to go out for our Sunday mission: The Market. All over Paris there are nearly daily markets as, by law, every district  has to organize two markets a week. There are not only street markets but Paris has also numerous covered markets such as The Enfants Rouges Market. Created in 1615 its Paris oldest food market.  But still today Parisians and foodie-tourists like the Enfants Rouges to buy the fresh produce at the stalls full of color and fragrance. Even in wintertime it is like hanging around on a Provence market is July. Sundays is our market day to get our provision for the week in vegetables, seafood, poultry, charcuteries and cheese of course. And in Les ...

Bread is a serious issue for the Parisians! We learned very fast after moving in our apartment in St Cloud, that bread wasn’t just bread. The first days we bought bread everywhere we passed a bakeshop on our way home from the Metro station. I think it was the third day after we moved in that I met my neighbor, in casu the very friendly elderly woman whom lived on the ground floor, greeted me ‘bonjour’ when I came in with my bread. And after some small talk about where we were from -ah! Des Belges- she asked me ‘the’ question: where do you buy your bread? And that moment I learned that bread is a serious matter for a Parisian! She explained me that you have to pick your Boulangerie (bakeshop) and stick to it. The neighborhood Boulangerie is more than just a place to get your bread, it’s a local institution with their own protocols and like the local Brasserie (café/coffee shop/restaurant) the place to go as ever...

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 f...

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...

I grew up with coffee. The first thing in the morning my grandmother did was to put the kettle on the stove to boil water to prepare coffee. This were the days before the electric coffeemaker and the coffee was brewed with a paper filter. Once brewed it was transferred to a big thermos who had his place in the middle of the table. All day long. My memories on that coffee are not that good. In fact you could hardly call it coffee, more hot colored water with a slightly taste that reminds you on coffee. But nobody could convince my grandmother to use or more coffee in her filter or to use less water. Somewhere when I was 10 or 12 years old my father bought a, for those days, very modern thing: an electric percolator and at least we had ‘real’ coffee. But the thermos stayed on the table as my grandmother still brewed ‘her’ coffee with her filter! Coffee in Paris is surely not brewed the way my grandmother did. ‘Le café’, the drink, is an institution, a cultural phenom...