Sunday in the Park with Victor!

This past Sunday, we took a drive to Vichy with our friend Victor from Brussels. Victor is an actor of TV and theater who also directs theatrical productions. (I will need to insert his website here!) He was visiting us for the weekend and we really enjoyed seeing him.





We had a nice lunch outside at the "Brasserie du Casino" on this beautiful Sunday afternoon. Starting with a glass of champagne, enjoying lovely starters and main course with wine, and finishing with special deserts of the house, it was a perfect afternoon outside.











Vichy is known for its water, mints, and dark history during the German occupation. It has a lovely Opera House pictured below:

We did some window shopping and actually went into a couple of stores. Vichy is one of the cities in France that allows their stores to be open on Sundays. So it was really nice to spend our Sunday afternoon there.

For dinner on Sunday night, we treated Victor to the infamous Chicken Wings. While I tried to tone down the spices a little, I must apologize for the final results, which maintained quite a kick despite my half measures for Tabasco sauce, paprika and Cayenne pepper!

Fête de la musique

Today, the 21st of June, is celebrated throughout France as the "Fête de la musique". The longest day of the year has been set aside as a cultural event where the creation and enjoyment of music is in order. Organized and ad hoc groups of people gather to make music in a variety of qualities. Other people will walk though city streets and listen and watch these random acts of creation.

For my last five years in France, I have only attended one of these events. This was in 2002, when I had just moved here from Scotland. Fred and I joined Marianne and André to walk through the streets of Clermont-Ferrand and watch the music makers around town. Everything from street soloist on traditional instruments, to small groups of electronic instruments, to techno being played at the highest decibels. It was a very festive mood, but somehow the "noise" of the event was most impressive.

Since that year, we have avoided the noise and clammer of the event by staying with friends who live out of town (thanks Francois and Nathalie!) or going to some remote country village where the depths of techno have not reached. Tonight we will visit Francois, Nathalie, Alice and Arthur to avoid the techno center of Clermont, which is just outside our bedroom window.

I am glad to have the chance to try out another one of the recipes that we learned at our cooking class this past weekend. Tonight I will bring a tarte provençale for the starter for our dinner. It is full of plenty of fresh ingredients and tasty herbs and flavors.

Happy Fête de la Musique!

mmmm........Gourmet Canned Foods!

I don't really remember anything like this from the Safeway store on Via Linda in Scottsdale, but it is quite common to find a variety of canned meals here in France in almost every grocery store. One of my favorites of course is "confit de canard", but I will tell you more about that later in this blog.

I want to start with my first experience having a meal from a can in France. It was my first Christmas spent with Fred in 1999. I came over from Glasgow to stay with him for the holidays. He told me would have a special turkey meal for Christmas day with his parents. I was expecting a whole turkey, but I couldn't find one in the refrigerator. I hope he didn't see the look of surprise when he told me the turkey, stuffing, and sausages where in a can! At this point, I was probably on my cultural awareness best; the walking on eggs that one does at the beginning of a relationship. So, I don't think my surprise was registered as anything out of the ordinary surprise to have a nice special meal for Christmas. I watched as Fred opened the cans and carefully placed the contents in a baking dish. I was later to recognize these cans as coming from a specialty store in town called Comtesse du Barry. Meal was exquisite. Very refined flavors of the turkey, stuffing and sausages were complimented with a nice fresh salad. I was amazed to think that something this good was coming from a can.

Since my first canned food meal in France, I have had many many others. Not just the dishes from the Comtesse, but also canned cassolets and confit de canard from the grocery store as well. Confit de canard is one of those really simple, yet special dishes that you can find throughout the country. I believe the origin is from the southwestern regions. The duck thighs and legs are canned in a bath of duck grease, which helps to preserve and cook them. Normally we will heat the portions in the oven and serve with a salad or potatoes. The meat is so tender it just falls apart with a fork.

Cuisine Provençale

We spent the weekend in the south of France in a small town called Bagard at a guest house named "La Magnanerie" where we partook in a cooking course in the provençale style. Our instructors where Stéphane and Marc, the owners of the place. The class was intimate, with us and another couple, Christelle and Julien getting lots of hands-on experience. We prepared three meals and served one of the meals to some of the other guests of "La Mangnanerie".

We made black and green olive tapanades, caviar of eggplant, rabbit in a thyme and hazelnut stew, a provençale tart, a tart of appricots and lavander, turkey pesto, zucchini cheese rolls, monkfish with ratatouille, churros with anise syrup, etc.

We also visited a bamboo botanical garden on Saturday afternoon called "La Bambouseraie de Prafrance", when we had some free time. This place really gave us some good ideas for adding more bamboo to our terrace!

It was really a great weekend and I want thank my friends in Clermont-Ferrand who gave me this gift for 50th birthday!

Vive les Herbes de Provence !

Orville who?

One of my biggest surprises in France has been difficulty to find products that one just takes for granted in the United States. Oreos, Philadelphia Creme Cheese, sour cream, baking soda, real chocolate chips, fresh refridgerated milk, chile peppers, fresh bagels, and fresh celery and carrot sticks to name a few, but one of the biggest surprises was Microwave Popcorn!

During one of my last trips to the states, I checked out a grocery store and a CVS store to help me recall what I had been missing. Just walking down the aisle with the Microwave Popcorn, one was bombarded with the buttery flavor scent and multitude of brands and options which were astounding. Different flavors, different sizes, different brands and different quantities, to name just a few of the alternatives.

Quite different from my experience here at the local grocery store. The store we go to here is quite large and modern. Codebar scanners for checking yourself out if you have less than 10 items, store coupons, fidelity card - you know what I mean.

Well the first challenge is to find where they might put the microwave popcorn. For some period of time, it was with the "world foods" section with other American food (like pancake mix and all the El Paso products), sandwiched between China and Italy on the global food map. The microwave popcorn was sold in single bag packets with a choice of salt or sugar for flavoring. At some point, the store changed vendors and also decided to place the popcorn with packaged nuts and dried fruits. Alas, still only the two flavors. And I swear, there must be some sort of rationing going on (maybe in response the George W Freedom Fries episode - how is that for a conspiracy theory?), because I could go for weeks and find nothing but empty space where the microwave popcorn packs should be. I sometimes blame this on a bad supply chain software implementation, but maybe it really is something beyond this. The popcorn packs are very generic in look, with instructions in about a dozen different languages. As a frequent user, I know that 2 minutes and 20 seconds is just about the perfect time in the microwave.

The only flavor I will get is the salted version. Somehow sweet popcorn reeks of crackerjacks and disappointed childhood memories of a prize that was always too silly to do anything with but throw away with the empty package. I guess I still kept thinking if I ate enough of it, someday I would find a really nice prize. Unfortunately, that is another one of those lotteries that I never won.

Am having a craving, for some nice salty microwave popcorn, but my stock is running low, so I will have to curb myself today.

Got POLITICAL?

I decided that the "exile in France" description in my profile might be a bit harsh, so I changed it to what you find now. The real driver for my original comment was from reading the Immigration Equality website and the recent discussions about the Uniting American Families Act (UAFA). So I decided to get a little political and wrote a letter to Hillary Clinton, who has expressed some issues about fraud and the administration of the policy. Below is the note I sent her campaign website:

I am glad to hear that your campaign office has agreed to meet with Immigration Equality about the Uniting American Families Act. As a gay American, this is only one of hundreds of areas of rights that I do not share with my fellow heterosexual Americans. But this is an area that impacts me personally, so I have decided to write to you with the hopes that you will be able to support UAFA completely and make it become a reality. I am one half of a bi-national couple, my partner being a French citizen. As we have shared a committed relationship for over 7 years, we have explored all of the possibilities for us to live together. France offers a legal solution for a gay couple, which allows us to live together and share a wonderful life. The United States does not. With UAFA, we would have the potential to consider the alternative of legally living in the United States together, where I could be closer to my American family and friends, be speaking my native language, and resume my career in the country where I was born and worked most of my adult life. Thank you for reading this and please feel free to contact me if you would like to understand these concerns more deeply.

If you have feelings of thoughts about this that you would like to express, please share them.

1500 Kilometers Goal Reached!

As we age, our fitness becomes more of a challenge and objective we need to address more seriously than before. We know the basic elements of diet and working out, but we need to bring this knowledge to action and that is not always so easy.

Never one to have had a true love for team sports and most physical activities, I was lucky to be able to participate in a variety of activities most of my life on an adhoc basis. Weekend skiing, an occasional hike, a bike ride from time to time; these sort of activities seemed enough for my first three decades. But during my mid to late thirties, I realized I needed to have some more regular fitness activities. While living in Arizona, I taught myself the joys of inline skating. Several nights a week after work, I would skate a couple of miles. On weekends, I would try to do at least one 10 to 15 mile skate. I also joined a gym and would regularly go to use the cardio equipment and weight machines. I even would do some free weight workouts with my neighbor in Scottsdale. In 1998, I moved to Glasgow, Scotland and soon realized that I would need to give up my inline skating for weather related reasons. I did join a council gym and later a more upscale health club to continue with my cardio and weight lifting efforts. When I moved to France in 2002, I sort of let everything slide, never really finding the same "body" conscious culture I had known in Arizona or the UK. At the end of 2005, Fred and I decided to invest in some cardio equipment. We bought a Kettler Elliptical Bike cardio machine. We would use the machine regularly and track our results in an excel spreadsheet. Using the iPod, the Polar Heart Rate Monitor and Cardio machine, we have logged over 260 sessions. Fred has had to cut back some, due to some back problems, but I have continued to pursue the rewards of cardio exercise. I listen to my cardio coach, Sean O'Malley and highly recommend using the Cardio Coach method if you have a home cardio machine and need some extra motivation.

Well, I am happy to say that after my workout today, the machine has reached it's 1500KM mark. Thanks to everyone who have helped us reach this goal!

Why this bloody name?

I want you to create a couple of mental images as I explain this blog name. First, imagine a "national lampoon" cartoon showing a wheel barrow outside a French restaurant next to a placard which says "fresh frog legs today!" Upon closer look at the contents of the wheel barrow you will see it contains amputee frogs with somewhat sad expressions on their faces. Now, imagine a similar style cartoon showing an American style restaurant which a sign outside it announcing "best chicken wings in town!" Scrambling around the sign are a group of wing-less chickens chatting to each other. We can overhear one of them saying, "we never did fly much anyway."

While both of these appetizers may be relatively popular in their respective countries, they may seem quite unusual in the other country. It is this sort of cultural experience I hope to share with you in this blog. The things we see and confront when we find ourselves in a foreign experience teach us as much about ourselves as the world around us. Our perspectives and prejudices filter our world view.

Food will most likely be a reoccurring element in this blog. I hope you will enjoy it and come back frequently for updates.