Gone viral: part III

Welcome to part III of my lockdown diaries. If you have a little oh, I don’t know, FREE TIME on your hands, part II is available here and part I is available here.

April 6

Amazon delivers a box. This is the highlight of my day—a box! With stuff in it! Stuff for me! Actually, it’s stuff to occupy my kids, but no matter; I bought it, so it’s sort of for me. Deliveries these days are bizarre. When UPS came with our new printer last week, the delivery dude basically threw the box at me and ran off before I could contaminate him or whatever he was so worried about. *cough* 

April 7

In an abundance of completely misguided wisdom, the government decides that there are entirely too many people strolling about during the one hour of exercise we are allowed outside of our homes per day. So they limit exercise to before 10 a.m. or after 7 p.m., which as any common idiot can imagine is ABSOLUTELY going to worsen the problem.

April 8

I go running at 7:01 p.m., along with what feels like half the town. WTF was the government thinking? I do my best to steer clear of everyone, even leaving the trail and running in the middle of the road (“Thanks for the asphalt,” say my knees and ankles). An older woman leaning on a walker glares at me, as though I were the Grim Reaper in the flesh, despite my respecting about 2x the recommended social distance AND holding my breath. Sigh.

April 10

Oh look! Our local authorities have noticed that the whole 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. restriction thing was an epic failure. But have they recanted? Not a chance! Instead they have doubled down, and now my entire neighborhood is encircled in barricade tape to keep folks off the most popular running paths, i.e. the ones that aren’t full of roots, leaves, and rocks. Speaking of barricades, I kind of feel like climbing one. Where’d I put my French flag?

April 12

Christos Anesti! I slip outside early in the morning and hide the 48 plastic eggs that I ordered online last month and spent 30 minutes filling with chocolates before going to bed a few hours ago. I sit in the garden and enjoy the silence. Having an apartment with a garden is an absolute lifesaver and I am incredibly grateful to be able to do this. The kids soon wake up and have a fantastic time racing about collecting the eggs. This feels like a solid win.

Easter Covid-style turns out quite nicely, actually. I tell the children that I am going to church, which these days means disappearing into my bedroom with my laptop and the online worship service of the American Church in Paris, virtual communion included. It’s alternative, but kind of fun! I like the fact that I can hit “pause” to go to the ladies’ room instead of slinking out of the sanctuary through the back door like I would if I were at a physical church.

Later, we go out for our daily stroll, which lo and behold takes us to the very neighborhood where I have an invitation to a “through the fence” wine tasting. We meet a very nice wine merchant, who lets us into his front yard where he introduces us to his wife and two children, who seem elated to meet our two children and the four of them R-U-N-N-O-F-T together immediately, which makes me realize how lonely my kids probably are, and I’m about to start feeling guilty but I can’t because there is a glass of chilled rosé being handed to me and before I know it the four of us are laughing and telling stories and GOOD LORD IT IS SO NICE TO JUST TALK TO ACTUAL PEOPLE! Like not on FaceTime or Zoom or whatever. Actual people. We buy six bottles and I stop just shy of asking them if we can be friends IRL. Come to think of it, I still might.

We head home, where I make a fairly elaborate Easter dinner, complete with hard boiled eggs sculpted into little chickens and again, I feel pretty proud of myself. My son says, “Mom, this is the best Easter I’ve ever had.” Remembering this simple affirmation is the primary reason for my writing this entire post. Our Easter is full of hope indeed. 

April 13

Macron addresses the nation wearing his furrowed, “empathetic” look. No wonder he’s trying to look empathetic—he announces FOUR MORE WEEKS of lockdown. I’m about to go look for anything I can make into a noose when he adds that after these next four weeks, schools will reopen. WADHESAY? So help me, there IS a light at the end of this long-ass tunnel. And that light is called “public school.” 

This really won’t last forever. Imagine that.

Visions of sugarplums

I’m not really a dessert person. Oh, I love tarte Tatin (it’s like an upside-down apple pie and I’m from the apple pie capital of America, so no surprise there). And macarons. And I can be coaxed into the occasional moelleux au chocolat. But I cannot *make* any of these things. I can make pumpkin pie. And banana bread. That’s about it. Everything else turns out either too thin, too flat, too dry, too crumbly, too dark, or some unfortunate combination thereof.

Lacking any kind of talent in this area never particularly bothered me until I became a mom. Living in France and all, where children’s 4 p.m. snack-time is straight up sacrosanct, I kind of feel obligated to provide mine with a warm home that smells of sugar and spice—which is why I buy scented candles.

But this is Christmas. Christmas is different. Christmas means turning on the oven and baking sweet things. More specifically, my American psyche says that Christmas means baking COOKIES. I suck at baking cookies. However, this year I felt like family cookie time would be a nice festive bonding opportunity that we could all share, while listening to carols and smiling. I have these moments of suspended sanity sometimes, where I forget all past experience or indeed common sense and just dive, head-long, into guaranteed failure. This would be one such moment.

It doesn’t help matters that my Christmas cookie culture is more inferential than empirical; my mom being an enthusiastic devotee of the full organic SoCal lifestyle, my brother and I did not grow up eating chocolate chip cookies; we grew up gnawing on whole wheat-sesame-raisin-honey-nut thingies with an involuntarily blackened underside (I’ve inherited this trait, so no criticism here). Actual Christmas cookies—the kind made out of white flour and white sugar—were something the neighbors gave us once a year, probably out of pity.

I obviously don’t own any cookie recipes—because why would I?—but that is why we have the internet. So I hunted down some Better Homes-worthy candidates, printed them out, made a shopping list, and figured I was off to a good start. What I neglected to factor into the equation was that THIS IS FRANCE. One would think that after 20+ years of living here, I’d stop assuming anything, especially when it comes to Christmas (there are no candy canes! NO. CANDY. CANES.), but alas.

Now, in my defense, we do our shopping at what the French call an hypermarché, which supposedly translates as a “big box store,” although I’ve never used this particular term in my entire life, and I get the feeling that if I went and tried to sneak it into an English conversation, people would imagine I was talking about a cardboard specialty shop. In any case, “big box store” is a moronic translation for the hypermarché, which is where you go when you want to buy large quantities of multiple types of stuff, all in one place. Oodles of groceries, tons of toys, mountains of clothing, piles of housewares, etc. etc. etc. It’s like Walmart but way better (duh, it’s French). Ours is a Carrefour Planet, which I call “the Vortex,” because time seems to mysteriously speed up as soon as we’re inside; instead of taking 1-2 hours, the average visit takes us 5. So I figured, foolishly, that the Vortex would cover all of my cookie-baking needs.

Ah, but this is France, mes chéris. And France does things its own way.

Let’s start with molasses. Seems simple enough. The word exists in French—mélasse—and is a known ingredient (at least in the French West Indies); therefore, it should be a supermarket item like any other, according to me. Except that no, it isn’t. I scoured the (very large) baking aisle, the jams and jellies aisle, the organic aisle, and even the imports aisle (lost time: 30 minutes). Nothing. As my dad pointed out, France’s colonial past would indeed lead one to believe molasses to be a readily available commodity. Plus, France has quite a few overseas territories that grow what? SUGAR CANE. Rum, for instance, is not lacking here; the Vortex has all the rum anyone could need. No molasses, though. The same can be said of whole turkeys, but don’t get me started on that.

Fine. I scratched molasses off my list and figured I’d find a workaround. All the basics were there aplenty: butter, sugar, eggs, flour. No ready-made frosting, but who cares? I’d rather make my own (you heard me). However, things got tricky again when I reached the “decorations” part of my list: red and green sugar, holiday M&Ms, and Hershey’s Kisses. Oh yeah, and cookie cutters.

Red and green sugar: did the Vortex have it? No. In fact, the entire baking aisle looked much like it does the rest of the year, i.e., nothing particularly Christmassy about it. Thus, the only decorations available were the usual confetti sprinkles, chopped nuts, chocolate chips, vanilla extract, almond powder, etc. I looked, believe me. Up the aisle and down again. Crouched. Stood on my toes. NOTHING. Oh, there was colored sugar all right: gold sugar, pink sugar, pearled sugar. I even found candied fruit, but only YELLOW candied fruit. They must be doing this on purpose.

On to M&Ms. Do you think that the French stock holiday M&M’s (considering they do stock brownie M&Ms, mini M&Ms, and caramel M&Ms)? No, I’m sure you would never think anything so patently absurd. Anyway, they don’t. So I bought a normal bag and figured I’d PICK OUT the red and green ones. Hershey’s Kisses I pretty much expected not to find; they may stock miniature candy bars like Snickers, Mars, Milky Way, etc., but the so-called City of Love does not carry Hershey’s Kisses.

By this point my bitch-o-meter was at about a 6 out of 10, so it was time to move along. Cookie cutters—dammit. I had to backtrack to the “house and kitchen” section of the Vortex. And what did I find there? NO GINGERBREAD MEN is what. Not one. I found tree shapes (yay!) and lots of festive cake molds, but no good old-fashioned gingerbread man cookie cutters. WHY THE HELL NOT? French Christmas decorations often feature gingerbread men! So where do they keep the corresponding cookie cutters? My bitch-o-meter inched up to a 7. I needed a drink. Spiked eggnog would have been nice, except eggnog is ANOTHER CHRISTMAS THING YOU CAN’T GET IN FRANCE.

In the end, I had to go to an arts and crafts store on the other side of town the next day for my gingerbread man. Obviously, the cutters weren’t sold separately; I had to buy a pack of three in various sizes. Oh well. I ALSO found green and red colored sugar! Granted, the red was definitely fuchsia, but it was labelled rouge, so I took it. Total cost for sugar and cookie cutters: 19 euros. Yeah.

When cookie baking day rolled around, I pulled out my recipes, organized my ingredients, summoned my children, and got to work.

It took six hours. SIX HOURS.

First of all, we only have one cookie tray (technically two if you count the pizza tray, but it’s “not optimal” and I mean that in the Benghazi sense). Second, our oven can only handle two racks. Also, whatever one is supposed to use as a surface for rolling out and cutting up cookie dough, we clearly don’t have that. Doing it directly on the countertop seemed weird, so I used a cutting board. The cutting board is not big. Anyway, our limited production capacity meant that our productivity level was destined to be mediocre from the get-go. That did not stop us. We rolled out portions of dough, the kids obviously fought over who got to do the cutting, I managed to get the cookies off the cutting board and onto the various trays without completely destroying their shapes, and into the oven they went.

Decorating the cookies was another romp through the fields of wholesome-family-moments-gone-terribly-awry. Have you ever made icing? I hadn’t. The recipe called for powdered sugar and water. Do you know what happens when you mix powdered sugar and water using an electrical hand mixer? Clouds of powdered sugar rising into your face is what happens. My kids thought this was hilarious. Spooning said icing onto the cookies was rather messier than I’d imagined as well, but we got through it. The kids THOROUGHLY enjoyed decorating the iced cookies, and for a few moments there I really did catch a glimpse of the “holiday moment” I’d been aiming for all along.

Alas, it was short-lived. The decorating committee soon began to squabble over supplies, which rapidly degenerated into mutual accusations of ineptitude, followed by insults and verbal attacks, physical aggression, and ultimately eviction of the committee from the premises. The committee was reconvened after a 10-minute break and told in no uncertain terms that such behavior was not reflective of the Christmas spirit and would not be tolerated.

Did that help? Not really, but we (I) gritted our (my) teeth and got through it. In the end, the house smelled Christmassy and the cookies were actually pretty tasty. The kitchen, however, took about an hour to put back into order, and seeing as how I’d had quite enough “help” from my children for one day, I thought it wiser to limit the clean-up committee to those above the age of 10. This obviously gave me ample time to mutter under my breath about holding Hallmark and its holiday propaganda (in particular that ca. 1990s Oh Holy Night commercial) FULLY RESPONSIBLE for guilt-tripping me into believing that family Christmas baking is a thing, when in truth I’m pretty sure that all those beautiful sugary cookies our neighbors used to give us when I was a kid were MADE BY ADULTS, WHILE LISTENING TO NAT KING COLE AND SIPPING BRANDY.

Oh well, there’s always next year. 

Almond joy

I’ve never been a huge fan of lunch. Breakfast, yes; dinner, definitely; but lunch ... meh. Uninspiring. I’d even dare say depressing. Just something we do in the middle of the day because our bodies demand nourishment. I realize this anti-lunch attitude is very un-French of me, but considering that I will never actually be French, I’m OK with that. So is my distaste for the midday meal an American thing? The running perception on this side of the world is, after all, that we Americans don’t eat lunch, or at least don’t eat anything worthy of being called “lunch.” We’re supposedly more of a sandwich-at-the-keyboard kind of culture. I’d try to argue otherwise, but since I obviously cannot cite myself as a counterexample, what’s the point?

Actually, that looks pretty good!

My parents aren’t big lunch people, either, which is probably where my lack of enthusiasm began. Lunch at their house is, for want of a better word, “nonexistent.” If one happens to be hungry in the middle of the day, one opens the refrigerator and forages. Possible finds include salad greens in various stages of decay, giant Costco cheese blocks, ancient tortillas that no one will ever eat, and an astounding—no, a stupefying—array of condiments. In the freezer are raw cranberries and a year’s supply of nuts. But again, since no one in my family eats lunch, the lack of actual food in the kitchen is worrisome only to my husband, who, being French and all, has no desire to subsist entirely on inferior cheese and frozen almonds until dinnertime (which is also pretty sparse). I say, where’s his sense of intercultural appreciation? At least there’s no need to worry about any holiday weight gain!

We are what we eat.

I will acknowledge that living in France has helped me to take lunch more seriously, even if I still don’t necessarily enjoy it. When I was a regular employee, I appreciated the midday breather that la pause déjeuner represented, as well as the proximity and variety of solutions to those pesky hunger pangs. But now that I’m my own boss, I’ve kind of returned to my ambivalent roots. Lunchtime rolls around, I’m hungry, and I have neither inspiration nor patience. Happily, there is an obvious choice: I really like cheese, which, France being the alpha and the omega of dairy products, we have aplenty. I also really like this pre-sliced packaged bread called Harry’s “American Sandwich” (which is actually quite popular among the French, who are more open-minded about bread than one might imagine).

Maybe it’s the American spin that my subconscious finds comforting, or maybe I’m just lazy, but I can’t get enough of the stuff! It probably accounts for about a third of my daily caloric intake. I do opt for the “whole wheat” variety, so I figure it’s not so bad. I mean, yeah, I’m eating straight up industrial bread in France, but hey—it’s from a French supermarket.

Plus you can’t do that with a baguette.

To make a long story short, I eat a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches: way more than I ever ate while living in the US, actually. I use coconut oil instead of butter (virtuous), real cheddar cheese (semi-virtuous), and Harry’s bread (it’s whole wheat!). I know I should eat some veggies with that, but when it’s already 3:00 pm and Babykins could go into meltdown mode at any minute, I don’t have the presence of mind to go concocting some amazing salad of organic produce, which I would have carefully selected that morning from a quaint farmers’ market while humming “Little Town” from Beauty and the Beast. So instead I eat a tomato. Whole. Like an apple (less cutlery to wash). Ironically, I often do this while watching reruns of Masterchef or Top Chef or some other cooking-related show, whose participants would probably be horrified by my dietary deconstructionism. But I figure watching real food being prepared counterbalances what’s actually on my plate and besides, it beats frozen almonds.

Slices of quince

One of the expressions I get great use out of in French is avoir un bon plan, which signifies having a good idea, project or scheme. There is also its opposite, avoir un mauvais plan, which in turn signifies having a loser idea, project or scheme. I have a lot of mauvais plans. Here is my latest:

Why hello, strange yellow fruit!

That, my friends, is a coing, or in English, a quince. I was indulging in my favorite pastime the other day—cruising the produce aisle to be specific—when as luck would have it, I noticed some exotic-looking (and therefore fun) fruit giving me the eye. Ignoring all past crash-and-burns in the exotic-looking fruit department (e.g. desiccated pomelos, bitter starfruit, buckshot-filled cactus pears, and hideously sweet cherimoya), I bought not one, but TWO of these things. I arrived home, artfully arranged them in my fruit bowl alongside more classic seasonal favorites, and left them to ripen. Four days later I figured they looked edible, so I took one and bit into it.

I’m lucky to have managed to disengage my teeth without leaving any of them implanted in the fruit’s ROCK HARD, bitter flesh. Whaaa??? OK, not ripe yet. I’ll give them another week, I figured. But a week later, no change. Bizarre. So I decided to leave them an even longer while longer.

Today it has officially been two months since I bought these fruit. Two months. And the damn things haven’t changed at all in appearance or texture. This is totally unnatural (two-month-old kiwis, for instance, would have long become pure liquefied nastiness). While I have been waiting on my quinces, whole families—nay, generations!—of tangerines, apples, grapes and bananas have come and gone from the fruit bowl, but does that incite my quinces to hurry the hell up and ripen already? Certainly not! Maybe they’ve been genetically modified. Or maybe some prankster threw a few wax models into the fruit bin.

Looks real to me.

Then again, maybe they are ripe. Maybe that’s just the nature of quinces. Maybe that’s why NO ONE EATS THEM. I mean really, who eats quince? Yeah, they make great jam; that is precisely why I bought them. Tasty jam = tasty fruit, n’est-ce pas? Plus—and this goes back to my wine marketing past—the quince is often cited in the tasting notes of several white wines that I seriously enjoy. You know, inspiring stuff like this: “clean and crisp, with soft, fruity aromas of white peach and quince.” Then again, no one knows better than I how made up imaginative tasting notes can be for having written legions of them myself. Sigh. I was hoping for so much more from the quince.

Why? Because I grew up with “The Owl and the Pussycat”:

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
     Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
 And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
     They danced by the light of the moon,
           The moon,
           The moon,
 They danced by the light of the moon.

Is it not perfectly scandalous that the real quince should not live up to the delectable image instilled in my subconscious by such beloved childhood readings? And I’d specifically gone out and purchased a runcible spoon and everything! This is some false advertising, that’s what. Who knows a good lawyer?

Never lost, never will.

In the meantime, I have a friend and colleague who swears that the quince is just scrumptious sliced up and sautéed with apples. That may be. But again, who (else) has ever heard of sautéed quince? Plus, let us not forget that my quinces are two months old! So do I have to go out and track down some gnarled old apples to accompany them? Because “ancient fruit sauté” sounds pretty off-putting. Maybe I could just distill it all into some sort of vile liqueur.

See? This is precisely what characterizes le mauvais plan. Can you not feel the loserness of its aura? From now on, my exotic fruit purchases shall be limited to pineapples. Maybe some coconut. And a few litchis. But that’s it. I’ll leave the quince to the owls and the pussycats. They obviously have some kind of weirdo fruit consumption insight that I lack.