Squirrels and Lobsters

Squirrels and (Red) Lobster : two things I don’t get in France.

The only squirrel I have seen in France to date was a little red fellow I spotted on the Paul Valéry campus in Montpellier. I seem to track these creatures at universities : when visiting colleges up North with Mom late in high school, I spied the rare black squirrels on the Haverford campus and have yet to see that variety anywhere else ; at Harvard I was more mesmerized by a squirrel who squatted peeling a small citrus fruit than by the university surroundings. (I guess even the squirrels at Harvard are geniuses.) At Bryn Mawr, the squirrels were decidedly on the plump side. I’m sure they thrive on the pizza crusts and apple cores of college women.

I passed up the chance to live side-by-side with such exotic varieties of squirrels however, and settled for the (more economical, closer-to-home) squirrels at UNC who’re pretty much identical to this good old gray guy you see splayed on his belly on our roof here at home. I took this picture the other day when I noticed a squirrel behaving oddly on the roof outside – he’s flattened himself out and is peering down, probably to the birdfeeder below.

Today was Dad’s birthday, and he and Mom and I went out to Red Lobster for dinner. This is a photo of Mom’s shrimp platter.
We must have had about 4 different people waiting on us and asking if everything was all right – a great change from France. I can't tell which system I prefer - that in which you're ignored by a surly waiter or the one where your server comes by every five minutes and gives you the bill before you've ordered dessert. There must be a happy medium neither culture attains, but I do think "service compris" is a great idea.

Youpi!

My mémoire is done. Fini. Bound at Kinko's last night and sent off this a.m. for a tidy little sum that will get it to my prof and the other jury member in 3-5 days (USPS time).

I misspelled my prof's name in the bibliography and had to correct it by hand with black ink minutes before mailing. There are probably myriad other mistakes, but I'm happy and proud.
Now I won't think about it until the night of September 12th, before my defense the next day.

I'm optimistic that someday soon my braincells will rejuvenate and I will be able to write a mildly interesting post. Until then, bonnes vacances - I'm really on holiday!!

Vertigo

I’ve been out of commission for a few days. My problems started Wednesday night when I awoke around 2 a.m. with my head spinning out of control. I couldn’t even walk to the bathroom so I crawled there, where I proceeded to be sick at frequent and regular intervals for the rest of the night. Thursday, Mom made me an appointment with the doctor, so I managed to get up from the sleeping bag she’d laid out for me beside the toilet, get dressed and get into the car (throwing up a few more times in the process).
The doctor diagnosed me with “benign positional vertigo” and gave me an anti-nausea shot, a lot of pills to buy and some special “exercises” to do which involve placing my head in various dizzying positions in groups of 12-15 repetitions.

I’m feeling better than I did that first day – my eyes aren’t spinning around in my head at quite the same speed. I can say that if trying to write a Master’s thesis in French on the literary portrait of Themistocles is tedious on the best of days, it’s somewhat more daunting when the computer screen is swirling around French and Ancient Greek in an incoherent blend of letters and accents. So I don’t know if the end result will be comprehensible or not, but I just want to get this thing printed and in the mail to France as soon as possible. The amount of time I’ve spent being sick this summer (first with a cold caught on the plane, then with the adeno virus caught from my aunt, and now with this vertigo, evidently a result of the virus), along with the amount of time I’ve spent stressing about this thesis, has prevented me from fully enjoying being with my family. In a way I’m glad to have gotten sick here instead of in Montpellier, because my mother has been taking such wonderful care of me ; but I see my family so seldom now that I live in France, and I’d have liked to get in a little more “quality time” with them this summer.

And I know I’ve made this out to be primarily a food blog, but for the past few days I’ve been ingesting nothing but prescription drugs, dry Rice Chex, saltine crackers, plain basmati and fruit juice popsicles. Nothing too worthy of note.

Krispy Kreme Kapers (of the linguistic variety)

Yesterday Mom and I went out to run a few errands. Her main motivation was to get me out of the house and get my mind off Ahamed, with whom I’ve been having long-distance yelling-matches about the Israel-Lebanon conflict for the past few days. I’m not going to get into this here, but it’s enough to say that we both have the same basic opinion, but he has the nerve to make false statements and that really frustrates me.

Anyway, Mom was sweet enough to distract me with an outing, at the end of which we stopped by the Krispy Kreme drive-thru to pick up some coffee and doughnuts (the cure for all psychological ills). Well, Mom was driving, and as we inched toward the ordering microphone, idling our engine in the rain, she realized her automatic window wouldn’t open. So I hopped around to the back seat and made the order from there (getting a little rained-on in the process). At the window, I paid and the guy handed over the little bag with the doughnuts. Now Mom didn’t realize I was still waiting for the coffee, and started pulling away from the window. All I could say was “Don’t advance, don’t advance!” in a very frantic way. I guess this isn’t a normal way to get someone to bring a car to a halt, because Mom began laughing. I can’t chalk this strange way of speaking up to thinking in French too much, because I’m sure any French person would have said “STOP” and have had done with it. I think instead that my brain has been fried by too much Themistocles. I’m surprised I didn’t yell “The battle of Salamis!” or “Aristide le Juste!” Thank goodness I only have a week left to finish this thesis paper ; I plan to send it off to Montpellier a week from tomorrow. “Plan” isn’t really the right word – I don’t have any choice really, I’ll have to send it off in whatever state it’s in to meet the deadline.

My favorite Krispy Kreme variety is currently the sour cream doughnut. I used to like the devil’s food doughnut – and I’ve noticed they’ve changed the name of that one to “chocolate cake doughnut”. I’m sure it used to be called devil’s food… maybe people taking doughnuts to church on Sundays felt uncomfortable with the original name and lobbied for the change ?

Bring on the beignets!

Above: Crepe myrtle in NC. Could the reason I’m having so much trouble concentrating on this thesis paper be the fact that the view from my window is hot pink ?

I feel like I’ve been doing a lot of “I wonder if I can find that in France”-ing in anticipation of the year to come. I’d like to try out a bunch of new recipes here in the US so I can get them under my belt and feel confident I can make them reasonably quickly once the year starts and everything is so frantic all over again. I asked Ahamed to do the same and try making some new dishes while he’s at home on l’Ile de la Réunion ; since his mother and sisters have left for Mayotte and he’s alone to cook for himself and his little brother for a month, I thought he’d have some good opportunities to try new things. That and the fact that he keeps saying how bored he is this summer and how little there is to do on the island… so why not cook ? I’d love to try some exotic island food. He doesn’t seem quite as keen on that idea as I am, though : So far he’s mentioned a dish with chicken, potatoes and macaroni in a tomato-based sauce, which sounds edible except for the fact that he eats it over rice. Now I love carbohydrates as much as the next girl, but that is a bit of a starch-overload even for me. Maybe I will cleverly conceal the rice (although in 18 m2, hiding places are scarce) and then ask him to cook his dish.

Also, although he keeps talking about these beignets he’s made (how he’s eating them for breakfast, etc., making my mouth water as I imagine little puffs of golden dough gritty with sugar), he says he won’t make them once we’re in France. “My sister can make them in Montpellier,” he says (the oldest of his sisters will be coming to do her first year of university in France this fall). Still, I continue to say how much I want to try his doughnuts, in the hopes of convincing him to cook some for us (and give his sister a little break). He’s told me how good a cook his sister is, so I can look forward to tasting some good food this year. But at the same time, I hope she’ll be able to relax and not have too many responsibilities of that kind – I think she does a lot of the domestic chores in La Réunion (for her mother and the five other siblings who are still at home) and it might be time for her to have a year to herself and take it easy a bit.

Chez lui

Today is about the third time this summer Ahamed has told me over the phone that he feels better at home in La Réunion than he does in Montpellier. The way he phrases it goes something like this : “You know, my body feels different here. I feel lighter. The first day I arrived, I got home and took off my shoes and I noticed a physical change : I feel better.”

I really do want him to feel good about being home and with his family, and I want him to share those feelings with me. But these remarks of his feel like a punch in the chest : he suddenly feels so good after getting off the plane in La Réunion. It almost seems magical, doesn’t it ? He feels lighter – maybe he’s about to lift off. Is the food I prepare in France too heavy ?

What I take his statements to mean (though he denies it) is that something’s wrong with his life in Montpellier. And if there’s something wrong with his life in Montpellier, there’s something wrong with our relationship, because most of our time in Montpellier is spent together ( I think I’ve made a point to mention the 18 m2 studio apartment).

So when we were talking today and he said this again, I suddenly felt very exhausted. All I wanted was for the conversation to end. I listened to him talk on for a while, saying things like “you always take things badly” and “can’t I tell you I’m happy to be home” and that kind of thing. I just told him I wanted to say goodbye and talk again on Tuesday. So we did hang up, without saying “I love you”. I really hate that.

Cream cheese brownies

Last night I baked some cream cheese brownies for a Tripoley party my mother, grandmother and I are going to hold tonight with two friends. I'm not going to post the recipe as I think it still needs some tinkering: the cream cheese part was very eggy, resulting in a kind of flan-like rubbery consistency. What I'd like is a cream-cheese batter that has the same moist, crumb-y texture as the brownie batter. Perhaps adding more flour and some butter, and cutting down on the eggs, would accomplish that - I'll have to experiment some more.

I wonder about what I could subsitute for cream cheese in France - I know cheescakes can be made with fromage blanc, so perhaps that would do here too. Actually in this recipe I used Neufchatel cheese, which is marketed as a low-fat alternative to cream cheese. I wonder how this cheese is sold in France - we put it in cardboard packages here in the U.S. so people will associate it with the Philadelphia brand cream cheese we're so familiar with. But it France it might be presented in a different and unrecognizable way...

Summer gardens in North Carolina

Scrumptious summer veggies! Last night Mom prepared a tofu dish we call “Tofu Daddio” after the man who invented it, an old family friend : tofu baked in a tahini-soy-ginger sauce. As an accompaniment I made spinach couscous (a product I’d never seen before : couscous colored green with spinach juice, like green pasta) with garlic, fresh basil and mint, and a mix of sautéed vegetables : onions, green peppers, yellow tomatoes and red cherry tomatoes.

It’s wonderful to have access to all of these fresh vegetables (in my mother’s garden and in the gardens of friends who drop by with baskets of tender summer squash and green beans). The fresh basil is what I’ll miss particularly, because in France I have no garden. I’ll have to make do with the dried stuff for pasta sauce… it’s just not the same. I have visions of making pasta salad with roasted red peppers, goat cheese and walnuts – with shredded fresh basil scattered all over. Oh well, this won’t happen anytime soon, and we’ll be on our way towards winter anyway, once in France.

Fresh mint is, on the other hand, incredibly easy to come by in Montpellier, thanks to the large North African population for whom it is such a staple. In the quartier arabe young boys sell it in big bunches. Parsley is usually in the markets alongside mint, so there’s no difficulty in finding that, either. The bundles of mint I buy in France are usually so big they go bad before I’ve finished with them - I’ll have to get into the habit of preparing thé à la menthe more regularly.

Bouffe Tip : Keep fresh herbs in shallowly-filled glasses of water in the door of your fridge, covered in a plastic bag held against the glass with a rubber band. Change the water when it starts to become discolored.

Quelle romance!

I got a letter in the mail today from Ahamed. In the envelope there were several postcards with lovely images from l’Ile de la Réunion for most of my family members, and a special separate envelope for me. Inside was my own postcard and a letter.

Above: the evidence

It was a love letter, complete with lots of flowery turns-of-phrase (he is so much more soppily romantic than I am), and even doodles of flowers he had colored in (himself! with colored pencils!) on the page. At the end of the letter was the usual “love Ahamed” you’d expect, and one more sentence tacked on at the end that struck me as a little funny : “Don’t send me any mail.” No lovey-doveyness there, no “ma puce, ne t’inquiète pas si tu trouves pas le temps de m’écrire, je sais dans mon cœur que tu penses très fort à moi ma chérie”, just “Ne m’envoie pas de courrier.” Point.

Now as a female, I can’t help but read into this that he is hurt or angry that I haven’t written him all summer, and is trying to express this in that one curt phrase. But then I realize : he is a man, and therefore this is probably not an attempt to make me realize how cruel I’ve been, but rather a suggestion I should take at face value and just not send him any mail. So I do believe I won’t.