ggglimpopo

A Parisienne friend's 18 year old daughter was an au pair just outside London last summer, to improve her English. She was treated to packet mash potato, cooked up in huge quantities on the Sunday evening, and frozen into daily servings to be defrosted and eaten on the following Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday evenings......... it was served with cold sliced supermarket roast pork, chicken, turkey or beef, topped off with lashings of packet gravy. Mmmm. BTW, Saturday night was party night -oven chips and fried eggs (done in the oven with the chips). She lasted 3 weeks and then came home to Maman.

If you read French, www.marmiton.org has some excellent ideas and recipes. It was sent to me by a friend who is a gourmet cook and thought I would appreciate the link. Just done their Foie Gras with figs (used mango - I had misread the recipe and thought they were looking for fresh figs which are unavailable here out of season). The Foie Gras was a doddle to make and perfectly "mi-cuit" on the timings given. I also have a French link somewhere to French restaurants, from starred to family places to eat, but it is not appearing on my favourites. Will try and dig it out............. Nola

Hi Kristin Thanks for all this, it's great. I live in Bordeaux, we've just done this huge French family Christmas thing - you should see the laundry I'm ploughing through - and it is 9.00 am here Monday morning. Japan seems sooooooooooo exotic Can't wait to read the rest. Sure makes a great change from Oysters and Foie Gras....... Foodwise, I love Japanese food but south west France is hardly geared up on the noodle front. We can get sushi here, there are a couple of so so Japanese restaurants ........... but hey, now there is your blog! Looking forward to the rest. Nola

We eat at the table every meal, no tv. The children have to sit at the table until we have all finished or until they are excused. If my partner is working late or we are eating out, or have people to dinner, the children eat by themselves, again at table, with the older children in charge of the younger ones, and responsible for clearing the table. Weekend lunches are always all together, either at the table or we all eat out. It works really well for us but the kids think that they are deprived - "At Marie's house you can eat in the front of the tv with your plate on your lap" etc etc.

I think that the idea of the family sitting down and eating together and the children learning from the adults hits the nail on the head. Here in France you often see very very young children at the smart tables and most often they are there as part of an extended family group. Also, the main meal is lunch and the children are less likely to be tired and cranky and the meal is a long and relaxed affair. They are surrounded by adults - grandparents, aunts, older cousins, who all admonish, guide and help the child as necessary and the children generally behave astonishingly well for incredibly long periods. I think it is a cultural thing. Manners are taught at school where even the very little ones have sit down 3/4 course lunches where they are expected to behave or they go home for lunch where they sit down and eat with their parents and eat correctly. On the whole, when we eat out, the only kids we see running around in restaurants are not yelling in French...

I recently heard "fooey grass" asked for here in Bordeaux. When the waiter explained - in faultless English - what the "mi-cuit" meant, the chappie asked for his to be served well done..............the waiter just smiled and said ok, no problem.

No worries now that I've found out all about suet...which incidentally is not in my Larousse Gastronomique Back on the subject of butter, here we can buy excellent farm butter from local farms at the markets, which is odd as most of the butter in France comes from Normandy and Brittany, hundreds of kilometres away. I understand that demi -sel and doux are made quite differently and it is not just the addition of salt that makes the difference, which is why the salted butter behaves differently in cooking - or so the woman at the market tells me.

Hi, I live in France and the last time I was in the UK I bought a couple of packets of gingerbread men to bring home. The children had forgotten what they were and were delighted to eat the heads, arms and legs .........yummy. They were a huge hit, all gone the first day, and I have decided at the next school bake to make dozens of gingerbread men. Only problem is that I cannot find a cutter here in Bordeaux, and will have to remember to find and order one off the net a few weeks in advance - as opposed to the day before!

Hi, I'm new on this forum, and this is my first posting............... I live in south west France and have my Frenchman's family arriving from Paris for Christmas. We have decided on a "French" 24th and an "English" 25th. The 24th is the easy bit, doing Oysters/ Foie Gras as the entrée, followed by a civet and mash, followed by salads, cheese and tbd dessert. But I am having probs with the "English" part, the Christmas pudding and the mince pies - ie the suet, which I cannot find here. I have read that one can use grated, frozen butter, but that it changes the texture of the Christmas Pudding and is not a perfect substitute, and that the mincemeat does not keep for longer than a couple of days if made in advance with butter. If I use butter would I go for salted/unsalted and would a poorer quality butter work better in this instance? The brother-in-law frequently does one of those very French rants on how awful the food was when he went to the UK, and the mother-in-law has a deity like reputation in the kitchen. I need to impress!! Any ideas? Many thanks..........