Bux

The thing about the value of milage, is that it's nothing unless you actually get to use it. Don't get me wrong, I have a Delta SkyMiles AmEx card, but I'm still skeptical. Anyway, all of the AmEx branded cards use the same 2% for conversions, including the Delta Optima series. If the actual value of the mialge reward is as much as one cent a mile, and you're already paying the fee to have the card, using this card overseas is probably just as good as using a non reward card with no surcharge. Working on the assumption that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, I use my Visa and MC credit cards overseas.

My instinct is to avoid TCs except as a backup. My general advice is also to buy curency in the country in which it's legal tender, i.e. dollars in the US and euros in Europe. I have no familiarity with dealing with the AAA and have not been aware they are operating as a bank. I have always thought they sold Visa traveler's checks and I have always understood the rate is not all that good when buying checks in euros. If I'm wrong on this and you get, as Pirate implies, the wholesale interbank rate, it may be a good deal. I've called AAA and they tell me members can buy TCs in euros at the rate shown at: http://www.travelex.com Right now that's .79 euros to the dollar http://www.oanda.com/ Onda shows a .859 exchange rate. I believe that using your credit card will therefore get you .85 euros to the dollar, barring your bank's loading of a surcharge. That's a loss of about six european cents on the dollar, or a worse than six percent tax on your money. Your daughter will also have to deal with the checks in Europe. My experience with TCs in Europe is limited mostly to France where they are not nearly so easy to use as they are in the US. She may have to cash them at a bank and probably pay a fee to do so. That was my daughter's experience many years ago. She cursed the checks and dumped them all into currency in one fell swoop at a bank as I recall. In her case the checks were a back up. What happened was that her new ATM card took over a week to get on the system. Furthermore, should your daughter have any checks left over when she returns, they will have to be reconverted at another loss. My questions about using the AAA cards are the same as for any bank credit or debit card. What is the surcharge for foreign currency conversion and what are the fees for getting cash? On a credit card, you don't withdraw from an account, you make a loan (cash advance). I understand that when dealing with a $20/day budget, we're talking about a dollar a day and ease of use may be more important than cost. In that case, I'd go with an ATM card (bearing either Cirrus/MC or Plus/Visa logos) connected to a checking account in a US bank (assuming you are an American, I'm taking AAA as that clue) and having her withdraw as much as she felt comfortable carrying at any one time. I don't see the AAA as useful. All they offer is the no fee on the TC, which I don't recommend carrying in Europe.

Are you no longer a chef, or are they feeding you at the restaurant? Have you read Pepin's The Apprentice? He's quite proud of the work he did at Howard Johnson. Unfortunately, all of that has disappeared under the present management, but he claims to have brought home frozen food prepared at the central kitchens and served chefs and gourmets with success.

With greater seriousness, my appreciation of beer has grown considerably although I don't drink as much of it as I do wine. What I appreciate about beer, is what I appreciate about wine and that's the variety. My tastebuds get bored by a steady diet. I enjoy matching my beer to my food, my circumstances and my mood. Whenever I am traveling, I enjoy the local beer. In Belgium, I really appreciated the local brews and sometimes the lesser ones that are not outstanding enough to be imported here. Perhaps it's just that they taste more of a place than beers that can be ordered all over the world. Of course that doesn't make them great.

And if the can is empty, you'll switch to whatever anyone is willing to bring you?

I'm not fond of dry Champagne with dessert and not particularly fond of even a demi-sec with chocolate, but many people like that combination. No less a chocolatier than Pierre Herme, served a fairly dry rose Champagne with his chocolate pastries at a party celebrating his chocolate cookbook last year. He also served a nice Banyuls, but his choice was the Champagne. I'm on the side of those who recommend Port, Banyuls, Maury, one of the sweeter wines from Jerez, etc. I may not change anyone's mind, but I'll suggest chocolate lovers try that combination.

Analogies will ultimately get us in trouble, but Peter's distinctions between ordering in the restaurant and making advance requests apply to art as well as food. Artists often work on commission and are usually happy to have the opportunity to do site specific piece, even if it's a framed painting hanging on a wall. Rarely can you get a copy of something you saw in his gallery, but in blue or that sort of thing, but you can have a discussion and come to some understanding of what you might expect before you commit yourself as a patron. Anyway, I'm not suggesting all painters are artists either.

Betcha didn't meet a lot of journalists. All through that article I was wondering if that same service were experienced elsewhere, would the local journalist be too polite to write about it.

I'll take one in blue, and could I have my trees on a side canvas.

Bux, you lost me on this one. How does 2% work out to be LESS than 1%?? On another note, I checked with MBNA Visa, and they also say that they add no other charges other than the standard 1% that Visa USA gets. But Bux, are you saying that it's still better to use Amex when you can? (Tough to use Amex in France) 2.0% charge by Amex for foreign currency conversion 1.5% rebate using Costco Platinum Cash Rebate American Express card 0.5% net cost Using a credit card without a bank loaded surcharge, you will pay 1% to Visa or MasterCard for their work in making the conversion. Thus, that particular Amex card is the best possible deal, assuming two conditions beyond just using the Amex rebate card. One is that you've already charged $5,000 on the card and the other is that you can use the card. Visa and MasterCard are far more easily used in France these days.

I think it's wrong to lump second rate writing and plagiarism together as sloppy journalism. While there's a difference between haute cusine and diner cooking and there are good and bad examples of diner cooking, unsanitary kitchens are a concern on a different moral and ethical, as well as legal, plane. There's nothing unethical about a lack of erudition. Plagiarism and copywright issues are also separate topics, but they touch on similar ethical issues that are unclear to most people. I find it interesting that the opening post on this topic, evidently contained copyrighted material. I mean this as food for thought and as non judgementally as possible. In this day and age when writers make notes on a computer and do their research online, it may be very easy to confuse one's own notes with lifted material, though it should be the responsibility of every journalist to mark his source material correctly. According to the Washinton Post, Ms. Mamone offered a defense for her lack of ethics not necessarily based on sloppyiness. She says she was "in a hurry, but "more concerned about the flow of the sentence." Jason Blair may have been dishonoring the reader. Karen Mamone dishonored her source.

Pirate is correct about HSBC. It has one of the most international outlooks of any US bank and you will find its logo not only on banks bearing the HSBC name, but on others including CCF in France. When I mentioned the possibility I might want an account in France and before we could make up our mind as to its usefulness, an officer in my HSBC branch got all the papers in line for me to open a CCF account in France. We never opened that account, but I was impressed by the work done on my behalf. In noting that American Express charges 2%, it should be mentioned that Amex does its own conversion and thus you avoid the 1% Visa or MC would charge. Thus it's comparable to a 1% surcharge, which, with the rebate, amounts to one half percent less than I'm paying on a no surcharge card. The ATM usage fee is yet another cost. The page linked to in Menton's post does a good job at explaining this. This is applicable to bank and debit cards issued in the US. One should never use a credit card (or only use it as a last resort in an emergency) for cash. This may be the easiest fee to avoid, but it may require you to maintain a large deposit in your account. Some banks require a large cash deposit and others consider an even larger investment account sufficient reason to waive ATM fees. I believe both Visa and MasterCard prohibit the machine owning bank from charging a fee to overseas card holders.

Pepin has one daughter and yes, you absolutely must read The Apprentice. It is full of expected and surprising stories.

Almost. The best thing about the book was sharing his experiences. The worst thing was not actually being there sharing the meals with him. It's all about a love of food and cooking, but for all his pride -- and you sense all along the way that he's proud of his cooking abilities -- it's never about cooking to get good reviews or Michelin stars.

What about an aniseseed (and other herb?) infusion in milk or cream. Depending on the desired effect you could add gelatin and go the siphon route or use some simpler foam with less structure. I guess it would depend on how you wanted it to sit with the rest of the dish.

No one ever has to much to learn, but if you're going to err in life, it's best to think you have more to learn than you really do rather then to think you know more than you do. There are no more faux pas in cooking since the rise of nouvelle cuisine, except in the eyes of the chefs at France's classic cooking schools. I wouldn't pass judgement on your preparation without tasting it, but here at home we usually serve asparagus quite simply sauteed in butter with a little lemon juice, or more often these days in olive oil, a little garlic and lemon juice. We also serve it cold -- boiled and dressed with a vinaigrette sauce. I think the classic way to serve asparagus -- at least that's the only way I ever saw it served in French restaurant, or read a recipe, in the 50s , 60's and maybe later -- was with hollandaise sauce. Jacques Pépin, in his memoir, The Apprentice, tells a story of the first time his very yound daughter was served asparagus at a friends house, she didn't start to eat it when everyone else did. Her friend's mother asked what was wrong and if she liked asparagus. Well of course, she was just waiting for the hollandaise.

Jeanne d'Arc, non?

Mogsob, we may have touched on this before, but are you absolutely sure your Chase debit card has no foreign currency conversion load? I ask only because several years ago I was told by a Chase representative that my Chase debit card did not have the surcharge. I then proceeded to pay for a stay in France using that card. Subsequently, I opened another account at another bank and on my next trip, withdrew 100 francs from each bank in rapid succession. The charge on my Chase account was exactly 2% more than on the other account. Thus I was not only taxed 2% by Chase, but I lost the float. I have never been a private banking client of Chase, but I have had select, and whatever they called that level of account before the last merger, accounts. Needless to say I was pissed about the misinformation and moved my primary accounts to the other bank where I may have other accounts, but at least I've gotten straight answers -- so far.

I also contacted that credit card site. The response I got was: I replied saying I knew of several banks without any surcharge and that the savings for a frequent business or pleasure traveler would be greater than the absence of any other fees. Their first reply was very prompt -- within a few minutes at 11:00 p.m. There has been no response to my second message as of 10:00 a.m. this morning. My first impression is that this site is not very thorough in it's research nor does it offer the kind of public service I would like to see.

One of the reasons this thread is in the France forum, is that a major concern here is the loading of a foreign currency conversion surcharge. Chase, for instance, adds two percent to every transaction made in a foreign currrency. That's got to wipe out any reward value on your travel expenditures. Unfortunately, this fee that is not even mentioned on the FAQ page. Banks have been known to be rather unforthcoming when asked about this fee and you will see no indication of it mentioned on your statement. It's up to you to know the wholesale exchange rate at the time your transaction is posted. The only place you are apt to find this charge mentioned is in the fine print of the service agreement, that so few people thoroughly read. By the way, Discover card is unusable in Europe as far as I know.

One of the more interesting cheeses I've had in NY was a brebis, sold in the Union Square Greenmarket. As I understood the situation, it was made in small quatities and because it varied so much from batch to batch, it was sold inexpensively directly to the consumer at the Greenmarket because shops wanted a more consistent cheese to sell. It does seem as if most of the American cheese on the market aims to be reliable rather than great. There are some goat cheeses made out in Indiana that I've liked and thought were unique.

Cheese, chocolate and pastry are three different things. I agree. I was talking about the pastries not the chocolates and I seem to recall someone posting that they were a different line of pastries than is made in Herme's pastisserie in Paris and that they are not an attempt to reproduce what is baked in Paris. Of course Pierre himself doesn't make either batch of pastries, but he's most often in Paris these days and it's his own shop's output that he can check on a regular basis. In any event, I don't think Wegman's advertises the pastries as the same as those available in Herme's Paris shops or that consumers think they are. On the other hand, some consumers probably believe the Epoisses, Livarots and Munsters are the same, while others are convinced they are not. As noted by many, even when the same cheese leaves the same farm headed for two different shops, by the time it reaches the consumer, it may not be the same cheese for sale in both shops.

I doubt that most of those who dine there do not perceive an amazing meal in the food sense, but most reviewers have been careful to describe the nature of a meal there. Some who rely on the three stars awarded by Michelin may be misled, but it's hard to believe that many diners are lured to this rather remote restaurant on that basis alone. Most people who frequent three star restaurants read about food. This is what I wrote earlier in this thread.

My interest and fondness for French cuisine makes me a bit reluctant to push this book too greatly as I doubt too many members share that interest to the same degree, but the story of his war time survival, his growing up in France in the forties, his apprenticeship and later working in the Meurice and for DeGaulle are probably appealing to a vast audience with little or no interest in in France or cooking and absolutely fascinating to those with an interest in either. His career in America is no less interesting. By his own admission he probably made some questionable decisions out of naivety but he took every responsibility seriously and made the most of it. He probably never made the money made by others of less culinary talent, but he was a great success in personal terms and somewhat of a star without chasing stardom. No matter how high an opinion of him you may have had prior to reading the book, I think your admiration has to grow from what you read.

I finished the book last week. It seems as if it should have appeal to so many different kinds of people who have an interest in food. What a contradictory man -- hero and antihero in one. His older brother distinguishes himself as a student while Jacques drops out of school to apprentice in a restaurant at thirteen by choice. He arrives in American as a chef and gets a graduate degree at Columbia in his spare time after having developed a taste for art and literature from his fellow hotel kitchen workers in Paris. It's always about food for him. As a child in war torn France, he saves his money to buy a black market sausage for his brother as a birthday present.