French Camp and Photos

I feel bad that my last post--that's been on here for so long--is ranting about things. A pretty mild rant about things that have little impact on the world, but still...

Today I started helping out at a French Camp that BYU is putting on this year for high school students. A graduate student and I are doing a cooking class for an hour each day, alternating groups every other day (today we had the "advanced" group, and they were pretty darn good). The grad student is paid. I am not. I emailed a professor and asked to be involved with the project.

As this was coming up today--as we were approaching 3:15--I started thinking, why am I doing this? I am busy with classes, and it's kind of a funny dynamic, actually, with the grad student, especially since she asked me if I had talked to the secretary about how I was getting paid...

But it was fun today. We made quiche Lorraine, which, it turns out, you can get into the oven in 15 minutes flat if you have pre-measured ingredients. I had convinced the grad student we needed to do a questionnaire about food allergies, which she said we could do after the quiche was in the oven...turns out one girl was vegetarian, and the quiche was the only recipe we're doing with meat in it. Oh well. Another girl is allergic to cantaloup and honeydew, and we were also planning a melon salad...I had had to talk the grad student into letting me do the questionnaire, and when we got the results I was thinking inside "ha, see it does matter."

Tonight we had Family Home Evening, and our group took photos wearing the tye-dye shirts we made for FHE two weeks ago. I would post them, except I'm having photo problems. I lost the cord to connect my camera to my computer, and my fancy memory-card-that-turns-into-a-USB has a virus, it turns out. I didn't know memory cards could get viruses, and I certainly don't know how it caught it. Anyway, I think blog posts without photos are kind of lame. But it looks like they'll be kind of lame for a little while still.

Poetry About Cannibalism

French lit assignment: Write a poem (two verses of four lines of twelve syllables, ABAB rime scheme, etc). Topic: food.

L’anthropophagie

Le mâle d’araignée survive pas la veuve

Et un têtard (parfois) mangerait son voisin

La version animale ce n’est pas la preuve—

Le cannibalisme, c’est aussi pour l’humain.

En Nouvelle-Guinée, ils ont la pratique

L’expédition Donner, ils l’ont fait dans le froid

Quoiqu’on préfère un cœur, le cerveau, j’explique :

C’est anthropophagie—et dangereux parfois.

Figgy Pudding

I have started a couple of posts...but haven't finished any of them. Things have been busy, busy since starting the new semester. My sister got home from 18 months in Brazil over the break--and got engaged a week later. I am important enough to help with the wedding plans--which, along with school, has been taking precedent over blogging. I wanted to write a post about my winter break creative projects. Here's one at least. Figgy pudding.

On Christmas Eve, one of my two sisters was still in Brazil, and the other was with her in-laws. So my parents and I celebrated with some extended family. I got put in charge of roast and dessert.

It was quite the roast. My dad picked it out. I used a recipe from Williams-Sonoma. It was lovely. And rare. But that's okay, because roast can be eaten rare.

As for the dessert, my first inclination was Christmas pudding. A little research, though, revealed Christmas pudding needs to be started weeks in advanced, and that half of its mass appears to consist of brandy--you have to keep feeding it brandy, like some strange holiday version of Audrey II.

So, thinking of "We Wish You a Merry Christmas," and realizing I had never in fact seen a figgy pudding, I decided that would be our dessert.

I spent about four hours working on it--and that includes the modern convenience of a food processor. (Four hours sounds impressive, but really I'm slow at just about everything. So it was probably max three hours at normal-person speed.) There are a lot of figs in figgy pudding, and all of them have to be chopped up--so do the nuts and the apples, after they've been pealed and cored.

There was also lemon and orange peal to be grated, eggs to beat...I found the recipe on Wikipedia. The Joy of Cooking, that fantastic Bible of a cookbook that could stand alone for recipes and reference, didn't have a word on figgy pudding.

The result? Figgy pudding tastes kind of like a fig newton dipped in orange juice. It tastes better with ice cream.

Tongue

I was at the grocery store at 7:30 this Saturday morning. I was walking around, and found these awful looking things in the meat department.

This is tongue. Cow tongues, lined up next to pigs feet and tripe.

Much of my life relates to the Ramona books by Beverly Cleary that I heard over and over and over again as I was growing up. This morning Ramona came to mind again—the time her and her sister had to make dinner, and had to use tongue because it was inexpensive. The characters narrated how awful a thing tongue was, and always in my mind, tongue was gray and about the size of an adult’s hand. If you can’t tell by my cell phone picture, tongue is slimy and looks like a mid-sized animal curled up in the package. Like a cross between a goldfish and a housecat.

Speaking of tongues, I am taking a class about the phonetics of Spanish. A good part of studying consists of looking at diagrams of how the mouth shapes sounds. (And trying to imitate them—slowly and thoroughly) I am gaining a new appreciation for the versatility of the tongue.

Sculpting...

The sculpture workshop continues. I am working on a bas-relief in Caen stone. Today at lunch someone asked me where I was from, and someone else knew Mormons were connected with Utah, so we spent some time talking about that. We established that Mormons dress like normal people and don't have to live in Utah. This evening, we had a barbecue. I expalined the strength of the different swear words they recited to me in English. We told jokes; mine weren't always that funny after translating them into French or explaining "la chute"--the punchline--for the ones in English. Tiffann told me about smoking weed and Mathieu talked about why he is vegetarian. And Adeline, who is teaching the workshop, talked about sculpting.

Waffles in Belgium, Cheese Course in France

Last weekend I went to Belgium. It didn’t really hit me that I was visiting a whole nother country until I was leaving Belgium. While Jennifer and I were there, it felt like the most natural thing in the world to be in Belgium—that is, not extraordinary at all. As we left, it felt extraordinary to be in Belgium. To have been in Belgium.

They sell beer in the vending machines in Belgium. Besides the vending machines, took a boat ride along the canals of Brugge, tasted curry, ginger, and spice cake chocolates, watched a woman making bobbin lace, wandered the Comic Book museum, and visited the bizarre and oversized Palais de la Justice where we could see the Atomium from a distance. Belgian waffles—from-Belgium Belgian waffles—are pretty much one of the best things I have ever tasted. Saturday was the national holiday, and that morning, in Brugge, we followed the small-town parade of a brass band and the veterans color guard. As they walked past I could hear the metals on their uniforms clink and I wanted to be home celebrating my own country.

It felt good to be back in France. Monday morning, I started a two week sculpture workshop that the MJC is running in Jumièges, near Duclair (the small town where the MJC is located). It feels so odd that this is what I have ended up doing, but I have enjoyed myself yesterday and today. So far I have sculpted a snail shell and a dog, in addition to helping make home made French fries and setting up a tent. Today I got a sunburn on one arm as we sat around picnic tables for two hours eating lunch—melon, bread and jambon cru and butter, salads, then the homemade fries and bloody steaks, a round of camembert, dessert, then coffee and tea.

A Few Thoughts

This is a picture of the church in Duclair. And the clouds of Normandy. The clouds here are beautiful.

Today is my last full day at the MJC in Duclair, I think. I have three more weeks in France. A lot of the internship has been...well, not what I expected. "Expected" namely being that I expected to have a defined role--ie something to do. Even so, there is a lot to look back on and it has been a good experience.

The plan the MJC people came up with to occupy me for the next three weeks is the next week off (except Wednesday evening, which is an apero and a barbeque), then for two weeks I am going to participate in a sculpture workshop. I don't really want to participate in a sculpture workshop. I don't know why I have such a bad attitude about it. It really will be interesting, I imagine. And how could I participate and not learn things?

Last night, the mother of Jennifer's host family, Caroline, showed us how to make crepes. While we were making them, Caroline talked about how she thinks it's important to travel. She spent two and a half months in Boston when she was twenty-two. Her son is that age now, and is looking at starting a job. She thinks it's too soon for him to settle down like that.

The family is doing some work on their garage, and they found a German rifle from WWII hidden in the wall. A few weeks ago, a woman who used to live in the house visited them. There were Germans in the house and in surrounding houses during the war, and the woman thinks it was her father that hid the when they left.

Wednseday night, Christine Rolland, the internship coordinator, had Jennifer and I to dinner. There, much of the conversation was on the horror of the newer laws that prevent restaurants preparing their own sauces (must be prepackaged) and that the milk in cheese had to be pasturied. Christine and her husband insisted that it was to boister industry at the detriment of small business and flavor. Personally, I've had a few I'm-going-to-die-of-food-poisioning moments. Well, I exagerate. But things like how leftovers are often left on the stove rather than in the fridge. Food service people take money and prepare food without gloves or soap in between, and food items are often stored at room temperature here, too. There was a barbeque a few weeks ago at the MJC, and the raw sausages came strait out of a plastic grocery sack. So I think restaurants not being able to prepare their own mayo (doesn't mayo have raw egg?) has more of a reason behind it that to insult the taste buds.

Cantaloupe and Other Feats

I have never liked fruit. This was never a big deal to me, just something to work around. It’s the texture that really bothers me, so I have just really never eaten fruit, with the exception of apples and raisins. So I would always just pick the pineapple off birthday-party pizzas and skip the salads at wedding receptions. Not liking fruit is a handicap that is easily dealt with, really.

It has only been recently, though, that I have realized that this is a bit odd. “You don’t like fruit?” is the way other people usually take it. This started to make me feel like my not liking fruit was a distinguishing feature, a sort of party trick and an odd quirk that was useful for get to know you games: “I have never eaten an orange” is a little more memorable than “I like reading.” As unique as it makes me, though, it’s maybe something that needs to change.

The other day, I had cantaloupe. It wasn’t anything like me deciding I needed to eat cantaloupe, but just because I had no idea what the waitress was telling me and it turns out “the first one” she had said was actually an appetizer of ham and cantaloupe. When it came, I took a deep breath…and tucked in.

And Monday I had strawberries for the first time in my life. I was over at the Warenghein’s for Family Home Evening, and the dessert was a strawberry tart. I really like desserts. I didn’t want to say I didn’t want any. And I had handled the cantaloupe. So, I took a deep breath….

The strawberries tasted like strawberry flavored Twizzlers—well, funny thing. They were pretty tasty. I am still not too fond of the texture, but fruit is a pretty amazing thing. I won’t go as far as to say that I like it. I will say, though, that the Granny Smith apple I had today, that was tart and crisp with juice that filled my mouth, was amazing.