Barter and Raw Food

Life continues happily, yet mostly uneventfully in Paris, which is why I’ve been a bit quiet. But, true to form, there have been at least a few moments that have seemed blog worthy. Here are two glimpses of Paris that seemed worth sharing.

Will work for food—Josh and I have been fortunate enough to find just enough work for the lifestyle we would like here. We both work about 15 hours a week and that gives us plenty of free time and a few euros in our pocket. Over all, we are enjoying a fulfilling and simple life. So, you can imagine my surprise when Josh concluded a dinner at a great little crepe restaurant by (essentially) saying to the owner, “I’ll translate your menu into English and you can pay me in salted butter caramel.” If you can’t remember what that is, it’s perhaps Josh’s favorite Parisian food—caramel that has a perfectly delicious balance of salt in it. I guess all his flea market expenditures earlier in the day inspired this—or, perhaps he’ll do anything for a little salted butter caramel. And fear not, Josh’s new Parisian barter system doesn’t end with caramel, he’s also possibly doing some translation work for an association of scotch makers, drinkers, and aficionados. As Josh says, he would have spent money on either of those things anyways, so by not working for money but for caramel/scotch, he’s just avoiding the middle man.

Raw food diet—I thought the other day, “Oh goodness, it’s happened” and by “it”, I mean my adapting yet another newly-formed habit inspired by France that seems will be virtually impossible to re-create once we return to the States. My most recent and most troublesome France-only habitis my new found love of raw food, and more specifically, raw meat.

Maybe its primal, maybe this is just what happens to Midwesterners who love meat but can’t build a fire very well or maybe some things just really are different in France, but over one four day stretch, I ate just one single solitary meal that had any cooked food in it—the rest of the meals involved raw tuna, raw salmon, beef carpaccio, and steak tartare. Yes, I love them all and find that I crave them.

Having a stomach of steel, I’m not worried about any health effects and I also am betting that if a restaurant bothers to serve these things, they must trust the source of the meat. And really, I have a hard time believing that raw meat is actually the most dangerous food habit I could have when seemingly everything here is sold is some raw form: raw milk, unpasteurized cheese, etc, etc. Not a single French person has ever seemed alarmed when my raw meat habit gets brought up in conversation.

So yes, now one of my favorite café lunches is steak tartare—basically hand-ground raw steak that looks an awful lot like raw hamburger—and a salad. Even Josh has gotten into the idea. At a recent meal, he tried Carpaccio du tete de veau, roughly translated as “raw veal face”. When he ordered it, I said, “Josh, I’m so proud of you.” And then thought, “What the heck kind of screwed up compliment is that?!?”.

Rumor has it that there is a new Ethopian restaurant in Virginia that has two kinds of raw meat dishes that are worth having (this according to Eve Zibert—Washington Post Food critic). It seems promising. Maybe Josh will start learning Amharic and then he can offer to translate the menu in return for a serving or two of “gored gored”

sPg