High Contrast Grey.

My latest cooking endeavor has been making baked potatoes. As I wandered the market yesterday I was thinking about new ways to save money on food, which led to the realization that potatoes are cheap and filling. I have been using a microwave en lieu of an oven thanks to the problem of living in student housing. I am not sure what kind of potatoes these are, as I chose by if they were organic and local and didn't search for a name. Little things. Delicious. This latest experiment I filled with a hint of butter, crème fraîche, some sea salt mixed with herbs, and instead of black pepper like I have been using I decided to add a bit of Dijon Mustard. Things to bring back to the states for upcoming dinner parties. My other new experiment was inspired by a homework assignment to write a recipe for a dish of my country. I looked for something from the Pacific Northwest and found an intriguing recipe for herbed French toast. I skimped on adding a dollop of sour...

Sautéd tomatoes, mushrooms, shallots, and garlic. Served with bread from the market. Something too tasty to finish as dinner, but to instead save some for breakfast tomorrow morning. Some avocado should be the sole ingredient to change this from a dinner snack to breakfast snack. Green oil lamp light. And the first doctor confusedly muttering in black and white.

I tried my best to make a tasty meal from scraps of food I have about. This was noodles, with French grocery store cheese with herbs (like Boursin), mayonaise, Dijon mustard, and a few chopped up green olives. It turned out alright, but I think I added too much of the mayonaise and the mustard, when I should have just used a small ‘dab.’ Of course to continue in the French style of the meal I paired it with a bagette and some pastis. Not bad at all.

After the shitty day of giving presentations in my broken French I decided that I should make something for myself that I have been craving. Fajitas. Well, like my broken French, these are more so my broken attempt at fajitas, but it was because I am missing a lot of necessary things to make them correctly, like a frying pan. I keep holding out that I might find a nice cast iron frying pan at the market, but that has yet to happen. There also isn’t going to be a ‘braderie’ market here for a couple of more weeks, which makes me a bit frustrated, but that is just how life is. I still think about that beautiful 30 euro oil lamp I didn’t get at the last market. I’m pretty sure it has appeared in some of my bizarre French dreams since.. Also it pops into my head whenever I am working on something in the evening and can’t use my lamp because the bulb is dead and the only available outlet is next to my sink. To sit at my desk in France and paint by oil lamp light… yeah, I probably s...

Since we visited a town litterally on the edge of the ocean we only found it fitting to end this excursion with some sea food. I have been enjoying the ability to buy dinners are three course meals for not that much money. This was my first course. Shrimp. I have never been served shrimp with even the head still attached, but the French are as the French do. Personally I do like the fact that more often than not I can see a dead animal for what it is and not a guise of something ground up and red. Second course was mussels and steak fries. Delicious and almost too much. I never did find the bottom of the bowl of mussels. Then third course we took to go as our train was going to be leaving soon and we still had to catch a bus to the tran station and buy the train tickets. With many of us not having functioning credit cards and not having a way to pay for the ticket in cash, we were in quite the dilema, but all was solved and I ate the third course on the train as the night...

My first homemade meal since arriving in France. Noodles with red sauce, of course. I don’t have a cutting board, or a knife other than my new pocket knife, so the process of making this was rather slow and hazardous, as I try not to cut my thumb while slicing. Thankfully I didn’t but making the sauce took forever because I only have one item for the stove and it is a pot and not a pan.. Regardless, I have finally made a meal and will not have to rely on food that can be microwaved or sandwiches.

Homemade dinner from the other night. After only having a slice of toast all day I thought that I would make myself something nice for dinner. I experimented with adding in some chopped roasted almonds for protein, but I am not sure if I liked the result or not. The dash of cinnamon in the sauce was nice though. I finally went out and got some cheap plastic sandwich bags to put my cheese into to hopefully slow the drying out process dramatically. There is nothing quite like that first serving of chèvre. The past few times I have gone by the goodwill here I have actually found some nice silverware. This time it was just a miniature fork and a silver plated try with sea shell shaped repositories on each side, but even still, I payed under a dollar.