Hello! New blog. About time.
Do you know what I like? Food. That's what I like. All sorts of food, of different shapes and sizes and tastes and colours and varying levels of morality. Shove a goose full of grain until you have to install a conservatory to house its gargantuan distended liver, and I'll hurl that down me until the baby cows come home. And then I'll hurl them down as well. There's nothing more delicious than food.
Now, as some of you might know, I live with a Frenchman. And the French have a reputation for doing two things: losing wars and cooking lunch (often in swift succession). Yes, the world's most renownedly gastronomic country has an ambassador living right under my nose. Quite literally, for he is far shorter than I.
So, you might expect our evenings in the flat together to feature nothing but sizzling pans, white aprons, and me running around saying 'Yes Chef'. After all, I am a competent cook, and under the right Gallic guidance I could be shoving Michelin-starred desserts into anybody who dares knock on our hallowed door.
Sadly, this is not the case. In the 20 months I have lived under this roof, I have seen Tim prepare a total of two different types of meal for himself. The first is simply an apple, which he slices into segments, cuts the skin off, and then eats with a fork on a Saturday afternoon at about 2-ish. The second is a heap of salad and chillies, drenched in Encona sauce (the really hot red one) and mustard, and quite literally sandwiched (hah!) between two slices of brown bread. No butter. Haute cuisine, this ain't.
So, having watched this peculiar pantomime for almost two years, I decided to have a look and see what kind of crap Tim keeps in his food cupboard. Actually, this is a bit of a lie, because I've been sneaking in there for months to steal food and then arrange it to look like nothing's been stolen, but for the purposes of suspended disbelief, lets go with my first story. Here follows a list of my Five Favourite Stupid-Ass French Things found in my Stupid-Ass French Flatmate's Food Cupboard.
#1 - Salt
Not just any salt though. An entire one-kilogram bag of 'Gros Sel Marin', which my GCSE-level French skills lead me to believe translates as 'A Fucking Huge Bag of Sea Salt'. If you look closer (which you can't because it's a picture, but I can because the stupid great sack of it is here right in front of my face) you will notice three alarming things:
One- The salt is actually a browny-beige colour, implying the presence of mud, sand, pebbles and maybe a lobster or two lurking under its salty surface. Two- It's still wet inside the bag, making you think this has just been hoiked out of some godforsaken French salt-marsh by some godforsaken French combine salt-harvester (hey, I don't know how these things work) and dumped into this godforsaken bag for my idiot flatmate to put on his chips. And three- It's a fucking great big bag of wet, brown salt.
#2 - Herbs
Herbs, as we all know, are very important in French cuisine. There's nothing more French than a bit of chicken with a gentle spattering of green flecks all over it, and no chef is going to disagree with that. They look nice, they probably affect the taste in some indistinguishable way, and you can sound sophisticated while talking about shoving handfuls of rosemary and thyme up some unfortunate bird. I'm still talking about cooking here.
But in Tim's cupboard, we have this monstrous pickle-jar sized aberration, calling itself a 'Melange d'herbes pour salades'. It is no such thing. It is 25 grams of dry leaves in a jam-jar.
The handy label says 'le contenu de cet emballage est equivalent a environ 285 g d'herbes fraiches', which basically means they've dried out a third of a kilogram of fresh herbs and put them in this pot. This 25g pot. That's a waste of over 90% of their original weight, and I bet that 90% had all the good bits in. This jar contains the detritus of hundreds of poor, unloved, unsung 'herbes', and it should be ashamed of itself.
Also, the first thing on the ingredients is 'Persil'. That's a detergent. I rest my case.
#3 - Chocolate Santa
I don't know why, but this thing scares the living crap out of me. Actually, I do know why and I'm now going to tell you, because if i went round not knowing things then I wouldn't make for very entertaining reading would I? No. That's right. Well done.
I don't like this because it has lived in our flat for longer than I have. It lives on top of the fridge, and every time I go to get some milk it looks wistfully at me with its alarmingly sad eyes. Look at them. He's smiling with his mouth, but his eyes betray his true thoughts. Dark thoughts, of drinking himself to a stupor on stolen sherry, then rigging a hosepipe to the back of one of his reindeers and shutting the garage door.
Also, if you can tear your gaze away from his tearful expression, you might notice what he's doing with his hands. Yes, one of them is holding a small bear, and the other is holding his massive sack. Except, as the sack is the same colour as his coat, from a distance it looks more like he's reaching for his massive 'sack', if you know what I mean. And if you don't, I mean his genitals.
He's a depressed, onanistic purveyor of children's toys, and I think we were all taught from a young age to avoid these types of people, and not put chocolate icons of them on our fridge. Unless, it would seem, you went to school in France.
#4 - More Salt
Yep. More salt. As if one kilogram of flotsam is not enough to satisfy your salty needs, here is some more. Except, wait a second! This is 'Sel Fou'! What does that mean?
It means 'crazy salt'. That's what it means. To illustrate the point, they've illustrated the point by illustrating a court jester with an extremely suggestive expression right there on the label.
'Look at me!' he seems to leer, 'I've just had some crazy salt, and now I'm ready to entertain some drunken hen party by taking my costume off and repeatedly cock-slapping an intoxicated bride-to-be.'
So, how does this salt qualify as crazy, I hear you ask? Well, a quick look at the ingredients let me know that as well as containing salt, it also contains onions, parsnips and garlic. Mental! If that's what qualifies as crazy, then whenever I cook a spaghetti bolognaise you should lock up your womenfolk because I go certifiably deranged. 'Look out, Dan's putting parsnips on that roast! He's a veritable R. P. McMurphy!' Although McMurphy wasn't actually crazy, and neither is this salt.
#5 - Tinned Pâté
Oh for crying out loud. Pâté. In a tin. That's like taking the Mona Lisa and sticking it on some teenage boy's bedroom wall so she can watch him masturbating, repeatedly and vigorously.
Pate (sod the acutes and circumflexes) is one of the greatest things ever to be invented by man. It's bloody lovely. Words fail me. And to stick it in a tin, like some common sardine, that's just low. That's like a war-crime. If there was a war of deliciousness, this product would be Heinrich Himmler.
This pate has four different bit of pig. Liver of pig, meat of pig, fat of pig and jelly of pig. This is all well and good. It also has the other things you get in pate; onions, egg-whites, wheat-flour, seasoning etc - and that's all good as well. It also has milk proteins, which is somewhat grisly, and 'aromes', which I can only assume means 'smells'. Although why you'd need to put an artificial smell into something is beyond me. Anyway, all of the above is okay, and I don't really mind. What I do mind is that - when you're ready for deliciousness, toasts akimbo, one hand on knife and the other on belly - you need to grab a little steel ringpull and open it up exactly the way you would do with a can of cat food.
This is wrong. I don't care how many 'Qualite Superieure's you have spattered about the packaging. If I want pate, I'd rather go and cut it out of a goose myself, rather than suffer the indignation of seeing it in a tin. After all, I don't think that's not how it would like to be remembered.
Buried in Pomposity is written by Dan, who really likes France and French food and his French housemate Tim, no matter how much he may have convinced you otherwise. He also plays in a pretty good band. Called Buried in Pompeii. Check them out sometime.
