The first time I ever visited France I was about four years old and I was stopping over to visit some of my mum’s childhood friends before flying back to Colombia after having lived in England for about two years.
The trip made a really lasting impression on me and I have a surprising amount of memories from the trip despite having very few memories from before or after. My first memory of a zebra crossing was in France (on the way to a supermarket) where I made my mum buy me babybell cheese covered in red wax, again a first memory for me, and snails. I remember my mum making me ask her friend Valerie in French if she would please cook the snails for me and I also remember trying my first avocado in France, where most of the adults were delightfully entertained by the fact that I thought you could eat the skin!
After dinner we were sent to bed early so that Santa could come and boy what a fun night that was! We departed for Colombia soon after where I remember my dad’s excitement at having a flat with a Christmas tree all set up for us. I have very few memories after that except of going to school for a while, but France and my adventures there really stayed with me.
The second time I went to France I went to meet up with my best friend and sadly we were both too broke to really enjoy a lot of the delicious food – that being said we did indulge in cheese and plenty of wine (maybe a little too much), some delicious crepes sprinkled with Grand Mariner and brown sugar, and other pastries. I also discovered some that I really didn’t enjoy such as canelés. Now that I have a stable job I cannot wait to go back to France and really indulge in a lot of the food!
When I think of food in France I think of pastries, baguettes, coq au van, cassoulet, ratatouille, pomme dauphinoise, quiche Lorraine, bouillabaisse, onion soup, cheese, moules marinieres, crepes, souffle… and I decided to try onion soup because I’d only had it once before and had some ambivalent memories of it. Well let me tell you that this recipe for me was a disaster – I really wasn’t impressed and I think it is partly because I tried to make it vegetarian but also because it gave me a really bad IBS flare up.
French Onion soup normally calls for rich beef stock, and I chose a recipe that I won’t share here which replaced it with vegetable stock and a dash vegetarian Worcestershire sauce. By the time I was done cooking down the onions for the almost hour it takes I found that the soup really lacked an umami quality which I think would have been there had I used beef stock. Needless to say I think I owe France a re-visit but be grateful that I’m not sharing this recipe as it really didn’t go very well.
Bình luận