Some food bits:  There is this amazing fact that beer and wine in France are cheaper than juice and milk. So, it is tempting to pick up a $3.50 bottle of wine every time you go to the grocery store. My librarian is a wine connoisseur and today I asked him for the name of a good (but inexpensive) wine here and he pulled a bottle out of his mini fridge in the library!! But of course!! Doesn’t every teacher librarian keep a bottle of wine in their library?? He saw my eyes widen and responded “Mais Oui! You live in France now!”  …It is true that Chris and I were a little shocked to see tables of wine bottles and cheese wheels etc. all set up on Open House night and both teachers and parents drinking together!  Wine has been at every school function…:)

Food has been an interesting learning curve here. Most grocery store items are familiar (with a heavy emphasis on breads, cheeses, sliced ham and smoked salmon), but it’s tough cooking without a BBQ and meat is very expensive anyway, therefore, we have to get creative . For most of us Canadians, ‘no BBQ’ is a real challenge in itself. Also, it requires me to read all package information and instructions
 in French which takes some getting used to. We try to cook mainly with all fresh foods, but again, this means shopping every 2nd day and planning meals carefully so that you only buy the ingredients needed with the smaller refrigerators used in European apartments. We also shop at outdoor markets once a week. Our town has one every Wednesday and Saturday.

Besides the ‘NO BBQ challenge’ and ‘WINE & BEER everywhere dilemma’, I have been on a mission to find coffee cream.  I have bought 3 different things I thought could be coffee cream, but it was never quite right. I’ve asked different grocery workers for coffee cream and they all shake their head, and say (in French) – “We don’t put cream in our coffee.”  The only sure fact I know is that they do have little tiny coffee creamers that have a brownish UHT (non-refrigerated)   cream in it, and that is all I’ve seen used at parties. There are other products called ‘fleurette’, ‘creme fluid’ and ‘creme lite’ but the cream blobs out kind of lumpy and the taste isn’t quite right. Needless to say, it’s hard to make a coffee that is anything like home,…unless we go to Starbucks of course.  🙂 Which we do whenever we can! Most people have their own Espresso machine at home here, so there are no ‘Timmy’ line ups in Paris, and we don’t miss that!

MW