Tartiflette

For some time now I have been lacking inspiration to take photographs. One of the reasons may be the backlog that has built up of photos I have taken but not actually done anything with - 900+ at this mornings count. Anyway I am spending part of today getting to grips with this and as a result decided to post some of them here.

Tartiflette after leaving the oven

First of all though, I made my first Tartiflette on Friday. Tartiflette is a French dish which was actually launched to promote the use of the Reblochon cheese!! It is now a firm favourite in the winter and cold conditions such as after a day in the Alps. I took three recipes from the internet and made my own version.

~ 750g of waxy potatoes.
2 good sized onions.
1 clove of garlic
100-150g of Lardons (chopped bacon with the fat still on)
Half a Reblochon cheese (although I used a little more than this)
Creme Fraiche
White wine - for drinking
Seasoning
Green salad

Serves 3-4

I boiled the potatoes whole until just soft enough. In the meantime I chopped and sweated the onions and finely chopped garlic down until close to soft but not brown. Add the lardons for five minutes or so to the hot pan and seasoning. Once the bacon /lardons are starting to look cooked too slosh in half a glass of white wine, but keep the rest of the bottle for drinking with the meal. Add seasoning, but no salt as there is plenty in the cheese and bacon.

In a large shallow pyrex dish most recipes tell you to start with the potatoes, but I placed some cheese slices on the bottom of the dish as an added touch. Then peel (if you want) the potatoes and cut about half into thick slices, creating a layer in the bottom of the dish. Then add the onion/garlic/bacon mixture, spreading evenly across the potato layer. Add another potato layer on top of this.

Finally I added several dollops of creme fraiche and smoothed that down before adding strips of Reblochon to cover the top. It is this top layer that will use about half a cheese.

My Tartiflette before cooking and with the remaining cheese

Cook for 20-30 minutes in a moderately hot oven (Gas 5, 190C) until the cheese has browned. Serve hot with a green salad and dry white wine. Bread is also good for mopping the plates. The remains, if there are any, are good either hot or cold over the next few days should you need any further insulation.

French Food continued

As you may know in my move to France I have been exploring aspects of the culture and the nature of food that is available. One of these ways has been to indulge my love of all things dairy and sample some of the available cheeses. When faced with a considerable choice it is hard to know where to begin, but well some methods just work rather nicely. In my case at present I am picking up one or two cheeses a week that are on offer or a block of it is reduced. One could argue that this means the cheese won't be at its best, but then there is always a risk that I won't like said cheese and so I'd also be wasting money. In this way I waste less.

Reportedly the cheese that gets exported from France must have a certain level of pasteurisation to normalise it. This has an impact on its flavour, but in France some cheeses are not pasteurised. Equally the level of mould on a cheese seems to be part of its character and not all moulds actually taste 'bad'. So the quote of the day has to be that "French cheeses only become good when they start to move by themselves". This was in response to a variety of Brie with which I had populated my sandwich... I could smell it through the plastic bag and the waft as I ate it worked its way across the office. The taste was fantastic, but very 'unBritish'!

Cheeses of note: (updated Nov 2011)
Goats cheeses (chevre) are popular down here and are usually very tasty. There is one particular one from the Carmargue region which starts very pungent and then grows a skin after two weeks and changes flavour, assuming you have tolerated it that long!

Emmenthal - a generally boring cheese to just eat, slightly rubbery, but very popular as a grated cheese for cooking and can be bought in huge quantities

Brie - Not just one type of Brie but a whole family of soft cheeses from tasty to very tasty and mellow to pungent. Brie de Maubert appears to be particularly fine ;)

Comte - medium Cheddar with a little extra

Reblochon - THE cheese for Tartiflette, see other post. Slightly salty, sticky and meltable.

Boursin - Creamy and tasty, for spreading on bread

Camembert - actually a type of Brie, this needs a little time to mature into a real stinker. Strong flavour and very good on stuffed mushrooms if you have little nublettes left.

Colomniers - similar to Camembert, not quite as strong flavoured.

Munster/St Auban - Sticky outer shell, matured for several months. Pungent sticky cheese that is quite salty. Not a strong flavour despite its smell.

Anyway I expect I shall return and add further varieties to this as and when I discover them. I frequently return to the Brie and Goats cheese areas.

The cheese course is also a rather good invention and comes either before or after dessert as a little enjoyment. The end of a baguette or a few little biscuits and a choice of tasty morsels is really a lovely way to end a meal. Not every day of course, but I appreciate it all the more when I do.

Well, A beintot and I shall go back to my slab of Frangipane I am munching this evening. :)

Moving House

Something I have never seen before - a lift from a lorry to a balcony to facilitate removing all the possessions from a n apartment. Genius!

A sign of the times??

No Elephants on the beach, La Ciotat, Provence, France 10/7/11

Is this a sign of our times and the problems people have with weight??
Or simply someone having fun where there was once a dog.
NB. the circus was in the local town and there was a performance of clowns tonight....

Provencal Pizza

Pizzas in the south of France are not like pizzas from the UK. First of all you only get one size - large; and secondly you only get one thickness - thin. I think this is as close to a traditional pizza as I can image, as you would expect close to the Italian border...
Pizza is also as readily available as a take-away as a kebab,  burger or fish and chips is in the UK. There are even Pizza vans on the corners of many streets selling slices of pizzas rather than whole pizzas, complete with an oven in the back of the van.
The thing I have been really impressed by is the quality of the ingredients, take tonight's four cheese pizza. A British one might use Cheddar, Double Gloucester, Cheshire and something else, but this one had Mozzarella, Rochefort, Goats Cheese and Emmental (I think) on it. Very tasty. And to round it off I was sat on some rocks by the sea, watching the sun go down, the air temperature was still around 25 degrees and it was comforatble in shorts and teeshirt.  The only downside was seeing all the smog in the air and the very red sun. Still I can't complain when I know it is dull and dreary at home!

Monsieur ou Organisme?

While trying to book accommodation for a few nights I was faced with a form asking for my civilite (or title as the English would normally say). The options were:

Monsieur

Madame

Mademoiselle

Organisme

No choice of Docteur, but I think I certainly qualify as an organism....

Bonne journee Monsieur et Madames,
A bientot,
Organisme Martin

La Fete de Musique

Tuesday the 21st, for those not in touch with the natural world, was the longest day of the year, commonly known as Midsummer. To some this means rituals, to others staying up all night to see the sun rise again is the objective, to the French it has become a festival. I can’t tell you the origins of the festival without looking them up, but midsummer is celebrated in Marseille through a Fete de Musique. On this day anyone can play any music they like, anywhere, anyhow, any time without jurisdiction.

Walking through Marseille last night after seeing a friend off to the airport, the streets were alive. In some sections life went on as normal, notably the Algerian section near St Charles, but in others music was being performed in a variety of locations. I walked into the city centre and around the Vieux (old) Port area and was amazed at the number of people out and about. It was a cross between a huge demonstration and a street party for numbers. I stopped beside a backstreet bar where an electro-rock band were performing covers (rather well I might add) to a 100 or so people – many drinking, some dancing, everyone enjoying the music. In other places there were little groups performing their version of music from hymns to a hiphop DJ beside the port, African drums to a full-blown orchestra on a purpose-built stage. The orchestra had an audience of at least 1000 people in a square, all watching for free, just like all the other music. Other notable musicians included an appalling one man playing over a vocal backing track and singing along in time; and a pick-up truck that pulled up at the busiest traffic-lights on the front, stopped and turned on a sound system complete with DJ and seven dancers on the back of the truck. This rapidly turned into a throng of 500+ people blocking most of the traffic and dancing outside of a ‘quality burger’ chain of restaurant. Ten or fifteen minutes later the car horns became irate and the truck moved onto another location. All in all, in the right locations you could walk for 30 seconds and get another genre of music to stop and listen to or avoid. The whole evening was certainly memorable.

Surrounding this mayhem you had all the standard street sellers marketing their wares. No I don’t need a pair of sunglasses at 11pm thanks! No, a flashing light-saber/rotating toy is not what I want. There were also many people taking advantage of the evening dragging around a coolbox hastily attached to an old person’s shopping trolley base selling cans of soft drinks at €1+ a time. There was also a wide range of ages of people out and about from the teenagers, through students, families with their small children, adult groups and even some old people looking on with interest or enjoying a meal in a restaurant and listening along to the music too.

Finally I had the general impression that there were a number of people on the lookout for a cheap steal of a wallet or phone, but by keeping my things firmly in front of me I don’t think anyone tried. I guess it happens everywhere, but it more or less obvious to the tourist or passer-by.

If I am in a French city on June 21^st next year I shall once again be wandering the streets looking for a party and enjoying random musical performances. This country holds many surprises for the inexperienced!

Virtual Calanques

I realise that most of my posts from France so far have been descriptive rather than visual, so to give you an idea of part of the area I have put together a selection of images to take you on a virtual walk through the Calanques – a protected area between Marseille and the south coast. The region is predominantly Limestone and gives characteristic scenery which is further specialised by the southern Mediterranean climate and heavy human usage of the area. So without further ado get your boots on, pick up the essential bottle of water and follow me.

A path through the Calanques just above the last buildings as we climb steeply out of the valley floor. This isn’t the most popular route, but it gives us a good overview of the area.

Stopping to drink some water on this hot morning after the climb you take in the view which has opened up over Marseille. The centre is around 5km away and can be found behind and to the right of the hill in the distance.

Looking the other way you see the strange sight of a university nestled into the countryside. I point out my building as behind the long building, but the campus itself isn’t as pretty as the location may suggest. After dark you can find wild pigs grazing the grounds though in the style of Asterix and Obelix….

Further along the ridge walk, following little dashes of different coloured paint and paying attention to whether the marks are lines (indication path direction) or crosses (the pathe doesn’t go this way) you stop again atop Col de Luminy and look out to an offshore island hidden in the haze.

Coming a bit lower we enter some deciduous woodland composed of a variety of trees, generally stunted. Among them though there are a few wild flowers among the low scrub and a butterfly is perched on one, resembling a Hedge Brown from back home, but I suspect it is not the same.

Crossing the path every metre or so are strange black centipedes like this one. Whatever they are seems to do rather well, but you can’t afford to be watching your feet the whole time. I suspect the mortality rate must be quite high on the busy paths.

After a path junction we descend down a steep valley on a concrete road, seemingly out of place in this semi-natural landscape. Around a corner this view of Sugiton calanque opens up and we marvel at the strange pale landscape.

In a sheltered corner we get a better chance to photograph both the vegetation and the scenery. Here Sugiton calanque is below us and the headland of Cap de Morgiou is in the distance.

After a swim at Sugiton in the clear 16 degree water of early June we take a different path away from the calanque and pass beneath a huge cliff. A momentary glimpse reveals quite a number of climbers on this face and we stop to watch them at their games – generally hanging in space and cursing… not like the Traditional climbers back home….!

Climbing high once again we stop for another breather as the vista has opened up again. Once again we can see Sugiton calanque and Morgiou in the background, but showing the elegant profile of Cap de Morgiou. The path along it is a killer in the heat. Strangely we seem to have caught a lull in the middle of the day where most of the tourist boats have departed. At times this morning we had seen three or four boats crammed with people within these calanques, paying €30+ a time from Cassis or Marseille.

After heading beneath a headland, we climb up a secluded valley at the back and finally feel like we have the area to ourselves, rather than the ever present human being. Up at 400m above sea level the cloud closes in and we can hear a rumble of thunder.

Cresting the ridge we can once again see down into Morgiou and this time along the South coast of the Calanques. However we don’t stop here for long as the rumbles are getting stronger and a few drops of rain have been felt. Experience says that rain here is a deluge or not at all..

 And so scurrying down the other side we make it back into the woodland and down a broad path to the university campus where we join the hoards of people waiting for a bus back to Marseille. Luckily they are quite frequent and we board one before the downpour starts bouncing off of the road. We have only walked 7 or 8 miles, but in the heat it feels considerably further and the lack of places to fill up a water bottle is obvious. 1.5 litres just lasted the day.

Cider with Rosie?

Cidre with Rosie?

I’m sure this isn’t what Laurie Lee meant when he wrote his famous book Cider with Rosie, but at the time I doubt rosé wine had made it to rural England. However it appears that the French now drink cider… or maybe they are trying to tempt the ladies of this province off of their Rosé wines and sparkling tipples. Either way I shall wait to see if pink ‘cidre’ takes off over here.

There is a saying which goes that if a film needs to be advertised it can’t be very good….

Kid in a Sweet Shop

In the third of this series of little windows on French culture… I just found a good sized supermarket. Up until now I had only found bakeries and small food shops in the centre of Marseille. An enforced move to a hotel on the outskirts landed me next door to the Casino. Consulting the dictionary Casino = casino… but I had been seeing Petite Casino around Marseille already (although they were all shut as it was a bank holiday), and now here is a Geant Casino, in reality comparable to Tesco Extra in the UK.

I guess I was like a kid in a sweet shop, or possibly a better description as a child exploring another child’s toy cupboard. Wide eyes, wandering around vacantly, you can’t find what you are used to, but there is this whole maze of lively items to choose from! Despite not drinking much at the moment I did have to wander down the wine aisle to see what I was missing out on at the moment. If my impressions based on the bottle are correct there are some rather nice bottles of Alsace white wine waiting to be sampled at €6-8 a piece, Montbarzillac at €8 and full bottles of Sauternes for €6-11… NOM!!!

Other things that caught my attention was the profusion of cheeses (fromage) and preserved sausages (Saucisson, take Choritzo and change the flavour a bit and you won’t be far wrong). Bread will never be the same as the UK, but there was a good selection of baguettes and other types of bread too, along with the expected Croissant, little tartlettes and sweet puddings. I was rather tempted. Yoghurt doesn’t appear to come in the large Onken/Yeo Valley size that it does at home. You can get little pots in all shapes and sizes or absolutely massive pots of plain yoghurt. There also appeared to be less in the way of fresh meat available too than the UK.

Excluding food products there were plenty of books and magazine for sale, but all appeared to be in French. For some reason I had expected a selection of both.. I recognised a number of authors, but in each case they had been translated. William and Kate – un bon amour (or something like that) and Clive Cussler stuck with me.

I’m sure there will be other observations that will come to mind over time, but these were my initial impressions of my first Geant Casino!

Car Parking

In contrast to the post about the toilets, the French are very good at many things from car parking to food. I have only been here a few days but watching the small spaces that cars can and have got into is amazing. Any little nook and cranny seems to be capable of holding a car. In most of Britain, London excepted?, you need at least two foot at either end of your car once it is in the space in order to get into it. Here you can halve that at least. I guess if you have a lot of practise you know exactly where the bumpers of your car are and how to get into small spaces, but I am impressed. I don’t know if I want to try it..
As you might expect many cars have scrapes and dents down them, so I suspect that in parking tightly many of them scrape bollards, nudge up too tightly to other vehicles and so forth. I think it was a good thing not to bring my fairly new car down here!

Thinking of food. I could get used to popping into a boulangerie for a sandwich most lunchtimes. We are not talking your delicate triangular British jobs, sur ou sans crusts, but full-on demi-baguettes. Your typical French sandwich will set you back 3-4 euro, but be 30cm long and full of salad, ham, tuna, egg, meat, cheese etc. I had a particularly good goats cheese and salad one yesterday (Thursday), although I didn’t understand how much it was and had to hold out my handful of change to have the relevant 3.50 extracted from it. Such is the life of a poor, but hopefully improving, French speaker.

Anyone for a fresh croissant or pain au chocolate as I pass the bakery? 

Toilet Humour

The French have a way of doing things that is different to the UK. Maybe that is us, maybe it is France. Who can tell? (Comments on the back of a single postcard or equivalent please!) Possibly they are just ‘special’.

If anyone can enlighten me as to how you are meant to go to the toilet without touching the bowl, I would be interested. For those who don’t know many toilets lack seats and in some cases bowls at all from memory. As far as I can see it must be some trick of contortion or very strong thigh muscles to enable you to lean back against the wall behind and brace your legs either side, but frankly it doesn’t seem possible! Thankfully many touristique places, such as hostels, have toilet seats for their international guests, but there are still many who would like you to be as quick as possible.

On that note, I have also met a timer on the light which must have been set to one minute and 20s if you are lucky. No reading time for you mate! Although my arms were long enough to reset it from sitting down…

Welcome to Marseille

The Vieux Port, Marseille

Having travelled down from the UK the day before, my first day in Marseille, the first of a new month, was an eventful one. After getting up at a sensible hour of 9am I walked down to the Vieux (old) Port and had a wander around. I was amused by the strange mix of old and new buildings in the area and cultures too. From block to block the scene changes. Marseille was historically a major port and there are many North African cultures here as well as French. A waterside Spar provided an expensive breakfast, as it would also have done in the UK, and I found where the 21 bus for Luminy campus left from.

Arriving at the end of the bus route and the end of the road, I was struck by just how rural the campus is. If you type Luminy into a image search engine you’ll find a few aerial photos showing what I mean. Set in a valley away from the conurbation of Marseille itself limestone outcrops from scrubby vegetation provide the views, while dry Mediterranean soils shelter drought-surviving trees and thorn bushes. The campus buildings themselves were built in the 1960s and show that typical concrete squared off corners and covered walkways. Many of the buildings show signs of crumbling and neglect, strange for a University in my view. The corridors and stairways remind me of schools and the lifts have a hinged door to access them and tend to only be trusted on the way up! Set within this there is much sophisticated equipment.

I bumped into my supervisor/boss on the stairs and after a few flights we put two and two together and introduced each other! The rest of the day was spent filling in forms, meeting people and touring the laboratories of our building. For the most part there are various research groups working in many fields of chemistry, oceanography and biology, but they are split up by floors and stairways and I wait to see how much interaction goes on. My research group is small and I will be sharing an office with equipment and my supervisor. That will be a new experience. I did meet some lovely people working in the department though and found one doing her PhD on some very interesting jellyfish populations in a local lagoon.

I also got a taste for how the French system works when you realise you can’t have a contract without a bank account, or a bank account without bills and a place of residence, and likewise residence without a job or bank account… There are always ways around these things, but they are designed not to be easy. Equally I hadn’t realised that the 2^nd of June was a Bank Holiday (Ascension Day?) and so work was closed this day, and that most people would take the one ‘bridge’ day between the Bank Holiday and the weekend off too. I suppose in the UK most bank holidays are on a Monday so this doesn’t apply. The holiday didn’t help the visit to the bank or the search for accommodation for me.

Eric with his Gambas

In the evening I went down to a restaurant in the Vieux Port with someone from the hostel and ordered food. At first I thought we were being ignored by the waiter, but overlooked was probably closer to the truth. My opening gambit of “D’accord pour manger?” (Okay for food?) was a bit Franglish, but I managed to get through the rest of the ordering and meal speaking to him only in French. It did wonders for my confidence. I also had a small carafe of wine without any ill effects. Maybe I am gradually relaxing…? Either way I still think that the alcohol isn’t the cause of my recent allergy, but the thing that tips the balance between health and ill-health.

There is hope for this Englishman yet.

Weatherwise – 20 degrees, strong winds and showers is not pleasant for the French but was quite nice for me!