Food! Glorious Food!

Food! Glorious food! I love food. And that fact is now more excruciatingly evident than ever before. The reason? Well I’ll let you guess. It starts with a ‘d’ ends with a ‘t’ and there is an ‘ie’ in-between it. I’ve never liked dieting because I like eating. But because I like eating, I am now dieting. Fascinating how that works.

In France, the temptations are great. If you’re hungry or lusting after a freshly baked baguette you might as well stay inside munching on celery, because baby, this town is full of freshly-baked-baguette-carrying-Frenchies wafting the delicious smell into your nostrils.

Walking around Saint Germain or le Marais is torture. Everyone is eating and drinking, diving into their plates of golden crisp French-fries accompanied by a pan-fried sumptuous-semi-bleeding steak and a bottle of a rounded Bordeaux. Aaand if you’re really naughty you follow up your already calorie packed lunch with a plate of profiteroles (or bourbon vanilla ice cream filled cream-puffs) drizzled with warm dark hot chocolate. Excusez-moi but I am drooling.

One of the French dieting standards is quinoa. Hmm. No longer drooling.

The woman who says, “Oh, I just love quinoa! It is so versatile. Healthy too!” is dead on the inside and has chalk for taste buds. I’m going to go out on a limb and declare that there is no enticing way to prepare quinoa. I’ve made it like a risotto, put it in salads, substituted it for couscous like a tabuli and yet, it is still reminiscent of being force-fed a plate of hair.

All jokes aside ladies: if you were confronted in a restaurant and were given the specials, one being a tagliatelle in a white wine sauce with chanterelle mushrooms or anything with quinoa in it…which would you choose?

Hello! Heart-attack-on-a-plate-s’il-te-plait!

As my mothers hairdresser once said, “I’d rather be fat and eat my cheesecake.”

And as I say, “I wish I could eat everything and be a size 0.”

And as the world tells me, “That is impossible, suck it up and eat your quinoa.”

Nuit Blanche or Nuit Blah?

Late-night exhibits, hidden corners of the ‘City of lights’ exposed, amorous rendez-vous and drinking…lots of drinking is the definition of the once-a-year event that the charming little village of Paris calls Nuit blanche or “White Night”. The Nuit Blanche allows for the arty-party people to observe alternative art exhibitions all night long with an extended metro curfew and two-for-one drink specials all around town

So the question is…Nuit Blanche? Or encore a Nuit Blah? When I first lived in Paris (in 2006) I encountered my first Nuit Blanche when on my way home from dinner with a friend I noticed (around 10pm) that there were an enormous amount of people out on the street, the metros were packed strike-style and tourist areas were teeming with wine-sodden Frenchies oohing and aahing over something rather a-typical. Obviously I had no clue what was going on and went to bed early. Hence…a true and triumphant Nuit á la clueless American.

Fast-forward 4 ½ years, 6 lovely trips back to Paris, and my now residency of 6 months and I was ready to enjoy Nuit Blanche with all the superior knowledge of a faux-française. I was expecting-a fun night of bar-hopping, seeing friends in varying states of inebriation and walking around Paris in the cold crisp autumn air at 4am with mon chérie.

Thanks to the germ-incubators I get to watch every day, I was plagued with a cold and a gastro-intestinal virus, which was not aided when I decided to eat a steak tartare. To skip the gory details, lets just say that diarrhea medication and cocktails do not go together. Bar hopping and sipping an herbal tea valiantly while my friends were drinking mojitos was just the start of this years Nuit Blanche. After finishing my delicious and stomach-settling tea we jaunted off to a birthday party where the Spice Girls was pumpin’, the champagne flowin’ and the headache was commencin’.

After the second round of “If you wanna be my lovah” I left my boyfriend to fend for himself and I escaped from the hazy cigarette smoke filled apartment into the crisp autumn air. At 1am I was at home thoroughly enjoying a box of Kleenex and a few chapters of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

It wasn’t a total bust. I did manage to see an exhibit on line 9 at the deserted station of Saint-Martin. It was alive with theatrical lighting and art students duped into wearing black and doing performance art into the wee small hours. It lasted approximately 35 seconds.

So this year, I’m going to chalk one up to experience. A few words of advice to escape a nuit barf…do not eat a steak tartare unless it’s fresh. To state it baldly, this Nuit Blanche was a grade-A-certifiable-insert-Copland’s-‘Hoe-down’-here Nuit Blah.