Gouda, lovely gouda

Thursday, July 15, 2010 Day 15
Roger pointed out that our stay in Paris is one quarter over. We went to the market this morning. Thursdays must be clothing day, or clothing and miscellaneous non-food day. At least half of the food vendors were missing, and in their place lots of clothing, plus other interesting vendors. There’s the guy who has cutting boards, trivets and lots of other interesting items made out of wood. There’s the spice guy, who may be the only one in the whole market. We checked him out for cream of tartar, but since I forgot to look up the translation before we left, I couldn’t ask him about it. We did look at everything white that he had, and none of it was cream of tartar. There’s a furniture guy selling what looked like really good quality furniture. There was a vendor selling all sorts of kitchen miscellany, including pot scrubbers, potato peelers, cooking spoons, other utensils, batteries and plastic novelties. There was a guy selling stainless steel cookware. There is always someone at a stall selling “Ron Popeil” items. This morning it was a woman selling multi-bladed scissors, nifty for cutting up herbs. I don’t know what else she was touting them for – we didn’t stick around. Last week there was the guy selling a set of tools for cutting decorative vegetables and fruit. There have been a couple of others as well, but I can’t recall what they were pushing.

We bought gouda. Boy, did we buy gouda. We went into a fromagerie to buy some cheese, and Roger, conservative tongue that he has, decided on some natural gouda (there was some flavored with basil as well). Cheese is sold by the gram or kilogram (if you want that much), so I asked him how much. He wasn’t prepared for the question, and we had just been buying fruits and veggies, so he just answered 500 grams without really considering. The clerk weighed the slab she had, eyeballed 500 grams, then weight what she had cut. It turned out to be 580 grams (1.2 pounds), and she asked if that was okay. I agreed and she wrapped it up. This is the usual procedure in a shop or at a market stall – when we are buying something and ask for a certain amount of a larger item, they cut some off, weight it and ask if that is sufficient. This morning we bought some ribs, and asked for a kilo. The slab turned out to weight 895 grams, somewhat less than the kilo we had asked for. The attendant asked if that was sufficient or if we wanted exactly a kilo. We took what she had. Two pounds of ribs is enough for the two of us. But, back to the gouda, we now have about twice as much cheese as we usually buy – in Louisiana we generally bought 8-ounce packages of cheese. I decided to make potatoes au gratin to go with the ribs. We also bought two petite pineapples – they were 2 for 2€.

We went to the grocery store for milk and some cream for the potatoes, and Roger wanted to get a marinade for the ribs. He couldn’t find anything suitable, and I told him I could make a marinade if he wanted me to. He agreed, and we picked up some capers and something from Peru which was an orange/lime marmalade-type thingy. There were two flavors of the marmalade stuff, the other being mango/passion fruit/pineapple. I gave him a choice of marinade flavored with either of those or with cranberry sauce, which I found on a shelf around the corner. We came home and began concocting the marinade and the potatoes. Roger peeled and sliced potatoes while I mixed olive oil and cider vinegar, salt, pepper, some capers and some of the marmalade stuff. I threw in some Moroccan seasoning from the spices on hand, along with some basil and oregano. I tasted at this point and it needed more marmalade stuff. I ended up adding half the bottle, although it was a small one, only 24 grams, or about six ounces, I think. When I finished concocting the marinade, I was impressed with myself – it tasted really, really good. I may not be able to figure out a French cell phone but I am one hell of a cook! I also put together the potatoes au gratin using a good deal of the gouda cheese and some cream. Yum! When we got home from our walk, we cooked both the potatoes and the ribs at the same time. When they had been cooking for half an hour, we added carrots which Roger had kindly peeled and sliced to the bottom of the rib baking pan and cooked everything another half an hour. At that time, we checked the carrots and they were not done, so we cooked the ribs and carrots another 10 minutes, but declared the potatoes done. When the timer rang again, we took out the ribs, removed the carrots from the pan and tossed them in the microwave for another minute or so. In the meantime, I deglazed the dregs in the pan with some sake and boiled the results down to about half, producing a wonderful sauce. The potatoes were delicious, too. They ought to be, with half a pound of gouda and almost a cup of cream! And look at me! I’m cooking with sake and capers! I can tell I have been reading Julie Powell’s blog too much when I start writing about how I cooked things!

This afternoon I spent a good half an hour trying to translate our cell phone agreement in the hopes that we could just return the phone and forget all about it. No such luck. So we trooped to Orange and had the clerk there undo whatever it is we did wrong and give us back our internet. Sigh. I have left most of the phone dealings to Roger so far, but I guess it is time for me to plunge in as well. I am bitterly disappointed that this phone, which I thought would be our friend, helper and constant companion on the streets, is next to useless for us. We can’t understand it, and we keep getting ourselves into situations where we can’t even use it and we have to go back to Orange to get them to straighten it out. When I think of it too much, I get so upset I am in tears. So I try not to think about it, but that means I am not trying to learn it. Sigh.

The weather was beautiful here today – the morning (by the time I got up) was in the 60s, and I don’t think it ever got up to 80. After our trek to Orange, we headed up to Gare Montparnasse to check out a fountain we saw briefly yesterday on our way to the parade. It is a huge disc in the center of a traffic circle which is slightly tilted, and its location and the tilt make it appear that water is running up the incline and running off. Then we went into a shopping center which consists almost entirely of clothing stores, but there was an Orange in there and we went in to check if they have a hard case for our phone, but no luck. The clerk there suggested that we try FNAC, which appears to be France’s version of Best Buy. No luck there either. Sigh.