Forgetting to Remember

LIZ SAYS: Sometimes it is easy to forget where you are. For the last weeks I have been all over the internet looking for faucets and learning about LED lighting. Most of the info I used in the States is useless. Kohler is not the king of French pots. All those brands that seem entirely too expensive in the US are normal, run of the mill items here. And all the brands you are used to in the US are expensive exotica here. Anyway, the weather has been more gray than not, so I haven’t felt like I’ve missed much. Meanwhile, outside there is one of this whole gorgeous raison d’etre , but oh, I must pick this and that before the info is given to the contractor. Floor tiles must be chosen. We spent most of Saturday and a few hours Sunday at the french equivalent of Home Depot. Its is called Leroy Merlin (luh-rah meyr-loh), sounds better in french. This is a giant DYI paradise. It is actually more like Target and Home Depot rolled into one on three whoppin’ floors with escalators. Not the kind with steps but the airport kind, a moving incline, which my bad knee just loves! Oh, me achin’ parts. Sorry, just watched an Irish movie with Robert Mitchum last night while trying to go to sleep. On day two Adrian was constantly distracted by fun decor items, while I was bleedin’ for the tile section. Oh right, American in France not Ireland. Back to the brickolage for the carrelage. French can make the most mundane of things sound poetic. It means back to the hardware for the floor tiles. I often get distracted wondering how they managed to make a language where just about everything rhymes. So, after a hard won battle of choices, we decided to go out and have a nice dinner. We went home to rinse off the exhausted construction brain and convert to ‘bon soir’ brain. Adrian sent an email, meet us at nine at Square Trousseau. We treated ourselves to a taxi and met our buds at a lovely dark square. More like a London square, with a gated garden with a very large gazebo and apartment buildings all around. Past the burgundy velvet curtain, we entered an Art Nouveau paradise. The smells of warm food on a cold night. (Don’t laugh, it was all of 40 degrees.) Soft golden walls with corinthian columns and most importantly an empty table for 4. After getting reacquainted with Frederic whom we hadn’t seen since their trip to the US, we ordered. It was a proper french restaurant with a proper french menu. I decided on the lentil salad to share and the veal with leeks. But, it was Frederic’s plate that drew my attention. After a kir and a glass of Chinon, I was ready. My first escargot. I had always recoiled from the idea of eating the nasty looking creatures leaving trails all over the rocks. I could not image anything could ever make them edible, let alone tasty. But, then, I have always had an immense weakness for garlic and the whole restaurant was bathed in the lovely smell. Frederic plucked the morsel, green with buttery parsley, with the tiny three pronged fork and looked at me. I was intoxicated by the smell of garlic, it was seductive, it was delicious. I had eaten it before I even knew it. It was chewy, but not rubbery, buttery and so inundated with garlic, that I was in heaven. Then came the frogs legs. A cute little plate of stretched out pale thighs. They we at once adorable and need I repeat perfumed by the lovely smell of garlic. I hate to say it but they did taste like chicken. They had little bones, but they were like little garlicky bits of moist chicken breast in the shape of lovely little legs. Then I remembered, yes, I am in Paris. Our Franco-Anglo conversation peppered with half sentences of both languages was typically french covering everything from personal taste to the perfect foodstuffs to world events, as well as “aren’t we great, look what we have accomplished today”. Okay, sing to the tune of I Kissed a Girl: I ate a snail and I liked i-it, it tasted like yummy garlic!