On Living with Boys...

Tips:

1. Don't leave tasty food hanging around.

2. Tasty foods are more at risk for consumption by males. Therefore, buy "untasty" or "healthy" foods. Foods with lower risk include: quinoa, fat free milk, nuts, anything with pink packaging, lentils, spinach, any vegetable really.

3. Disguise "tasty" food in "untasty" food containers. Put precious eggs in a large empty low fat yogurt tub, delicious flavored dessert yogurts in an old white wine box. Most anything can be hidden inside these yogurt tubs or old wine boxes. Except milk. And taking the label off the milk to try to pass it off as a "mysterious untasty substance" may work at first but they catch on after about a week. Still trying to figure this one out.

4. They believe the "cleaning fairy" exists.  A drastic change in the cleanliness of the apartment and kitchen from weeks of pizza crusts, soda bottles, grime, dirty dishes, unwashed cooking pans, and more to spotless, shiny, and smelling like bleach in their minds only means the cleaning fairy finally came. 

5. Placing cleaning supplies like bleach, sponge, paper towels etc right next to their pile of mess doesn't send any comprehensible signals.

6. Expect strange events. (All night gaming in the dining room with full on extension cords, headsets, and battle cry's?)

7. Retaliating by eating all their cookies and Nutella is completely justified. And mostly unnoticed...I hope.





Disclaimer: This is a wide generalization based off of not reliable, not valid, uncontrolled case study conditions with some experimenter and participant bias thrown in there. We love our roommates and enjoy their company entirely. Now they know what's in all those yogurt containers... 

Donnez-moi SUGAR

Image from pinterest

Not sure if we've been over France's love of all things chocolaty, creamy, fluffy, and sweet.  I know I know. French people are supposedly thin because they eat small portions of really delicious food (and that thing about big lunches and not snacking). I've heard it too. I have never ever seen this in action. My students are always eating Prince cookies.  The other teachers have rich cake in the teachers lounge almost every day. I see high school students walking around eating madelines and croissants.  My roommate eats nutella crepes almost every day twice a day. Portions at restaurants are pretty massive and I have a hard time finishing them*.  It's scoffed upon if you don't order dessert.  I've made my point. Anyways I'm at an American style cafe called "Columbus Cafe" and you would not believe the amount of whipped cream and cookies I've seen consumed in the past hour. The whipped cream towers at least three and a half inches above the top of the cup and everyone orders it. It's pretty wonderful that no one harbors guilt about ordering whatever the hell they want.

The cookie I'm eating is the size of my face. Meant to be shared? Maybe...

In other coffee related news...We hit up Starbucks in Paris** and had an encounter with infamous Parisian customer service values.  We go in, order our drinks, pay...normal order of things right? What comes next? Oh they make your drink? No! Really?! Cause the barista thought that the way things went were...I order, I  pay, she doesn't make drink, I wait, we notify her of her mistake, she gets super angry and says we were supposed to wait next to the bar or else she doesn't know we need our drinks. Although I think the whole ordering and paying thing should have been an indication that drinks were needed. Anyways in the US we'd have come out of this with a $20 gift card. Here we got our money back, no coffees, no apologies, and left. 

Finished the cookie. BAM.

* Who are we kidding- of course I finish them.

** Yadayada you're in France and go to Starbucks?! Sometimes I just need it ya know?

Cuisine-ing at a bar

Last Tuesday Katy and I had the opportunity to cook with our french bartender/restaurant owner friends. Although I mostly de-shelled some pistachios and pressed "marche" on the food processor, I can now claim I have cooked a "terrine" from scratch.  After cooking we ate a delicious meal with cheese, wine and apres meal drink included.

 So many meats

Giant Cheese

Photos courtesy of Katy at http://katy-out-there.tumblr.com/

Canteen life

My favorite yaourt

So once a week I eat at my school's canteen. It's a large and scary flashback into my own time I spent at the middle school cafeteria.  Plastic trays, buckets of utensils, running gossipy children all around. However instead of the free for all cafeteria style of different lines for different menu options, pizza, fries, chips, chicken fingers, soda fountain, milk station, cookie station etc, there's one line for the one meal planned for that day.  Everyone waits in one line and for the five course (or more) meal. Check out what I ate for lunch the other Friday.

First course: grapefruit and banana
second course: mushroom quiche
main course: huge fried calamari (didn't want it didn't have a choice), rice and green beans
bread course: bread and cheese
dessert: lil custard creation
apres dessert: yogurt

note: Everyone eats everything, no changing options or refusing. It's noted and looked down upon. French people have supergenes.
Oh and it was 2.50 euros.