My Life in France

Isn't it incredible how a photograph can transport you back in time, to far away places, to memories you didn't know you still had? Old pictures I recently unearthed in old photo albums reveal a life I lived in France, when all I had to do was look out the kitchen window to be inspired. Just a few pictures tell so much:

Here is a typical French dinner, served by my elderly host, consisting of meat and vegetables, freshly baked bread, fresh fruit for dessert, and of course the famous cheese platter.

This was the room in which I awoke to the street of the Bastille below my window. The bed in which I slept, the journal splayed out to record my adventures. I wonder where that journal is now!

There was time to savor life and food in Paris. Time to stop at a market for lunch supplies, at a boulangerie for a baguette, and a patisserie for at least two pastries per day. (What? I only had 6 weeks to try them all! I was on a pastry tasting mission!)

The view from the top of Notre Dam sums up Paris for me. It remains the most aesthetically pleasing city I have ever visited, simultaneously frustrating and intoxicating, like a bad crush - one I never quite got over and wouldn't say no to even now.

On Food and Memory

I feel the same way about produce as this girl

I remember a while back, my friend Heidi showing me an article by Andrew Knowlton, aka "the hot guy from Bon Appetit magazine". This was my introduction to the man known as The Foodist.

In perusing one of the lucky 25-cent magazines I scored from the library, I saw a Foodist column in which he posed a thought-provoking question: What is your first food memory? (His was Halloween candy, by the way.)

The question got me reflecting on my own earliest edible memories. While food played an influential role in my life, it took me a while to sort through all of the memories. I find it increasingly hard to pinpoint specific time frames in the expansive, mostly unstructured pool of memories that constitutes My Childhood.

I came up with two experiences, although I couldn't tell which one came first, but both occurred while my parents I lived in a tiny rented house built in the 1940's.

The first is more like a series of experiences that have merged into one collective memory. It is cold, dark, early in the morning, wintertime. My father and I huddle in front of the wall-mounted space heater eating the same breakfast every day: Cheerios with milk, topped with either canned applesauce, or browning bananas that were seemingly always overripe. Strange - to this day I still dislike all of those foods, individually but especially collectively.

The second memory occurred in the summertime. I am sitting on a couch bathed in golden sunlight, with freshly picked apricots from the tree in our backyard. I am engaged in the process of learning how to twist the two halves apart and pick out the brown pit, then sink my teeth into the blissfully sweet flesh. The contrast of these two memories perhaps proved prophetic: to this day, I still prefer the weather and food of summer.

What's your earliest food memory?