Thursday, December 25, 2014

French Christmas Meal 2014

Snow, turkey, Christmas tree, presents...these are the elements that make me think of Christmas.
In our region, it hardly snows; in my family, we seldom eat turkey.
So there you go, we celebrated Christmas with no snow, no turkey, but with Christmas trees, plenty of presents, and scrumptious foods.

Seafoods are usually on the menu in our region since we are very close to the sea. On Christmas Eve, we started our celebration with slice of salmon or tuna on a toasted bread spread with savour cream, then sprinked with some chopped shallots. A few drop of lemon juice added some fragrance to the combination. Then we had rolled ham spread with cream cheese. Other finger foods including carrots cut into stick form, some nuts, and some pomelo.

Celebration would not be completed without a glass of champagne.

Another French Christmas tradition : eating foie gras with onion on a toast, then sprinkled with some salt. This is a heavy meal, not everyone can digest well the foie gras. I stopped eating since several years ago.

One of the signature dish of my FIL : scallop with wine sauce, in my family we like to eat it with panfried apple.

As mentioned in my previous post, finish one's plate means mopping the sauce with a slice of bread. Here I had no problem cleaning the sauce on the pan as it was too good to leave them to waste.

We continued to the cheese section : crêpe stuffed with cheese (not sure what type of cheese), the two went along very well.

My MIL signature dessert: raspberry Christmas cake. The traditional Christmas cake is made of lots of butter so it was very heavy. My MIL reduced the butter and matched it with rasberry, very refleshing.

Hubby saw Mangosteen imported from Malaysia so he decided to buy two. Very expensive, at 20€/kg, these two costed around 2€. My MIL mentioned that French love to try out exotic fruits during Christmas season.

Santa Claus passed by earlier this year as the little girl was a bit sick, she went to bed without eating dinner days before. Luckily she recovered on Christmas Eve, after meeting Santa, she was able to stay with us.

Here the little angle, very satisfied with the presents, waiting to blow off the candles as she was also celebrating her birthday. Yes, she has turned 5!

Christmas day lunch. Here were the appetizer.

We had this wine from 1996 to go along with the meal.

Boudin blanc : one kind of stuffed sauce with apple. Apparently it was a very old tradition to eat this during Christmas, but we don't do it often. I'm not a big fun personally.

We did not eat capon like every year, instead we had beef fondue. Again, not a big fun so I didn't eat much. We had the leftover Christmas cake and Tiramisu as dessert.

After the meal, the sun was shinning so we decided to go for a walk in the park nearby.

We also had our annual family photo taken. This year we are blessed with Awena joining our family.

Hope everyone had a blast like us this year, and wishing everyone a prosperous year ahead!

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Honey, please finish your plate!

When I eat rice, I make sure I finish every grain of rice in my plate. If I don't do it, this phrase will keep flashing in my brain "谁知盘中餐,粒粒皆辛苦". It literally means that every grain of rice represents the hard work of a farmer.


So when hubby finishes eating and I see in his plate that there are some grain of rice left (just like what is shown on the photo above), I will ask him to clean up. Once he protested, saying that I do not clean up my plate when I left sauces in it. And he actually thinks that eating all those grain of rice is harder than cleaning up the sauce! Well, funny because I feel the complete contrary.


For him, the plate on the photo above is an unfinished plate. To be fair, I left much more sauce on my plate compared to this photo, especially tomate sauce when we have pasta or spagehetti. 


In France, I have seen many people mopping up their plate with a piece of bread. I do it when I really love the sauce, but not systhematically, and I don't think tomato sauce goes well with bread. Sometimes I feel full already and there will still be salad, cheese and dessert coming, so I figure I better leave some space in my stomach than filling it with bread and sauce. 

So, do you clean your plate of rice or sauce? Or maybe both?

Friday, December 12, 2014

In France, we have The Little Mouse

It happened. Her first tooth just dropped.

Unlike in the USA where tooth fairy would come collect the tooth, in France we have The Little Mouse. Yes, we told her that the mouse would passby to give her a present or a coin, she was excited.

She has a loose tooth since two days, then she decided to take it off, I suspect that she did it so that she could get a present quicker. She put the tooth under a pillow, and kept going to check it out if the mouse has passed by.

Well, she only got it the second morning, as we didn't expect the tooth would come out so quickly. I had to make a trip to the local grocery to pick up something. She was thrilled when she saw the present, and immediately put the two euro coin into her saving box.

Tooth fairy or Little Mouse, it is just something the occidental world created to please their kids, just like the character of Santa Claus. One day she would find out that it is just an invented story, hope she will take it well though.