Getting Your Bacon in France

CUNNING "FRANGLAIS COOKING" BACON TIP you will find this hard to believe but tasting is believing!

After over 15 years of being largely deprived of bacon it took a French woman from Alsace to share with me acunning and simple method to achieve English style bacon on demand, without the expense, delays and difficulties of importing from England.

Take some ham, (eg jambon de Paris) and fry it gently, serve with your egg;  looks like bacon, smells like bacon, tastes like bacon - and no watery bits or bothersome rind.  Also works with 'roti de porc', and for a different taste,  'raw' ham  eg (jambon de Bayonne), a bit of a waste, but if you've got some to use up...

15 years of deprivation...for nothing!  tchshhhniya

Franglais Cooking; lemon mousse recipe

FRANGLAIS  LEMON  MOUSSE

A creamy mousse, could be called une crème au citron

I have developed a Franglais style of cooking, using ingredients that can be found here in France, yet pandering to my English taste and tendencies.

Easy lemon mousse, Franglais style

Until recently I was unable to buy pots of lemon mousse;  for some reason the French only sell chocolate, coffee or vanilla (with chestnut in season).  This has caused me a certain amount of frustration over the years.  Just recently big business has introduced it to our supermarkets, but I'm not keen on industrialised food in terms of health, taste and morality, and also you never know when things will be unintroduced.  For example Lindt introduced a lemon meringue chocolate to French supermarkets.  I was ecstatic, at last an alternative to praline, and fruit with milk chocolate (here the limited supply of fruit centred chocs limit themselves to plain chocolate which I don't like).  But this trial presumably revealed that the French preferred to stick to their bally old praline, so Lindt withdrew it.   With this sort of experience, I decided to make myself independent with my own easy recipes, satisfaction guaranteed.  

FRANGLAIS LEMON MOUSSE RECIPE
Ingredients, collect together:

Ingredients; 1 lemon, 2 eggs, creme fraiche, petits suisses, sugar

Pot of creme fraiche, good and firm (try local market, or good health food shop, not watery fluffy stuff in supermarkets)

6 petit suisses (nature)

One lemon and a good zest grater (I'm glad I invested, I use it constantly)

Sugar

2 eggs

Method
The wonderful thing about creme fraiche is that you don't have to whip it, and the petits suisses are also good and solid, so take 3 large dollopy dessert spoons of the creme fraiche and 5 petit suisses and mix them together in a bowl with 4 dessert spoons of sugar (you can add more if not sweet enough).  Juice half a juicy lemon, or a whole not so juicy lemon and add, along with the zest of the whole lemon.

Separate the eggs and whisk the whites into peaks, and fold in to mixture.  VOILA!

"Les Profs"; portrait of a failing nation

As part of our English exchange student's cultural education (well it has been pouring with rain for the month since his arrival) we took him to the cinema to see 'Les Profs' a film of a cartoon which bears the same name, which promised to wise him up to the realities of French education.

The producers had the 'witty' idea of combining atrocious cartoon-book violence with realism;  that is real actors, only mildly exaggerating the real situation in French Lycée.   The acting of the students was particularly convincing;    the mass obedience, lip biting in the face of abuse; lip curling of ineffectual rebellion, severe trauma in the face of extreme physical and mental violence - it was like watching child abuse whilst struggling to emit a lame laugh.

The film also extolled the anti -virtues of:

Racism (eg:  jokes about cous-cous and pulling at a student's afro hair and shouting 'take off that wig')
Sexism (eg:  a teacher whose sole attribute was to dress pornographically and cause all red blooded males to drop their jaws and fall backwards off their chairs)
Violence, physical, mental, group, all unchallenged and pointless
Defeatism
Dishonesty
Sadism
Theft
Substance abuse in school (legal and illegal)
Helplessness in the face of utterly immoral absolute power (School Inspector, Authorities)

There were no actual virtues and no heros and everyone was dragged down together.  Things only turned around when one of the defeatist anti heros decides not to walk out (the promise of love with a ravishing German teacher persuaded him to stay) and instead climbs onto the roof clutching a Napolean hat, where he leaves the audience guessing;  is he going to  throw himself off, or rally the troups, pourquoi pas?  He decides to rally the troups (I think) by declaring 'Nous sommes tous nuls...Ensemble!'  (We are all stupid, useless failures utterly lacking talent of any kind...together).

The school then rallied, for reasons which aren't entirely clear to me as an Englishwoman, and achieved success (measured statistically) by raising their exam pass rate from 3 to 50 percent.  Any other aspects of what one might call 'education' were studiously ignored, and the possibility of an 'alternative' pedagogy rendered risible.

The joyous climax - the absutely 'nul' (stupid useless failure etc) student who had failed his Bac for 3 years running was thrown out of the school by the Powers on High (school informed by letter) which meant the school achieved a 50 percent pass rate, whereas with him still on the books it would have been 49 (this is all about figures not fairness).

Then the 'bad' teachers refused to accept transfer to the Cote d'Azure which they had been offered as a reward for raising the pass rate from 3 to 50 percent, and said that 50 percent could be improved on and they would stay on at the school to finish their duty.    Then teachers and pupils did a wild rap dance in the playground, filmed from above, The End

Surely the audience would be left flat I thought.  Not at all, the cinema was full to capacity, people were sitting in the aisles (where were the usherettes, the health and safety standards,  the social responsibility of the audience to shove up and give them a seat?) 8 showings a day, and the audience gave a standing ovation.  The French must be really desperate for education therapy.