02 janvier 2008
Happy New Year 2008
Happy new year to all of you who read this blog, and to everybody else!
In 2008, always remember to look straight towards the future.
For those who should be wondering where I came across these weird-looking fish, I will reply that you can find everything on Guangzhou markets. Everything.
10 décembre 2007
Menu For Hope 4: Ptipois' in.
This year, Ptipois takes part in Menu For Hope 4, an annual raffle in support of the UN World Food Programme, created and organized by my friend Pim Techamuanvivit on her blog Chez Pim. To know all about it, go to Pim's blog where everything is clearly explained (hey, you can even win a baby goat!). You should also visit Foodbeam, Fanny's blog — Fanny takes care of the raffle for Europe and there is a lot of important info on her site.
Here's a summary:
For $10, you get a raffle ticket that may make you the happy owner of a prize of your choice, offered by one of the participants — restaurateur, producer, food writer or journalist, or any foodie that has something to share. The more you give, the better your chances of winning are. See the prize list on Chez Pim; frankly it is quite amazing.
The collected sums entirely go to the WFP — United Nations World Food Programme, the world's largest food aid agency.
This year, the funds raised by Menu for Hope 4 will be earmarked for the school lunch program in Lesotho, Africa. Providing food for the children not only keeps them alive, but helps them stay in school so that they learn the skills to feed themselves in the future. The program also supports local and community farming. Promoting local agriculture and food production using sustainable agricultural methods — and thus improving world environment — makes this program particularly interesting and, needless to say, quite fitting for a foodie raffle.
The prize
Ptipois' blog, this year, as a mirror blog to its French original version Chez Ptipois, chooses to donate the author's (yeah, well, my) latest book, La Table du Thé, which has been commented here and elsewhere. I will, of course, send the prize by mail to the happy winner.
One word of warning though: since I am about to stay for one whole month in a distant country, I will not be able to send the prize before January 15, 2008.
Practical info
Virtual raffle tickets should be purchased between December 10 and 21, 2007.
The code for this prize is EU29.
To purchase your raffle ticket, go to this page. Donation is done by credit card.
Other prizes are displayed here on Pim's blog.
07 décembre 2007
This wonderful world
Paris, rue Saint-Dominique, Nov. 30.
I just read that sea-urchin larvae were shaped like Eiffel Towers.
I did not indulge in illicit substances, I found it on Wikipedia.
Apart from that, everything OK?
14 juin 2007
Life in blue
While I hadn't yet had much time to play with my new toy (a D80 Nikon reflex meant to celebrate the end of my whooping cough and my birthday), I went to the Fooding d'été in Vitry-sur-Seine. Normally, since this camera has a slight tendency to overexpose, I set the white balance on "cloudy", with good results. Except that the night before, at a Sichuan restaurant (while all other diners were turning around with a scared look in their eyes to watch yet another one of my spectacular fits of coughing), one mysterious individual had found it amusing to set the white balance of my camera on "tungsten" and had not set it back on its previous position. Furthermore, the next day, in Vitry, it was so hot and sunny that I could not see the pictures on the display screen. So, for a couple of hours, I shot the Fooding in deep blue. It's a style.
"I meant to do that." (Pee Wee Herman.)
I haven't said my last word. You just wait until I've de-blued the whole thing and I'll tell you all about it. The chromatic dominance that will stop me hasn't been born yet. To be continued.
20 mai 2007
Avant la whooping-cough
Sorry I deserted this blog for nearly a month: I have been caught by
a strange disease, on the very night of the first turn of the
presidential election (gasp!). Since then, I have been suffering like a
dog and going through many sleepless nights. The disease was not
diagnosed from the start, hence the painful evolution.
Before that,
I was leading a normal life. I'd take tireless walks through Paris,
without those dreadful fits of coughing or those unpleasant heat
flushes in the face. For instance, I'd go to Château-Rouge and I'd take
a picture of a bag of habanero chillies, one of my favorite things,
gracefully hanging on a wall.
In those days, not so long ago, but painfully far away now,
habaneros from faraway countries roamed freely on Paris sidewalks. We
had not yet been hit on the head with a sledgehammer, and half of
France was not yet knocked out, dazed out, powerless and depressed. And
I hadn't yet been informed that I had whooping-cough. I thought
it was a cold. A big, fat, hairy cold.
However, one night, as it was getting
really bad, I could not stand it anymore and I went to Hôpital
Lariboisière (specialized in nose and throat problems). And
since it was the night before May 1st, I could not hope to see my
regular doctor the next day. I wanted to get rid of it as soon as
possible, so I did not hesitate.
I waited from midnight to 4 AM,
coughing and shaking. An elderly lady, accompanied by her old man and
daughter, had been waiting since 7 PM. A young Srilankan girl was
coughing just like me: deeply, almost musically, rooster-like,
recovering her breath with difficulty. I was not thinking of
whooping-cough yet, since I believed, like everyone else, that you
catch it only once in your life and it's OK if you've had your shots.
Which is not true at all.
After
a few hours, hours cease to matter. You can wait longer, what the heck?
Time stands still. If you have to wait until daylight, well, big deal.
Anything, by the way, is better than walking out in the darkest night around
the Gare du Nord area. Sick and variously afflicted people come in,
some on their feet, some on stretchers. Two old people have serious
nosebleeds. Poor souls — probably a result of the fierce, unseasonable
heat we've had for a few days. Two handcuffed young men come in surrounded by
five of six cops. The cops sit them on chairs, asking them to behave,
and let them fall asleep sitting up, with their chins on their chests,
hands behind their backs. A mini-Guantanamo just for me. The usual suspects — a few drunks, a few bums;
one drunken woman with a recently broken calf cackles jokes with the
nurses and firemen. She seems somewhat happy to have broken her leg; at
last some people are going to take care of her now. An Indian man's
feet are so sore that he enters barefooted, his shoes in his hand, all
toes curled up. An old man and a young man, both wearing kippas, enter
with an amazingly beautiful, weak and tearful young woman. She has
taken the wrong dose of medicine but her life doesn't seem in danger.
She only looks very unhappy and vulnerable, impatient to be nursed. The two
men beg the nurse: she replies she cannot do anything, there are
already five people before them, no — do not insist, she cannot make an
exception. The two men do not seem to understand; tears roll down the
woman's cheeks. Before leaving home that night, I wondered if I should
bring a book to read. I decided I did not need one. I was right: you
cannot get bored in a place like this.
Shortly before 4 AM, my turn
comes. I enter the office of a frail, tight-lipped, unfriendly young lady who
hardly takes a look at me. She hardly touches me, too; she does not
check my lungs, although I tell her that I have been coughing for
several nights. She takes a sadistic pleasure from pushing down my
tongue with a rugous wooden stick and the strength of a wild gorilla,
and smiles discretely every time I gag. "It's a bug", she says finally, and sits
down to write down a prescription of physiologic serum to wash my
nostrils. Obviously, she is taking me for a complete idiot. I ask her:
"Do
you think I've come here in the middle of the night and waited four
hours to come out of here with a prescription of physiologic serum?
— If I give you antibiotics, you might develop resistance to germs.
— Do you believe I eat antibiotics on a monthly basis? And what do you say about that cough?"
She
looks at me with hatred in her eyes; apparently I'm the wrong type of patient, the
type that opens their mouth. She isn't even listening to me. At this
point, I decide that I'm not going out of her office without a decent
prescription. I tell her so. She ragingly scratches down a line at the
bottom end of the sheet and hands it to me without a word. Then she
just about kicks me out.
Well done, bitch. You have just made a
beautiful diagnosis error. It so happens — but how should you know,
you're only a doctor, right? — that there is an epidemic of
whooping-cough going on, and that it is mostly passed from adults to
young unvaccinated babies. This is how I found myself with not quite
the right antibiotic for what proved, days later, to be a fine case of
whooping-cough. However, though not quite appropriate, the remedy has
apparently shortened the contagious stage and hastened the recovery
process. Today, May 18th, I am still coughing myself stupid but at
least I have begun to recover some sort of sleep at night. So we're
probably going to live after all. Into what future?
This presidential election has been preceded by a sad period of apprehension, false hopes, justified fears and sickly feelings. We got such a blow on our heads that we are still recovering from it, our minds dormant, our eyes closed. Disaster has happened, The thing that I feared the most has become real, as ouf friend Job would say — so no one seems to know what there is to do. The only voices that let themselves be heard are high-pitched and arrogant; the winning half is getting ready to bleed the other half white. Le Monde needs another title; Pravda will do very well. A thousand-year-old culture has opted for the negation of its very self. Nothing will ever be the same again.
But enough of those sad words. As soon as I get better, I promise, we'll go back to Love Apple Farm. There are plenty of vegetables left.
25 mars 2007
Why this blog?
This is the first post of a new — and not-so-new — blog. Not so new because it already exists in French, and recently celebrated its second year of existence. But as friends have told me repeatedly of their frustration from not being able to read it in French, I decided to create a long-overdue English version. Right from the beginning (February 2005), I had meant Chez Ptipois to be bilingual. I never had the time, or the courage, to do it. Now is the time.
For those who will discover this blog now and are not familiar with
the French version, here is a small description: basically, Ptipois'
blog is a food blog, but not in a pure, unmixed kind of way. Behind the
nickname Ptipois ("fresh green pea" in French) is Sophie Brissaud, a
French food writer and journalist who has gathered a relatively long
experience in — guess what — food writing, but also in translation,
photography, graphic design, food styling, recipe editing, teaching
cuisine and some restaurant
reviewing. I have written a dozen books in French, some texts in
English, translated a few English food authors, and I do not count the
books I have written, co-written or edited as a ghost-writer for French
chefs. That, in short, is my resume. Therefore, since I spend all my
life thinking
about food and writing about it, I feel happy to write about other
subjects when I sit down updating my blog.
Particularly about Paris, the city where I live — a constant source of
amazement and joy —, and my rather frequent
travels to close or distant locations.
However, for the very same
reasons — the strong presence of food and cooking in my life and the
interest I feel for them —, the subject is, quite often, well — food.
One more word of warning: although this blog is starting off as a
French version of Chez Ptipois, I already have a slight notion that it
will not completely stick to that definition. Some things are better
said in French, and some things are better said in English. In either of
the two languages, some things go without saying while the same cannot
be said of the other language, and that is true the other way around.
While most posts will be common to both versions, it is not impossible
that some posts remain exclusive of the French version or of the
English version, depending on how well they will fit either blog. So
they will not be quite identical, although I will make sure they do not
lead their lives too far apart.
Also,
it is definitely too much work to translate all posts as they get
written, so English and French texts will not be equivalent, since the
English will be written from scratch and not translated from the French.
Now I hope you will enjoy either one
of my blogs; and if you can enjoy both, then let me congratulate you:
it is indeed nice to be fluent both in English and in French. Sure helps with those restaurant menus, doesn't it?