On French cookbooks and grocery budgets

My poire tarte tatin was a resounding success yesterday. The original recipe, as I mentioned in my post, came from Ina Garten's Barefoot in Paris. (In the photo, on the left.) Most of my French recipes come from this book or The Paris Cookbook by Patricia Wells. Everything else comes from random hits on the Internet. The Paris Cookbook has my brioche recipe, which is an all-day process. Garten has a brioche loaf that takes less time and is tasty, but brioche in a loaf is less fun.

Garten includes a variety of essays that talk about her experiences cooking and gathering recipes in France, all of which are very enjoyable. I lust after the cookware she mentions from E. Dehillerin (which does have a web presence).

After my class yesterday, I met with the professor and we had a conversation that I thought deserved to be recorded here. I had sparked the conversation with discussion of how my French exchange student considered everything in the U.S. "big" and I thought it an apt description of American culture. He's French, and he mentioned that Americans have no sense of aesthetics. He directly associated this with food.

"Have you ever noticed," he said, "when you go to someone's house to eat... It's never 'Did you eat well?' or 'How did it taste?'"

And I cackled, because I sensed his upcoming question.

"It's always, 'Did you have enough?'" I finished.

And he nodded.

"It doesn't matter what it looks like, or how it tastes, just how much there is," he said.

Something to think about. Supersize that.

I have no meal plan for today, yet. My husband took off of work today because I have to go to the office around the same time the furnace maintenance is scheduled. I have cash because I used my credit card to buy a Christmas gift for my mother-in-law that my father-in-law paid for. I'm hoping to spend about $50 at Aldi and round out some missing supplies. Then, I can take the other $50 bill and head to Wegmans for some specialty items. (Whole wheat flour, soy milk, Wegmans Mac N cheese in the box, and imported chocolate for a business meeting, but that's another post.) That left $38 for an office Christmas dinner my husband has to attend Tuesday. Isn't budgeting fun... The $66.67 I spent on groceries thus far this month represents 4.5 percent of our projected income for December. And I did stop at CVS yesterday and spent $12 on some bathroom items that normally would have fallen in with the groceries, except I needed them ASAP.