14 juillet et une demi-française

Happy Bastille Day! While I am as much French as I am American, I rarely celebrate that fact for no good reason. But today, today my fridge is packed with cheese and coq au vin, Nick is baking baguettes for dinner and we hung out the the old red white and blue (vertical) striped flag. Why the hell not?

My dad Claude, a French Tunisian, is the first to deplore the traits of the Frenchman. Lazy, long vacation takers, snobs, and on and on. He calls Italians nos frères qui rit, our brothers who laugh, in another jab at the somber French. I will admit that living there as a 20 year old American was very, very hard. I wanted desperately to be French, to embody the aloof coolness that I felt all around me. I lived in St-Germain-des-Pres, an impossibly chic neighorhood, bought fancy clothes, and tried to pass myself off as one of them.

Mon pere at Vivant, a restaurant in an old oisellerie (bird shop!) — Mon pere at Vivant, a restaurant in an old *oisellerie* (bird shop!)

The cultural differences could not be denied. I came out of my apartment one morning eating an apple and came across the lovely older woman who lived next door. She said to me: "Look at you, eating an apple like Eve!" And in the changing room at the gym the ladies had matching lingerie on under their workout clothes. Small things, yes, but this California girl would never pass.

I'm happy to say that I could give a shit what the Parisians think of me now. I visit and walk the streets and take pictures and pull out my map and just enjoy. I don't mind when my cousins make fun of my American accent. But I still rock a scarf and make sure my shoes are clean.

Some of my favorite Paris things:

Le Timbre - fantastic tiny (the name means Postage Stamp) restaurant in the 6th

Du Pain et Des Idees - Best Bakery Anywhere

Chez L'Ami Jean - badass restaurant

L'As du Fallafel - go get a fallafel for god sakes, fill it with harissa and sit in the Place des Vosges

L'Avant Comptoir - maybe our favorite spot in Paris. Walk in for amazing bites and wines. Chill environment, nice staff, pictures of the dishes hang from cards on the ceiling. Whacky and delicious.

May 11, 2020

Mating Dance

April 1st and it is the 23rd anniversary of my mother’s death. Usually I go walk the beach, to the place where we scattered her ashes and where she spent her last years, but it’s 2020 and the beaches are closed so instead I go for a walk around the block. In my seventh month of pregnancy now and my feet have started to ache from the extra weight, so the walk starts out slowly, gingerly. I conjure her here, in step beside me - Suzanne Segal, born on Friday the 13th and died on April Fool’s Day. Was that her ridiculous way of encouraging us to see some of the humor, the lightness of life? Those deep dimples and that shrieking laugh are with me as much today as they were decades ago.

February 20, 2020

santa fe, NM 1995

My mom and I got off the plane in Albuquerque and headed for the white Isuzu Trooper we kept parked at the airport. After our first few visits to New Mexico, when my mom had properly fallen in love with the landscape and started buying property – all sagebrush and pink dirt – she decided we needed our own car there. This one was properly beat up enough to fit in, as I learned after my eyes had adjusted from the bombastic wealth of the Bay Area to this perennially poor state. But the colors! Even on the license plates! The flamboyant yellow, red and turquoise delighted me, set as they were against the glow of the high desert. I suppose we both were in love with this new frontier.

December 15, 2019

Peeking through the Back Door

I have always felt most at home in restaurant kitchens. No matter how glossy the paint or how shiny the brass door handle on the imposing front door to the dining room, there is always a dinged up, unmarked back door that leads to the real heart of the beast. It took a few weeks into my first cooking job at The Olema Inn to get used to the complete lack of glamour of it all. Only now do I see how the paucity of it helped to form our psyches, ordained us cooks with the chips on our shoulders and the swagger in our steps. We’re here to do the real work. We don’t need no fancy door.