La Vie Continue à Paris et à Fontenay-Sous-Bois

...even though I've been sick for the past 3+ days.

WORK
In any case, I went to work on Monday and, after stopping by the pharmacy, found out that one of my colleagues was sick and at home resting. In retrospect, I probably should have gone home but, beuf, I was already there. Why not? With the sickness slowing me down, I was actually in just the right state of being to sit down and work on an individualised project. Outside of the two trombinoscopes that I put together, I had been pretty much going through the normal rotation of dossier work as student files kept coming in. However, the acceptance deadline has either passed or will pass soon enough; with that said, it was pretty important to find me something else to do. As always, my office group pulled through and asked me if I wanted to revise the "Welcome to Paris" guide book. Hmm... An English project that is basically like creating a yearbook? POURQUOI PAS ?! (Indeed, that's what it's turned out to be.) In the end, I pulled together and organised a lot of what was already written and updated the format, layout and grammar; I finished the project in less than a work day and a half's time. Now, I'm back to dossier readings, etc., but I'm looking forward to the remaining weeks there.

On Monday evening, Trevor and I finally got around to trying pasta take out from Mazzo di Pasta. Later that evening, I also finally got around to watching the Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian and may I (very randomly) say here that I am one of the biggest fans of Ben Barnes's hair.

On Tuesday evening, the food concourse began yet again, only this time around we forgot to warn our host parents about the amount of food we would be serving. I also didn't do the best job with portion control... In the end, though, we definitely played a bit of "role reversal" with them, preparing completely for six full rounds. Utilising my new raclette machine, the first round (entrée) went to the first dinner I ever had in France, namely a combo of raclette, boiled potatoes and prosciutto. The second round (plat, but perhaps more like plat n° 2) went to the only huge meal I ever made in the Fiske Christian House: ratatouille. Then, for the first and ONLY time we will ever let this happen: we had to skip our salad and cheese courses, because there was too much food. For dessert, I somehow became very lucky (too much, nê ?) in creating the best chocolate chip zucchini bread that I have ever made from scratch. To round off the evening, our host parents were great sports and tasted our pains au chocolat and chocolat chaud ending. We still talked about the dinner for a bit the next day.

Last night, Trevor and I babysat Stanislas and Elisabeth. I can't quite recall if I've really ever mentioned them much on my blog, but in sum, they are simply adorable. By the time we started babysitting, they were actually getting ready for bed. In due time, they would eventually fall asleep, but not before a bed time story, or five... all in French. I enjoyed reading to them and in retrospect I think I did a pretty decent job. I had to slow down and annunciate so that they wouldn't be confused as to what I was saying; it probably also helps that I've babysat back home so I was all set with asking them questions and getting them involved with the story. Haha, only once did Elisabeth correct my French.

So, with the kids asleep so early in the night and our host parents not expected until a few hours later, Trevor and I thought it would be a brilliant idea to cook something. In the end, it was indeed a brilliant idea. I hesitate to say what we made because I can already hear the sounds, and see the faces, of uncertainty on all those who read this. I promise, though, it all turned out quite well. After a bit of sifting through recipes and the ingredients we already had, we settled on making olive oil cookies, the batter of which includes black pepper and red wine. The end product came out in a bit of a biscuit form but with a slight cake texture. I would like to enforce the fact that someone else has created this and so we're not the only ones who enjoy them. As the cookies were baking (ps/ one batch yielded 65 cookies of medium to large sizes), I thought it would be fun to experiment and make a strawberry tart. Although there was some doubt as to the extent I could get away with using margarine instead of butter, I ended up making a crust with a recipe gleaned from memory (i.e., the cooking class I attended quite a few weeks ago). I'll have both recipes on my food blog soon enough, but here's a bit of a taste as to how I measured the ingredients: "One and a half of Christine's round glasses of flour, 1/3 a tub of the margarine, one and a half pinches of salt." To make the filling, I completely used (as was discussed during dinner last night) my "feeling," i.e., intuition, as to how to make it. Once again: "Cut 9 strawberries from the 17th arrondissement Franprix into little pieces and boil them in a mixture of 1 of Christine's hexagonal glasses of water and 1 hexagonal glass of sugar, for 15 minutes." The end result was a perfect amount of sugar but a really tough bottom crust. Next time, I'm definitely using butter and definitely not kneading the dough too much!