Visiting Tours (France) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Tours (France) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I loved the weekend trips I took with Laurent when we first lived in Paris (France).  I especially liked going to Tours where Laurent’s maternal grandparents lived in the Loire Valley that was full of châteaux.

It was cold, but we sat in the garden outside to eat anyways.  I liked talking and eating in the garden with all of Laurent’s grandmother’s flowers around me.

I enjoyed laughing at Laurent’s grandfather each time he said he was going to get “his last bottle” of some good wine for our lunch.  He used to be a wine salesman, so I am sure he had a wine cellar extending from Tours to Blois.

Despite the cold outside, I sat on one of the lawn chairs and played “jeux-jeux” or “baby games” with a set of kittens that Laurent’s grandmother had adopted.

I played with the yellow kittens all weekend.  The little tomcat kittens were going to stay in the Touraine despite being cute and cuddly.  Paris had enough tomcats to deal with already.

While playing “jeux-jeux,” Laurent’s grandpa served us steamed artichokes on plates with small bowls of vinaigrette on the side.

Laurent’s grandfather teased me saying “Queen Catherine de Medici ate so many artichokes that she almost died.”

“Too much vinaigrette,” I answered.  You can gag on olive oil with a highly acetic vinegar; Southerners in the US all know this.  You might not die, but you can mess up your clothing choking on this mixture.

After the artichokes, we ate delicious rillettes that resemble room-temperature, Mexican carnitas.  We spread the carnitas on toasted baguette rounds.  We also ate room-temperature rillons, slices of sweated pork that is cured in its own fat with Vouvray wine.

Vouvray is a slightly, sweet white wine from the Touraine region that goes well with rillettes, rillons, and chèvre goat cheese that has been rolled in ashes. 

Chèvre aux cendres is a specialty of the city of Tours.  You can drink a white wine like Vouvray with it, but the people of Tours usually eat it with Bibb lettuce from their own gardens “à la Touraingelle.”

“You never drink wine with vinaigrette,” Laurent’s grandmother told me.

“The vinegar in the vinaigrette destroys the delicacy of the wine,” she said.

We ate an apple tart for dessert with perfectly cut slices of apple and pastry cream as filling in the tart.  The crust was a sugar sablé one made with butter, so I ate it.

We finished with a pear eau-de-vie made with Reine Claude pears.

I was happy with that meal.  We ate it all weekend.  It was easy to serve, and we could talk about:

-cars (papie’s hobby)

-hats and famous writers from the Loire Valley (mamie’s hobby)

-good thriller films (Laurent and I both watched these)

I suspected mamie and papie watched the films we talked about when we went back to Paris. 

We all liked the actors Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Gabin, the director Luc Besson (for the Grand Bleu and La Femme Nikita), Jacques Cousteau, bad boy Gérard Dépardieu as Cyrano, and Socialist Culture Minister Jacques Lang, who wore a mini skirt around Paris to prove that gender is a cultural construct.

We had tons of fun with Laurent’s grandparents.  We always took them magazines and newspapers, including The International Herald Tribune, which I subscribed to at home in Paris.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting Poitiers (France) - the Birthplace of Eleanor of Aquitaine with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Poitiers – the Birthplace of Eleanor of Aquitaine – and Bordeaux (France) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget – Ruth Pennington Paget

We were up bright and early the second day of our trip to Bordeaux to catch the train for Poitiers, where Eleanor of Aquitaine was born.

Poitiers is also the city where Charles Martel stopped the advance of the Moors into France in 732 – 733.  We visited the church Nôtre Dame la Grande that was built in the 11^th ad 12^th centuries.

Since the French did not have the same colorful marble that Italians did, the French painted their churches in the Charente to make them look elegant and festive with bright colors.

We also visited the Poitiers Cathedral and the Saint-Jean Baptistery from the 4^th century, which is one of the three oldest in the world.

The next day, we ate a late breakfast at the Café du Levant.  The vineyard workers, who ate here, cracked me up; they were drinking beer with an English breakfast of sunny side up eggs, thick-cut bacon, sausage, and toast.  The largest customers of Bordeaux wines are the British, so the Bordeaux wine workers eat like the customers.

The next day we did a walking tour on foot through Bordeaux with a Michelin touring guide after eating breakfast.

On the way home in the car, I noted the things I liked about Bordeaux in my journal:

I like the town houses on the quai (port) des Chartrons, which still houses many wine brokerage houses.  There were steps leading up to these homes to deal with heavy rain. 

There were also iron rings at the base of the steps that were used to tie up horses in the past.  Today, these rings are used to hold flowerpots of geraniums.

People in Bordeaux dressed fashionably, but I suspected that as in Paris many people wore their money on their backs.

We went to the supermarket and bought some not-so-expensive bottles of Graves and Entre-Deux-Mers to go with gambas al ajillo (Spanish garlic shrimp). 

I loved gambas al ajillo (Spanish garlic shrimp) and could make it with no problem very quickly, using fresh or frozen shrimp.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting Bordeaux (France) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Bordeaux (France) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

Laurent and I planned a trip to Bordeaux over a three-hour meal in a Vietnamese restaurant in the Luxembourg neighborhood of Paris (France). 

We toured the gardens and loved Marie de Medici for creating a park in this spot inspired by the Boboli Gardens at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence (Italy).

We took a week’s vacation to Bordeaux that included a side trip to visit Laurent’s paternal grandmother.  Mamie had just returned from a trip to Algeria with her seniors’ touring group.

She showed me how to eat with the thumb of my right hand and first two fingers of my right hand.  When you eat mechoui, North African roast lamb, you are supposed to use a flat bread to pick up slices of lamb and side salads.

As we walked by the port on the way to eat a seafood platter of raw oysters, mussels, shrimp, and large boiled snails with a bottle of chilled, white Graves from Bordeaux, mamie sort of preached to the choir when she explained why to eat food from all over the world to me.

“Seafood and fish can be unreliable sources of food, so it is good to be able to eat Moroccan food like mechoui and orange and walnut salads,” she said.

She quizzed me about my Bordeaux wine knowledge over lunch.

“Everyone in France has to know how to sell wine to ward off economic depressions and get money to buy food,” she said.

Both Laurent and I wanted to hone our knowledge of wine in Bordeaux after mamie’s lecture.  There were wine salesmen, caterers, master pastry chefs, and corporate dining room managers in Laurent’s immediate family, so we did know the importance of understanding the food, wine, and restaurant trade and law.

Laurent arrived early on Friday morning from Rouen, where he was finishing up his MBA degree with a rental car for the long trip to Bordeaux.  I had our bags packed, snacks ready, and our lunch sandwiches ready with bottles of water stored in a cooler. 

I put on a floppy, straw hat and sunglasses and felt like a movie star headed to Bordeaux for wine shopping and seafood platter meals.

I wanted to stop at so many places as we sped down the freeway particularly in the Charentes region where I knew there were many Romanesque churches with frenzied façades galore.

We arrived late in Bordeaux and walked from our hotel to the rue Sainte-Catherine and the Porte d’Aquitaine.  We ate dinner in one of the expensive, touristy spots, because we were so tired.

Saturday we started our day with a trip outside Bordeaux to an air base at Merignac.  We went there, because that was where Laurent did his mandatory military service as a teenager.

We then followed National Route 2 along the Gironde Estuary.   We stopped at several châteaux along the way and took pictures of me in front of the vineyards and châteaux.

“Our vacation homes, honey,” I said to Laurent.

We giggled and looked at all the famous châteaux as we drove through the Haut-Médoc.

We then retraced our steps and went to the other side of the Gironde.  We stopped at the resort town of Arcachon to eat a seafood platter.  We sat outside on the terrace and ate.  The salty, sea air made everything taste like we were eating it just caught on a boat.

We ordered an Entre-Deux-Mers, a Bordeaux white, to go with the seafood.  The two seas in the wine’s name refer to the Dordogne River and the Gironde Estuary on either side of the peninsula where the Entre-Deux-Mers winery juts out into the Gironde.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting Montmartre in Paris (France) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Montmartre in Paris (France) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I went to the Montmartre neighborhood in Paris one weekend day.  Montmartre used to be a small village outside of Paris that became part of the city as Paris experienced exponential growth in the 19^th century.

I took my baguette sandwich of Laughing Cow cheese and ham with me and a bottle of water to visit the famous Parisian Montmartre butte with a big, white shrine on top of it called Sacre Coeur.

I began my visit by walking along avenue Rochouart with all the throngs of people examining the latest deal offered by the Tati Clothing Empire located on the street.

I turned onto Avenue Steinkerque and followed rue d’Orsel to the rue des Trois Frères and onto Place des Abesses.

Montmartre is the spot where the Jesuit Order of the Catholic Church was created on August 15, 1554 by Saint François Xavier along with six other men, who vowed to become apostles of the Catholic Church overseas.

The first time I saw the name François Xavier was in the city of Hirado on the southern island of Kyushu in Japan.

(I lived in Japan as an exchange student with the Youth for Understanding International Exchange program in high school.)

From place des Abesses, I followed rue Ravignac up the side of the “butte” or “hill.”  I marveled just like a tourist at a mecca of modern painting called the Bâteau Lavoir.

Some of this apartment building’s artistic inhabitants included Picasso, Juan Gris, Modigliani, and Braques.  Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon at the Bâteau Lavoir.

I climbed up some more charming streets oblivious to the grade.  When I arrived at the Place du Tertre, the artists were doing brisk trade in night scenes at this spot.

I made a quick visit inside Saint Pierre de Montmartre.  The church used to be part of a huge abbey that sat on top of the butte.  Saint Pierre along with Saint Germain des Près and Saint Martin des Champs are the oldest churches in Paris.  The abbey was closed during the French Revolution.

Saint Martin des Champs was begun in 1134 on the site of an earlier Merovingian Church.  The builders recycled a few columns from pre-Christian times in the building of this Church.

The French have lived by the “waste not, want not, but avoid rotten food” motto for centuries.

I avoided the tourists at Place du Tertre and took rue Rustique down the hill.  I passed the Montmartre Vineyards on my way down.  The wine is not supposed to be good, but the citizens of the quarter could just be saying that and squirreling it away for themselves.

I passed number 54 on rue Lépic where Vincent van Gogh lived with his brother Theo for a time.  Little country homes abound in Montmartre, because it used to be a village.  I thought it would be fun to work in La Défense and come home to my country house by Place du Tertre at night when I walked there.

I spent an hour touring the Montmartre Cemetery.  I saw the tombs of Stendahl, Zola, Berlioz, Fragonard, Alexandre Dumas (the son), and Degas.  I felt as if I had rendered homage to the greatest French artists of all time in this cemetery.

My favorite French writer is still Stendahl, who wrote The Red and the Black.

After my tour, I took the Métro over to the Latin Quarter and had my hair fixed to look cute in Paris.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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