Visiting Lyon (France) with the Belle Famille by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Lyon (France) with the Belle Famille by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

On another weekend trip from Paris (France), Laurent and I took the T.G.V. (Train Grand Vitesse – Very Fast Train) to Lyon where the Rhône and Saône Rivers meet. 

The third river around Lyon is supposed to be the Beaujolais.  Watch out for this quiz joke if you eat in Lyon’s “bouchon” diners.  Bouchon refers to Lyon’s sausages and traffic jams.  Lyon is huge toll area for vacationers coming back from the Mediterranean here to reach Paris.  It is also the headquarters of Interpol to make sure the tolls reach Paris I think.

You are supposed to buy a huge bag of nougat de Montélimar for the family to eat while waiting to go through the toll as you listen to the “tubes d’été” –summer hit songs and talk about the TGV running on World War II tracks and having no room for souvenirs.  (The TGV has air conditioning, but it does not work well. Snark, snark, snark à l’américaine.)

I read Le Figaro newspaper looking through the want ads for work on the way to Lyon.  We arrived around 1 pm at the train station where Laurent’s cousin and uncle picked us up.

Laurent’s uncle went home to cook while his cousin showed us the principal sites in Lyon – the Colline de Fourvière, the Basilique de Nôtre Dame de Fourvière, the Roman ampitheatre, and the Odéon (indoor theatre).  We walked through the streets of Old Lyon, which reminded me of Italy.

Laurent’s cousin made the trip special by giving us a tour of Lyon’s secret passageways that led from courtyard to courtyard around entire city blocks.  We came out somewhere across town.  The tunnel passageways are called “trabouls.”

I remarked that these were better than the “cours de miracles” – criminals’ lairs - that Victor Hugo described in Nôtre Dame de Paris. 

“These could be mapped for tourists,” I added.

“The locals know where they are.  We never know when we might need to use them again,” he said in a sinister voice.  He was a theatre major in college, who wanted to do films, so we all walked around pretending to shoot people.

Laurent said, “You have to eat mint candy to be authentic after killing someone in France.”  I love insider French data.

When we went back to Laurent’s uncle and aunt’s house for lunch, we stopped and inspected the ruins at Champonost from the ancient Roman era.  There are archiducs, menhirs, and dolmens all over France.

Laurent’s uncle was recreating ancient Roman cuisine by roasting a leg of lamb that had been marinated in olive oil and herbes de Provence at an outdoor grill oven when we returned.

We drank a Châteauneuf-du-Pape wine with the lamb.  Châteauneuf-du-Pape is made a little further down the Rhône River around Avignon, where the papacy had its see when the Catholic Church had to leave Rome for several centuries. 

Châteauneuf-du-Pape is a blend of several varietals (grape varieties) with a papal insignia on the bottle.  It is one of my favorite wines, because it tastes good with lamb and has a very distinguished bottle decoration.

After eating we looked through French antique books and talked about the TGV being modern, but running on World War II tracks.  The uncle from “the Mines school” was the one to pooh-pooh to about possible derailments.  I do not think this is the rail situation anymore.

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

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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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