Fromage and financiers: Food in France

I had fairly high expectations about the food in France. I pictured myself cycling along to the local market and coming back with the basket laden with fresh vegetables, smelly cheeses, cured meats and of course the obligatory baguette sticking out at a jaunty angle. Breakfasts would be grabbed from the local patisserie and we would eat our dinner on the terrace each evening, making the most of the late evening sunshine, savouring the delicious salads and fresh quiche I had conjured up during my leisurely day at home, before finishing the meal off with a tart made with fruit from the garden.

To some extent, the food here has definitely lived up to my expectations. The fruit and vegetables here are a world apart form what we get in the UK. The melons taste amazing, so sweet that they are almost pungent, and the tomatoes are so good that you need very little else in a salad. It's all incredibly fresh and even though it's now October, the shops and markets are still full of what I would consider summer produce. I have made a few cakes with fruit from the garden and I think there has been one homemade quiche. But it's not all fromage and financiers. My first wake up call came with my first visit to the market in Thoiry one Sunday morning, where I was greeted with stall after stall of stinky cheese, heaps of the local cured sausages, and butchers selling amazing cuts of steak. It looked wonderful.

The market at Thoiry

Lesson number one: all of the above are off the menu for pregnant ladies. True, you can have a steak if you like, but it needs to be well-done - and what's the point in massacring a good piece of meat? Cheese is fine, but not the stinky soft kind. And cured meats are only to be eaten if cooked, not savoured as part of a nice cold platter (also comprising the afore-mentioned cheeses) with a little glass of vin (also forbidden, bien sûr). It is actually pretty tough being pregnant in France. Of course, the French are quite laissez-faire about the whole thing: 'Wat eez ze problem weez a bit of toxoplasmosis fur yur bébé?' But in the UK we're a bit more strict, and I can't help feeling that I must do everything I can to keep the little octopus inside me safe and well.

All of which makes eating out quite difficult too. One Friday evening we decided we'd throw caution to the wind and venture out of our little village for a meal in a restaurant. Eating out costs roughly twice what it does in the UK, so it's not something we are doing very often. Expect to pay at least £20 for a run-of-the-mill pizza; a nice but not particularly special three-course meal with wine for one will set you back around 80-90 euros. We considered our options: steak restaurant, steak restaurant, steak restaurant... oh and a few places that do pizza. Some of the steak restaurants do have a few other items on the menu: goat's cheese salad (forbidden), foie gras (forbidden) and horse (not forbidden but no thanks). Unfortunately for Andy, for the next 4 months it's pizza all the way.

Lesson number two: the French only eat lunch between 12-2pm. Turn up at 1.45pm expecting a late lunch and you will be turned away and left to starve. We found this out to our cost the day we drove all the way up to the top of a mountain at 2.30pm only for them to turn away a ravenous pregnant lady without so much as a bit of baguette. But today we decided to try our luck again and ventured out to Gex in the hope that a bigger town might have more options for a leisurely Sunday lunch, and we got lucky. We chanced upon a lovely restaurant called Le Convivial, where Andy had the biggest steak tartare I've ever seen:

I had a delicious plate of guinea fowl with wild mushrooms, decorated with wild flowers. Sadly the camera didn't pick up just how colourful the plate was:

There were desserts too - pain perdu with caramelised pears for me and some tiny cakes called cannelés, which we'd never come across before, for Andy. They were both scrummy, but we scoffed them too quickly for me to get pictures.

Lesson number three: you are never more than two minutes walk from a patisserie. Really. How the French stay so slim is a mystery to me, given that every village is filled with the sweet smell of freshly-baked pastries. And in Saint Genis, just a short distance from CERN, they have one of the best patisseries around: Sebastien Brocard. So good it's won awards. This is how happy I was when Andy took me there on our first day:

Oh my... I'll take one of everything.

Row upon row of beautifully-crafted little financiers, tartlets, macarons and exquisite celebration cakes.

And it doesn't say anything in the books about endangering your baby with one too many macarons.