A Very Full Weekend

First off, just so you know, most of the pictures on our entries can be viewed in a larger format by clicking on them.

We started off this weekend by making a French specialty--the Tarte Tatin aux Pommes.  For those of you who don't know it, it's an upside down apple pie, started on the stove and finished in the oven.  I had my first version of this when visiting Jean-Claude and Corinne in Paris in 2009.  It was amazing.  Butter and sugar combine at the bottom of the pan and become caramel with the juice from the apples.  My mouth is watering as I write this.  My second experience was at Brad's house, and his was superb--the absolute perfect caramel.  We collected recipes from friends and the internet and did out best to follow them with the equipment we have now.  We made caramel on top of the stove, then put it into a loaf pan, put apples in it, baked those for a while, and put spiced pastry crust on top.  Not bad, but way, way too sweet.  We'll share a recipe once we have something we like.  Most likely, for the upside down version, it will be Brad's recipe.  Until then, I think we'll try Elizabeth's recipe, though we might take the handle off of one of our skillets and try that with pears this week until we have a better piece of equipment.

We of course went to the marché to get our fruit and vegetables for the week (including pears for that Tarte Tatin aux Poires), and we took a long walk through our blackberry park.  We also walked up to the big grocery store to get some ingredients for meals this week.  We got a solid five miles in yesterday!

Olives!

We went to the local "Délices de Plantes" garden show down the street from us on Saturday, where we saw our first olive tree, learned all about sureau, and talked to a beekeeper!  The olive tree looked just like a normal tree but with olives hanging from it.  It was actually kind of strange to think that the salty little cured things we eat actually come from a tree!  The sureau is an elderberry bush and is apparently very popular here.  I always thought elderberries would look like blackberries, but they resemble black currants in both look and taste.  Aaron was worried they were poisonous because of misremembering Arsenic and Old Lace (they put poison into the non-toxic elderberry wine), but when we talked to the man who made the delicacies (Bertrand Bouflet), he informed us that there actually is a very similar plant that is toxic and that you have to know the difference between them.  We purchased his elderflower syrup, and it is fantastic!  You can see all sorts of recipes here, but the first we might try is adding it to some club soda.  Yum!

Bees in Brétagne love white asters.

The beekeeper was very interesting and warmed up to us after we spent about 15 minutes showing our fascination with his bees.  He had one of the frames from the hive out (in glass for safety of course), and we could see the drones making honey and caring for the larva.  They were also carrying corpses and other unneeded items to the bottom of the frame so that they could continue working.  The gentleman was a member of a sort of local guild for apiarists.  He said they have lots of classes and internships, so stay tuned for our experiences with that!

Does your church have a
bouncy house?  I didn't
think so.

Today, I started off with a run, and then we went to our first church service here.  It's a Roman Catholic one, as almost all are here, but perhaps they will accept us.  There must have been at least 600 people there!  Of course, it's the only church in town, but still, I think it was a lot.  We caught most of what was going on in the service since it's very similar to the Episcopal service, but we didn't know the exact translation of any of the responses.  The music was excellent; they had both a children's and adult choir, complete with a long-haired conductor.

The duck pond.

Aaron, with cream puff and
coffee.

The church hosted a kermesse ("church mass" from the Dutch, something like a local carnival), which came with a bouncy house, more singing from the children's choir, carnival games, fair food, and the perrières, traditional Breton dancers.  You can learn all about their costumes here.  The story they danced and narrated was about Merlin teaching the fairy Viviane nine incantations that would create an invisible prison for whomever she wanted for all eternity.  The carnival games consisted of the ubiquitous duck pond and a "knock-the-cans-off-the-table."  (Aaron thought the food people were just having trouble keeping the cans on the tables until I showed him.)  Fair food in Brétagne is crêpes, pastries, cider, and coffee.  We both had a cup of coffee, and Aaron picked a cream puff to share.  He does love his sweets, and it was a good choice.

For dinner, Aaron is making an eggplant and chickpea stew with onions and tomatoes from his Greek cookbook.  It smells absolutely amazing.

The Perrières de Cesson.

This next week is approaching very quickly; we begin a bunch of long days with interviews and make-up classes.  I suppose it's time summer break ends, but never fear!  We will still have lots of adventures to share with you!

Our First Trip to a Gated Community

The gate to the tower.

On Wednesday, we visited the city of Dinan, north of Rennes, about halfway between Rennes and Dinard (where we went last week). Unlike Rennes or Saint-Malo, most of Dinan's medieval section is well-preserved, including its 3 kilometer-circumference city wall (hence, a "gated community"!). Riding on the bus from Rennes to Dinan, the Breton countryside struck me as being very much like western Pennsylvania (or even southwestern Wisconsin, for that matter): hilly, lots of cornfields, a fair amount of dairy cattle, and the occasional horse or sheep. If it weren't for the architecture of the houses and the French road-signs, it'd be hard to tell you were in France!

The viaduct/bridge.

Dinan is situated on a large rocky outcrop overlooking the River Rance. To get into the city, you have to ride across a viaduct several hundred feet above the valley floor. We arrived in the late morning and our first stop (as always) - the local tourism office to get our free map of the city! The map helpfully included two different walking tours of the city, one along the city ramparts, and one through "vieux Dinan," that is, the old medieval city. We decided that, as cool as medieval fortifications might be, walking around the entire city on the walls would probably not be the most interesting way to spend our day. So we opted for the walk through the city instead. We walked through numerous narrow medieval streets, some with wooden arcades over the sidewalk (the structures probably date back to the Middle Ages, but they've been rebuilt and repaired so many times that there's nothing medieval left - it's the old "Ship of Theseus" paradox, for any classicists/philosophers out there!). Along the way, we passed many tourist-y chain stores, not to mention a lot of German tourists.

Church of Saint Malo.

Spiral rose window.

We passed the city's 15th-century clock tower, built by a duke of Brittany, but the first major site we stopped and looked around at was the Church of Saint Malo. It's named for one of the "seven founding saints of Brittany," Welsh monks who arrived here in the mid-sixth century to spread Christianity. Upon entering the church, it had a definite moldy smell, proof, I think, of its age (unlike the clean-smelling church we visited in the city of Saint-Malo which was rebuilt after World War II). The church has been built and rebuilt in various stages, so it dates from anywhere between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, depending what part you're looking at. There were a lot of very nice stained-glass windows and a rose window of a type I'd never seen before - the petals were arranged in a kind of spiral, making it seem as if the rose were turning.

"When cloisters fall completely
out of use, what do we turn
them into?" Lisa says Larkin
would ask.  "Parking lots,"
she would answer.

After eating our picnic lunch outside with our backs to the wall of the church, we continued on our tour, walking past a former monastic cloister that's now a school, and heading down the extremely steep Rue de Jerzual. The shops on this street were mostly of local artisans and craftsmen of one kind or another - jewelry makers, sculptors, wood-workers, even an illustrator (Chris Hahner) who had done work for Disney! At the base of this street, we exited through the city walls and (continuing down-slope), we ended up at the River Rance and the city's "port" - a large array of sailboats and tour boats. We walked along the river for a while, then began the trek back up the slope of the hill to the city walls. Along the way, we got a good, up-close view of the viaduct (pictured above), forcing us to contemplate just how high in the air we were when we rode into town! After getting quite the work-out climbing the stairway back to the level of the city walls, we continued to climb along the edge of the wall to the next gate. It certainly gave us a good perspective on just how difficult medieval siege warfare must have been!

Statues outside the basilica.

On re-entering the city, we made our last stop on the tour, at the Basilica of Saint-Saveur. The exterior wall where the main door is dates to the twelfth century, and it shows. Most of the statues carved in the stone have weathered away and are barely recognizable. The architecture isn't as over-the-top Gothic as that of Saint Malo, but there are a lot more elaborately carved altars in Saint-Saveur. Like Saint Malo, it was built and re-built in different stages so it's a mish-mash of medieval and more modern elements.

A pheasant with feathers all
the way down to its feet!

This was the end of the map's walking tour so we decided we had earned some ice cream. We went to "The North Pole" and Lisa got amarena (cherry) while I got Bounty (the British version of a Mounds candy bar), both topped with copious amounts of whipped cream. We then walked to a large park area outside the city walls. Unbeknownst to us until we entered, this park contains several cages of rare pheasant and chicken breeds as well as some domesticated deer, allowing us to expand our knowledge of strange bird breeds! Afterwards, we went back into the city walls and stopped at a large tourist-y store full of Breton souvenirs to try to start getting ideas for Christmas gifts for some of you.

Feeling as if we had seen most of what there was to see in Dinan, we decided it was time to make our way back to the bus stop and come home. Unfortunately, our bus was forty minutes late (the driver explained that there was some kind of "catastrophe" on his way to Dinan, but he didn't elaborate). To make up for that, the driver decided to skip a few stops closer to Rennes and get on the autoroute (the French version of an interstate highway) to get us home faster which he (thankfully!) did. So ended our first trip to a (very old!) French gated community.

Work

What are we doing here?  We are teaching English to students at the Université de Rennes 1.  The Université de Rennes is the big, public university in Brétagne, and it has campuses all over the city.  The "1" means that it is for science students--physics, math, chemistry, biology, economics, computer science, law, philosophy, etc.  Medical students are separate and attend a different sort of university straight out of high school.  There are about 22,000 students at UR1, with 1600 faculty members.  The founding of the whole academy dates back to the fifteenth century, but the university as it is known today only dates back to the late 1960s.  There are twelve sites in the whole UR system, including eight campuses, three research centers, and a museum.

Library at Sciences Éco, housed in
a former monastery.  Photo courtesy
of Wikipedia.com.  

I teach my classes at the Sciences Économiques campus (known as Sciences Éco), which is for the business students.  It is in the heart of the city, and the oldest of the buildings is very pretty; it used to be a monastery for the Carmelites.  I have three classes: one for second-year business students in the normal track and two for second-year business students in the advanced, international section for students planning to work abroad for at least part of their careers.  The students are most definitely quieter than those in the US, but overall they are pleasant and interested in English.  We make all our own curriculum here, so we can choose subjects in which the students are particularly interested.

Beaulieu campus.  Photo courtesy
of ICOM.

Aaron is teaching L2 (second-year) science students and second-year master's students in the mathematics track at the Beaulieu campus.  The math class has not started yet, but he thinks the science students have fairly good English.  Since he's only taught one class, he says it's hard to make any other judgments except that it's strange to teach a language without a textbook.  (Note strange=different, not wrong or bad.)

Next week, we will begin the other part of our job, which is interviewing students who are taking the online version of classes (This semester, these students are L1 and L3, first- and third-year.  Next semester, it will be the L2 students' turn to study at home).  What we have been told (unofficially, mind you, so please feel free to correct us) is that the university budget cannot cover the cost of having all the students in the classroom all year.  We'll let you know how that goes once it begins!

Sometimes at Beaulieu, the instructors ask us to come to their classes to help out.  Aaron is visiting a class for future high school science teachers and has to be taught to give a presentation on volcanoes; then he has to give the presentation to the class and compete with the other American lecturer, Andrew!  I, unfortunately, do not get to participate because I am teaching during the class period.

The other part of our job (and this is the really hard part!) is that we have to lead English Club in the Irish Pub in the city every Monday night.  We even get a special Happy Hour for our participants.  We, the leaders, buy our first drink, and last night they gave us our second free!  Aaron enjoys a good pint, so that was fun for him.  I chose Irish whiskey (Bushmills) and then they gave me their favorite Scotch (I have no idea what it was) for free as my second.  They were very nice, and we had about thirty people there speaking English!  (Aaron adds that many of them were American, either from Andrew's college in New York or other expats from around town).  We even met someone from Madison, Wisconsin, and it was her twenty-second birthday!

Tomorrow, we are planning on taking a trip to Dinan, a walled, Medieval city between Rennes and Saint Malo.  We'll let you know about that soon!

If you thought life in a small town was boring...

That little path on the right is my
running trail.  It goes for miles and is
filled with other runners all day.

think again!  We had an adventurous day in Cesson-Sévigné yesterday, starting off with a run on the trail by the river for me and then a walk around town.  We did some boring things like buying envelopes and going to the post office and grocery store.  Then we explored a local park, full of blackberries and walking/running trails, a field, and a lake.  I think we've found our perfect picnic spot.  On the way to this park is an organic supermarket: Scarabée Biocoop.  It is a LOT like a very small Whole Foods--smells lovely and fresh, has very limited merchandise, prices most of the products at lest 1.5 times more than they should be, but then prices some more cheaply than you can find them anywhere else.  I'll never understand supermarket pricing.

Parc de la Monniais, which we are
dubbing Blackberry Park.

What they did have was very important!  They had all different grades of flour, maple syrup, molasses, and TWO kinds of brown sugar in the bulk section.  This brown sugar was moist, dark, and smelled of light molasses.  Perfection.  We purchased the molasses to transform what we already bought into a better version of brown sugar instead of just accumulating more and more types of sugar.  They also sell LOTS of cookbooks, including a blank one!  That might be my first frivolous purchase in France come next month.  This little market will also be perfect for picking up picnic goods on the way to Blackberry Park.

Twix 10+2=1 dozen Twix bars!

What other sorts of adventures did we have?  We went to Carrefour (much like Walmart) to pick up some cinnamon because I made my first pumpkin custard here with a fresh local pumpkin yesterday.  It was delicious.  The recipe is on the new "Two-Burner Meals" page for recipes (which Aaron titled!).  Now, to the right, you'll see an image of a GIANT pack of Twix bars, so if you were thinking that everything in the US is bigger than everything in France, you just have to go to Carrefour to learn differently!  (No, we didn't buy it).

What is that I'm hearing echoing across the Atlantic?  "Lisa, you implied that life in your small town isn't boring..."  Well, never fear!  We are at the good stuff!  Right in the parking lot of Carrefour, what did we see?  Camels!  Llamas!  Donkeys!  Oh my!  That's right!  You don't need to go to Africa to see a camel; you can find three right in Cesson-Sévigné!  Why were they there?  The Zavatta Circus has come to town with the yellow trucks, blaring music, and exotic animals for the week.  This is the second circus in our little town in the three weeks we've been here.  We're beginning to wonder if it's the favorite stop of the animals or just some sort of September thing for small towns.  We're not sure if we'll attend of not; I don't like clowns, and I hate seeing the one with all the big cats in the cages.  Aaron just thinks they don't seem like very much fun.  We were hoping they would let the lions out in the parking lot, but no such (un)luck.

Mr. Camel in front of the now-defunct
French Home Depot.

Most of the ads for Zavatta
actually include pictures of
the big yellow trucks in the
background.

"Hmm...should I buy the pink
lampshade or the blue one?  Oh dear,
it seems the store isn't open anymore,"
thinks Mrs. Camel.

Success!

 It's been just a week since we first tried to make Nestle Tollhouse Chocolate Chip Cookies, and we succeeded in finding the proper (well, mostly proper) ingredients with the help of many friends.

• First, baking soda was found.  Michèle told us it does exist here, and Elizabeth told us it was indeed in Europe but used only for health purposes.  Someone else's blog told us it's found in the spice section of the grocery store, and that is where Aaron found it!
• Second, Todd told us that brown sugar here is called "sucre vergeoise."  We'd been told that "cassonade" is the same, and a google search shows us that is true, but that it is also the word used for what we call "raw cane sugar" in the US (in fact, since having tried both the dry cassonade and the moist vergeoise, the cassonade tastes more like our brown sugar, but the texture is different.  The next time, we'll replace the white sugar with our cassonade and use the vergeoise again.  Perhaps eventually we'll find moist cassonade.).  Our local grocers (G20 and Carrefour) only sell the dry, raw cane sort and not the moist brown sugar.  Galeries Layfayette Gourmet had sucre vergeoise, and U Express downtown has it, too.  It is easy to find now!
• Third, we did find chocolate chips, but their quality is a bit too high for what these cookies need.  We found some bars of semi-sweet chocolate on the bottom shelf at G20, and their taste and texture is almost identical to a Nestle chocolate morsel.  
• Fourth, we found with Michèle's help that flour #65 is not too hard to find, but for this round of cookies we are just going to use up the rest of the #55.  That seemed to be the least of our problems from last time.
• Fifth, we found actual vanilla extract at U Express (even Galeries Lafayette Gourmet didn't have it), but we had already started making our own in rum according to Elizabeth's recipe.  Thus, we are going to use the rest of the vanilla sugar while we wait for the vanilla beans to soak for a month.  

Now, onto the actual baking.  We still had to add the extra quarter cup of flour because our flour is a bit fine.  We shaved a bit off the block of butter to get it closer to 8oz, and we measured two cups of chopped chocolate.  When measuring the white sugar, we first put in five packets of vanilla sugar and then filled the rest in with white sugar.  We followed the rest of the recipe here: Nestle Tollhouse Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe.  (Ok, even Aaron doesn't follow the recipe exactly.  We skip the nuts.)

We've illustrated again below.  

The players: 2 eggs, 225g unsalted sweet cream butter, 37.5g vanilla sugar, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon baking soda, 3/4 cup sucre en poudre, 3/4 cup sucre vergeoise, 2.5 cups #55 flour, 2 cups chopped semisweet chocolate.

2 cups semisweet chocolate.

5 sachets of vanilla sugar.  This was
still not strong enough, but our homemade
extract will be ready in just 28 days!

Creaming 3/4 cup sucre en poudre,
3/4 cup sucre vergeoise, 225 grams  warm
butter (sweet cream, unsalted.)

Gradually adding premixed salt,
flour, and baking soda.  This was
teamwork.

Mixing in the chocolate.

Shaping the cookies.

These cookies were a much better replica of those we miss.  Please come visit and try some soon!  We'll add a picture of the actual cookies to this entry soon.  (On a side note, the apron was a parting gift from my friend Carrie, for which I am very thankful for multiple reasons (in no particular order): (1) I had forgotten to leave one out when I was packing to put everything I own in storage (my parents would probably object to the term everything, and I'd have to agree based on the piles of book boxes in my bedroom at home), (2) it's adorable, (3) it's really nice to have something from a friend to remind me of home, and (4) it keeps me from getting as messy as I might otherwise.)


Soon, we'll do an entry on our work here, lest you think all we do is bake cookies and go to the beach.

A Map

Many of you have asked precisely where we are and where we go, so here is a visual attempt at explaining that.  It's not quite as clear as we'd like (we borrowed it from the LP), but it will do for now.

Our First Seaside Adventure

The chilly beach at Dinard didn't
stop these tourists from sunbathing.

Aaron, the navigateur of this year abroad, planned a day trip for us to Dinard and Saint Malo, two cities on the Channel.  We went into the city to catch the Illenoo bus, a very clean regional bus that takes people all over the department of Ile-et-Vilaine for a very reasonable price.  We boarded the train a bit after 9am with four elderly nuns who were giggling like schoolgirls as they prepared for their seaside adventure.  (Aaron's comment before we realized they were nuns was: "Hey, do you think those ladies are going to the casino?"  We did pass a casino on the way to Dinard, but they did not visit it to our knowledge.)

The tunnel leading to the beach.

We started the day as healthily as possible: cereal and orange juice for Aaron, yogurt and fruit for me.  We arrived a bit hungry in Dinard and immediately went for the healthiest treat in sight: ice cream!  I had a delicious boule of salty caramel, and Aaron had a raspberry glace italienne (sweet soft serve).  I think that's a perfect way to start a day at the beach!

We then walked a few miles along the beach and around the point.  It was very unamerican (shocking, we're not in America)--no guide rails most of the way.  There would have been a LOT of law suits about that back home.  It was gorgeous.  The sun was shining, and there was a brisk breeze.  We walked up some stairs on the cliffside and had the picnic lunch we brought with us while overlooking the Channel.  (Lunch was actually good for us--fruit, bread, cheese--which of course meant we could get a pastry later.)

Aaron even took his shoes off to
walk in the water!

 We walked back through the town toward the bus stop to get to Saint Malo, which is a medieval city right across the water from Dinard.  It had gotten warmer, and I actually considered going in the water for a bit.  Then I realized I hadn't brought a towel, and spending the day in damp bathing suit and jeans did not sound entirely appealing. We waded, though, and the sand is so sparkly there!  I'm not sure why, but when the sun hits the sand in the water and on the beach, it looks like gold.  I've never noticed that at any other beach I've visited.

Alfred Hitchcock.

We snapped one last picture in Dinard while waiting for our bus--a statue of the great Alfred Hitchcock!   His statue is there because the prize given at the British film festival in Dinard is named after him.  The area attracts a lot of tourists from England because of the proximity.  

Saint Malo was a more interesting city for a non-beach day.  Dinard is a 19th-century resort town, and Saint Malo was a medieval city, largely destroyed in World War II but restored to look historic.  The actual city is much larger than the walled section, but we've seen other modern cities here, so we only went to the medieval section.

A view into the medieval part of Saint Malo.

The cathedral in Saint Malo was
almost entirely destroyed in
WWII and was rebuilt in the late
twentieth century.

We visited the cathedral, which, like the city, had been mostly destroyed in the war.  It had a strangely modern feel, with an altar made of bronze by local artists and gorgeous stained glass windows, but the windows had no detail, just patterns of color.  The church also held saints' relics encased in wax sculptures of the original body.  You could see the broken bone fragments in the uncovered, open hand of the figure.  They also had a vial of the saint's blood.  We're just showing you pictures of the pretty windows, so don't be afraid to scroll down.

Detail of the light through the stained glass at the cathedral.

Before leaving Saint Malo, we went to its seaside and looked back across the water to Dinard.  Chateaubriand, a famous 19th-century French writer, was buried on this coast.  Well, it's on the coast if it's low tide, and it's an island when it's high tide.  If we'd had time, we could have walked out to see his tomb, so that may be an adventure for another day.  They built a walkway so that people can go at low or middle tide without getting all sandy.  High tide looks pretty impressive from our google image search, especially when the tide pool on the beach is entirely covered.  The diving board looks like the head of some sort of sea dragon poking out to inspect the city.  

The view from Saint Malo to Dinard.

An apple Kouign Amann, a traditional
Breton butter and sugar pastry.  

We wandered around the shops in town for a while and tried an apple Kouign Amman pastry, a sort of croissant like creation, fried in caramel and butter, which an apple in the middle.  We both thought it was a little too sweet, but we wanted to try a regional specialty to keep our tummies quiet on the bus ride home after all the walking.

St. Bartholomew's Church in Dinard,
the only Anglican church in Brittany.

To get back to Rennes, we had to take the bus through Dinard and had about an hour's wait there.  Aaron wanted to walk around the other side of the city, and in doing so we found an Anglican church!  We went inside, and it reminded us a lot of the chapel at the Chapel of the Cross.  It's not too surprising because they were built at roughly the same time.

Our day ended getting back on the bus in Dinard but with only three nuns.  Suspicious?  I think so.

A whole-hearted, yet feeble, attempt...

At Aaron's favorite cookie recipe.  The one, the only, THE Nestle Tollhouse Chocolate Chip Cookie.

Let's begin with a history lesson.  The first version of what we now know as Nestle originally began in Aaron's home state, Illinois in September of 1867.  The Page brothers founded the company as one to produce condensed milk.  That same year, just one month later, Henri Nestlé of Switzerland developed a milk-based baby food, which involved dehydrating milk.  In 1868 Daniel Peter began developing a process for producing milk chocolate and needed his milk to be completely dry, thus bringing the Nestlé's work to its ultimate heights.  The Pages and Nestlé competed on the market for baby food and condensed milk until the early twentieth century when they merged.  They now own over 6,000 brands and are based in Vevey, Switzerland.  (Lesson paraphrased from Wikipedia.  We must cite our sources as good and honest academics.)

The company started in Aaron's homestate.  Switzerland is close to France.  Nestlé owns more brands than I own books.  So why, why, why can the brands necessary to producing NESTLE Chocolate Chip cookies be so far from Cesson-Sévigné, a mere 850 kilometers from Vevey?  Why?

This is not to say that we failed at making cookies.  This is not to say we produced bad cookies.  We just did not produce what we know and love.  Normally, I love a challenge at making substitutions.  When I'm out of eggs, out of butter, out of sugar, out of flour even (it turns out ground-up Cheerios function much like flour and impart a lovely oat flavor to a baked good.  But alas, even normal Cheerios aren't available here), I can usually get by, but not this time.  This time we produced something very akin to a cookie version of chocolate chip quick bread, and this time we are in mourning.

This mourning shall not last long, I do declare!  We will rise above this setback and triumph over our loss!  We will enjoy this country, and we will show it THE NESTLE TOLLHOUSE CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE if it takes all year!

In the meantime, see the illustrated kitchen experiment below.

1. Consult recipe, brought
from the USofA.

2. Purchase semi-sweet chocolate
from Ikea to replace 12oz semisweet
chocolate chips.  

3. Chop what turns out to be bitter-
sweet chocolate from Ikea.

4.  Soften 250g unsalted butter.
(of course it's cultured, not entirely
sweet, like in the US.)
5.  Purchase parchment paper to put
on broiler pan (no cookie sheet.)

6.  Assemble ingredients
from store.
a) Levure chimique=
baking powder (baking
soda is hard to find.)
b) Vanilla sugar (extract
is hard to find.)
c) Flour #55 (somewhere
between cake flour and
regular flour.)
d) Raw cane sugar (brown
sugar as we know it does
not exist here.)

7.  Let cage-free, organic eggs from
market come to room temperature.
(Some things are the same!) 

8.  Cream butter and sugar
by hand. (We did not bring
a mixer to France.)

9.  Add chocolate chunks.

10.  Drop cookies onto
parchment with tablespoons.
(Spoons brought from the US.)

11.  Attempt to enjoy cookies for
what they are.

Nota Bene... 

Unmentioned steps include, but are not limited to, the following:

2a) Use 3.5 Ikea bars.

6a1) Use 2.5 teaspoons of baking powder to make up for 1 teaspoon of baking soda.

6a2) We have since found baking soda.  It's located in the spice section, not baking section, here.

6b1) Use 2 packets of vanilla sugar to replace one teaspoon of vanilla extract.

6b2) Discover after tray one bakes that this is not enough vanilla, so sprinkle tops of remaining batches with more vanilla sugar.

6c1) Decide that you need to find flour #65 after using 2.5 cups #55 flour to make up for 2.25 cups American flour (a courser grind).

6d1) Use 1.5 cups of raw cane sugar to make up for 3/4 cup white sugar and 3/4 cup brown sugar.

6d2) Discover this is not quite sweet enough and does not have nearly enough brown sugar taste.  See 6b2 above.

8a) In a separate bowl, mix together flour, 1 teaspoon of salt, and baking powder.

8b) Add eggs, one at a time, to creamed butter and sugar.  Mix well.

8c) Add dry ingredients, gradually beating them in.

8d) Stir in chocolate chunks.

10a) Preheat oven to 190C (=375F).

10b) Bake for 9 to 11 minutes or until golden brown.

10c) Cool on plates instead of cooling racks like at home.

11a) This is only half of the recipe we made.  We ate the other half over the last few days, so they really weren't that hard to enjoy.

Our Apartment--with Furniture!

Aaron at the dining room table/our
 desk before we hung pictures.

Where I write.  Quite comfy.

As of Thursday, we have a furnished apartment!  As of Friday, we even have a bed and kitchen table!  It took three trips to Ikea and one delivery truck, but it's finally all here.  (The third trip was for the kitchen table top and the bed slats which were sold out when we purchased things for delivery.  Have we told you this already?  I'm feeling repetitive.)  This means that I can sit on our loveseat with my feet up on the coffee table (how couth of me) while writing the blog entries!

Our little terrasse and a
glimpse of the laundry.

Now, if we've had furniture since Thursday, why are you only seeing it now?  Well, we'd been doing laundry, and we had lines of laundry EVERYwhere--one outside, one outside coming in, one from the kitchen window to the bathroom doorknob, and two in the bedroom!  That made it difficult to move around, much less take representative pictures of our living space.  So here you are, finally, with pictures of an apartment furnished by Ikea and some things we bought from Heidi, who was a lecturer here last year.  Todd is letting us use the television set for the year, and we turned it on last night to see what there is to watch--lots of French shows, plus Friends and Cougar Town.  The French must like Courteney Cox.

Starring the dining table in
its secondary role: desk.

We've decided to leave decorative items to a minimum because we'd rather get meaningful souvenirs during our travels around Europe than get shoddy attempts at objects conforming to our tastes from Ikea.  We brought maps and have put them on the walls to aid us in travel-planning and to provide some decoration.  We are planning on hanging maps of places we visit while we're here in the bedroom.  Besides that, we have some pictures from home, wedding pictures, a Beloit College calendar, and a towel representing Pennsylvania (part of our wedding gift from my cousin Adam and his wife Christine). The throws on the couch are also from home and can double as scarves for me.

Where breakfast and lunch happen.  

Where deliciousness happens.

When we first moved in, we thought we wouldn't need curtains because French apartments all seem to come with shutters (generally resembling the sort that stores pull down after hours in malls).  They keep the light out quite efficiently at night, and they provide good insulation.  They do not, however, provide a middle ground; they're either all the way shut or all the way open (well, I suppose they can be halfway up, but there's not much point to that).  After a few days of making eye contact with neighbors every time they walked to their cars, we decided we should add some light filtration.  We ended up getting just one pair of curtains from Ikea to cover five windows!  Thank goodness for iron-on hemming for cut-to-length curtains.  Now we just have to get to that ironing...

The bedroom, obviously.  Where the
 day ends, so where this entry ends.

Stay tuned for our next entry on making Nestle Tollhouse Chocolate Chip Cookies abroad and perchance a rant about why I don't know enough html code to be able to lay out a blog entry with pictures in an aesthetically pleasing way.