Think of some of the world’s record-breaking works of art at point of sale, and paintings from Claude Monet’s Water Lilies series will no doubt feature on the list. Ever since I first saw a Monet in the flesh in the eighties, during a touring exhibition that actually made it the extra xxxx miles to far-flung…
Tag: france
McDonald’s, France: Venez comme vous etes!
At the end of the summer, Monsieur and I were in Cap Ferret when we spotted a poster for the new McDonald’s France ad campaign, called Venez comme vous êtes, or ‘Come as you are’. It showed a shrouded figure in a death mask, like those seen in SCREAM, sitting down to eat a Happy Meal (or…
Dining Success at Borgnefesse!
The Blind-in-one-eye Bum is an interesting name for a food establishment, and that’s the rough English translation for a Saint Malo restaurant named Borgnefesse. Borgne means blind in one eye (how efficient of the French to have one word for this affliction instead of four in English) and fesse means bum, buttock or bottom, whichever…
Moules on Market Day – Honfleur
I can’t say I really knew much about Normandy until recently. Admittedly, the closest I’d come to getting to know the place would be waving at it from moving vehicles or watching Band of Brothers. So how much Norman knowledge did my grey matter actually hold? Astonishingly little: Normandy is a place in France with English weather and lots and lots of…
How to Run a Motel 101 – Motel Les Bleuets, Honfleur
We hadn’t even slept a night in France but Monsieur and I were already having adventures on our French Road Trip. We’d been caught in traffic, were nearly run off the road by a nasty red-faced man in an evil orange car, missed our ferry by a mile, had to wait forever for another berth and…
The Price of Eggs at Mont Saint-Michel
Ever since I first set eyes on an image of Mont Saint Michel in a school French textbook I’ve dreamed of visiting the famed island abbey and recently that dream came true. At last Monsieur and I were able to see Mont Saint Michel for ourselves, but that experience is a whole different blog post….
I like to MO-GETTE MO-GETTE
All the talk about beans on the London Bloggers network recently made me do some odd things. Well, odd for most people but probably quite normal for me. This includes taking photographs of BEANS in a French supermarket, planning extra beans into our weekly diet (they’re very good for you – slow energy release), checking…
Parc Caillebotte
When I was a child, we always had prints of famous paintings on various of the walls at home. It’s little wonder I grew up with a taste for things French (including a certain man), because most of these prints were of works by French painters – from Chardin to Lautrec. One of my favourites…
A Big Chill at Vaux le Vicomte
On a bone-chilling day in December last year, keen to walk off some of that devillish foie gras that French people (and this particular Kiwi) love to consume at Christmas, Monsieur and I and a couple of the in-laws visited Vaux le Vicomte. For those men who salivate over Eva Longoria Parker and for the women who aspire…
From aspic setting to lobster killing – Julie and Julia do French cooking
When I was about eleven, I started home ec classes at school. My classmates and I then spent the next two years fighting over ingredients in these core classes as we perfected the mangling of simple dishes such as scrambled eggs and kedgeree. The worst part of these classes, however, was post-cooking when we had to sit and EAT what we’d just burned,…
The Return of Frenchified
For a while now, Frenchified has been Stultified, i.e. on the back burner whilst I’ve been struggling with unprecedented workload and exhaustion. No longer. I miss writing about France, so I’m dusting off the blog and preparing to give it some renewed OOMPH. Thank you for being patient with my recent lack of posts. Here’s…
Winter Grasse
Monsieur and I were in Cannes for New Year but soon decided to leave the heaving Croisette for a little trip elsewhere. In our efforts to do just that we drove stop-start through the labyrinthine streets of France’s answer to Tinseltown trying to find a way out. This took a while but a U-turn and…
Epicurienne 