Filed under: food
Opening a book that was assigned in the French class I’m auditing, I was alarmed to see this first word: “Doukipoudonktan.” Flustered, I just ignored it at the time and kept going. The book was Zazie dans le métro by Raymond Queneau, and with the help of a photocopied excerpt from a scholarly article “Lexique Zazique,” I was later able to decode Queneau’s very modern ideas of French crasis (“Doukipoudonktan” = “D’où qui pue donc tant”) and the abundance of slang (argot) and semi-obscenities that were tripping me up. I didn’t read all of the book. Our professor only assigned us certain chapters, and despite my best intentions to over-achieve in a class for which I am not receiving credit, I only read the book in a morseled way.
The novel is clever, and it’s clever in a way that–as I think–books should be; I suppose it could be described as a type of cleverness that weeds out readers. And I don’t mean this in a snotty way–I don’t care at all which readers are being weeded out. For all I care, it could be the smart, dull, virtuous, or blond readers who just can’t understand what the author is getting at. Exclusion in itself makes things better. Mostly, I need to believe this, because all of my friends at home did, but everyone I’ve met at school out here seems opposed. No one could understand why I wouldn’t bring my football with me to Sprinfest, when I could not assure myself that I would be able to prevent other girls from playing with it. They thought I sounded mean. At any rate, Zazie is much more accessible than that last example; I think that most people would find it entertaining. So I recommend: the book or the movie, Zazie dans le métro. Here’s the movie trailer on YouTube.
Also, during these last few weekends of the school year, we are suffering more than usual here with the knowledge that all of our friends at schools on semester systems have been out for weeks already. So I cherish the weekends especially and, recently, the opportunity to read magazines. I start the minute I get out of class on Friday afternoon. I have a subscription to Vogue from my highschool years that will never expire, and I recently got a subscription to Gourmet from my cousin-once-removed’s school magazine sale.
I also read an occasional New Yorker–I mean to get a subscription–and Women’s Health, and pick up whatever else shamelessly, if it has an interesting topic on the cover. Especially if the something interesting on the cover is a recipe–my weekend magazine reading corresponds nicely to my weekend cooking.
In the May issue of Gourmet, there were two very different recipes that got me excited, both of which I slightly altered and put together as two dishes of my Friday night dinner. From the “Ten-mintue Mains” section, I made their “Open-face Chicken Cordon Bleu.” As the section suggests, it was quite simple. Chicken cutlets with ham and Gruyère on top. I omitted the spinach they prescribed for in between the chicken and ham, since the local grocery store only sells spinach in huge bags, and I don’t make myself salads. I also made the dish from a few pages earlier, “Bacon-and-egg Rice,” but in this case I omitted the chopped scallions, keeping the protein content two the title ingredients. I also grabbed some string beans while I was shopping, and the meal was quite satisfying, both that night and again this morning, when the leftover rice served as a great breakfast.
Also, on a side note, I hate bugs right now. I had to duck out of one of my house’s famous Porch Parties early this evening, to nurse four huge mosquito bites with Cortaid, and I HATE EARWIGS! Why did they have to call them that? Am I the only one to whom the name always suggests grotesquely vivid images?
Anyway, till next time.
