A French Pastry Primer

Posted on by je parle américain

Photo: pain au chocolat, © Luc Viatour

As soon as I decided to start writing about French pastries for this blog, I realized how little I actually understood about the technical differences among the various forms of French sweet baked goods. For example, what exactly is viennoiserie and how is it different from pâtisserie? If I write about something made from choux pastry, is it a viennoiserie or a pâtisserie? I considered sitting down for a little interview with my friend Arno—a former boulanger … or was that patissier … or both?—but I ended up doing some research on my own instead, and I think I’ve figured it out, so here goes:

je parle américain’s
Basic French Pastry Primer
(or useless information for your next visit to the boulangerie) 

Read the rest of this entry »

What do you say to a French person on Bastille Day? Nice fireworks!

Posted on by je parle américain

In this post from yesterday, I pondered the appropriate way to wish a French person a Happy Bastille Day.  After last night, I think my friend Nicolas was right: “Bon feu d’artifice !” … “Nice fireworks!”

(You can watch this in high definition by selecting 1080p HD after starting the video.)

Continue reading What do you say to a French person on Bastille Day? Nice fireworks!

Happy Bastille Day?

Posted on by je parle américain

What does one say on Bastille Day to a French person? Having been here long enough to know that the French don’t call July 14 “Bastille Day” the way we Anglophones do, I was in a quandary as to how to wish a happy national holiday to my French family and friends. I asked Michel and he said, “We don’t do that. We celebrate, but we don’t have a sentence like that, like you do in America. It might seem strange, but we don’t.”

Hmm.

Continue reading Happy Bastille Day?

Because it was just too hot to post anything yesterday …

Posted on by je parle américain

(That’s 37ºC  for those of you not too familiar with the Fahrenheit scale.)

… and it looks like another scorcher today, though not nearly as hot. I certainly hope that Wednesday’s forecast high of 71ºF (22ºC) is right. That’s the kind of Paris summer I like, and I can’t spend all day, every day hanging out in the frozen foods section of the Super U.

American in Paris arrested for assaulting a man wearing a pink kilt, led away screaming “Hello Kitty is not a clan!”*

Posted on by je parle américain

Okay, so that’s not a real headline, but it got your attention, right?

My friend Dan Costello, of Washington, DC, wrote that as a comment to my Facebook status Sunday wherein I addressed what I call “the misappropriation of the kilt” in Gay Pride parades. It got the most traffic of anything I’ve posted on Facebook since my posts about Anthony Weiner, so I figured it was a good hook for this post. (Let me know if you’re interested, and I can expound a little.)

Continue reading American in Paris arrested for assaulting a man wearing a pink kilt, led away screaming “Hello Kitty is not a clan!”*

A Bitter-sweet Exile

Posted on by je parle américain

A friend recently posted an article on Facebook about former Manhattanites living in my former hometown of Washington, D.C. Manhattanites exiled to Washington search for fellow sufferers is a humorous piece in the Washington Post‘s lifestyle section reporting on the “stranger in a strange land” lamentations of the members of a group called the Fellowship of Unassimilated Manhattan Exiles. It’s pretty funny because these folks are self-styled “exiles,” as if they had been banished from Manhattan to the hinterlands. And it’s even more entertaining because the article is rife with the stereotypical over-inflated New York ego: Continue reading A Bitter-sweet Exile

What do you mean, I can’t work for myself?

Posted on by je parle américain

I’ve been spending my day working on my CV, trying to convert my “lawyer” CV into one that screams:

“I TEACH ENGLISH! HIRE ME!”

I spent almost 8 years of my life working as a lawyer for a big firm in Washington, DC. Many of my clients were big financial institutions from Wall Street and most of my work was for them. When I left that job back in 2009, I decided to pursue a different course, but I wasn’t quite sure which one to take. Continue reading What do you mean, I can’t work for myself?