Eating food with eyes.

Cafe life......



Fur & Feathers 

I know why people don’t blog every day, life gets in the way, by the time you experience, live the moment, domestic duties, issues “Facebook” it, “tweet” it! You have to do some living, interacting, to have any insight to share.

Bastille market

I pointed at quails and they chopped their heads off when I was not looking, saw bunnies in their fur coats. It's interesting seeing your meat fully dressed with head, eyes, feathers, fur and tails. Acknowledge  dinner as a living thing. French teenagers, I assume don’t squeal and gag when they see a chicken hanging dull eyed with neck feathers failing backwards, naked plucked breast exposed. A visceral humane connection to the food, reviling how dinner runs around on the earth, at its day job, you may say. Does it make us more mortal as well? We could be breathing and eating, planning to see the chick next door when low and behold our necks broken and we are on view to a mortician, not a hungry crowd. But it's that touch of our own mortality we are denying in the pre cut and wrapped ready to go once life in plastic.

Denial has never been good for us but as a race we are encouraging it with the preparation of our food. Ideal image driven advertising ... brand taking over from actual product accountability. Why is that, because the actual facts about where and how a lot of mass-produced food is grown, cared for and slaughtered is not actually that appetising? Have a look at Food Inc the movie?

Back to digestible details.

Late lunch at a café ala typical, the girls had Crème Brulee; my daughter makes for a great hand model. I have insisted she wear red nail polish the whole trip.

Dinner

Quail in coriander seed, lemon zest and sea salt seared with pear, finished with the dark ends of endive, flageolet beans and pigeon stock. Pigeon stock donated by our last meal. Accompanied by the other part of the endive, its pale heart with walnut bread in a salad. The bread falls apart in the dressing of the salad, giving it a nutty almost creamy texture, carrying the flavour of the dressing.