Tell me how you eat – One “green” lifestyle, One recipe.

Do you remember Corinne with her mousse au chocolat d’Amour en Cage for her jealous hubby. It’s a fact, the French are passionate about chocolate! I have observed that chocolate is more than a something delicious to taste. It’s also sometimes, for the relationships, a tension regulator.

Chantal, one of my clients, explained to me that year after year, the chocolate became necessary to reduce the relationship tensions. Indeed, she discovered that 2 pieces of chocolate disappeared after each conflict with her husband. She found that her husband was also eating some chocolate after any domestic dispute !! Her husband even managed to fill the kitchen closet with chocolate!! The chocolate has become a kind of ‘climatic’ regulator, a soothing food, a delicious refuge after the domestic dispute. For them, the effect of the chocolate enables a calmly heart to heart discussion. And it’s always a successful reconciliation!

Chantal is fond of the chocolates of Michel Chaudun ( me too !!). This Parisian chocolate maker, unique in the world, used to eat chocolates on the sly when he was a child. But not for the same reason…
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Even if you think French women are liberated, happy and fulfilled with that, they also need ‘ingredients’ to express their feelings. They need to ‘make up’ their desires with romantic daydreaming, marriage or dîner in order to toe more the line. That being said, choosing a diner or cooking as a « vehicule » of love messages is not the prerogative of French women.

Did you know for example that women of some tribes in Amazonia eat a species of potatoe to express their feelings. Some scientists, observing them many years before, have discovered with amazement that this potatoe prevented these women from being pregnant. So they have extracted the oestrogenic plant hormone from the potatoe, to create the first pill ! They had the women’s liberation thanks to a potatoe! Amazing, no?

I guess you will tell me that I see connections between food and love eveywhere ? Oh yes, you know that there are other ‘carriers’ of feelings, don’t you? Like letters of love! Armandine, a French woman in WWI, wrote romantic daydreaming in a four pages love letter per day to his hubby Armand, gone to war. Her love letters have been published in a wonderful book : Armandine, Lettres d’Amour (love letter). As we talk about carying the love messages, Armandine has chosen to carry herself to his hubby ! No admittance was possible for women at the war front, so Armandine has taken a green and funny ‘vehicule’ to meet her hubby…the potatoe bag!! Indeed she met her hubby hiding in a potatoe bag! The potatoe, it again!! Liberator of women and ‘carrier’ for love messages !

While I was reading this book for Christmas holiday, some sentences of Armandine resonated in my mind. Well, I heard about these sentences before, I told myself! Yes for sure, I heard about these sentences at work, by these women who told me their life and their hubby.

Today, women have not really changed in their way to idealize their hubby. Their imagination is indeed very productive ! To such a point that, when I meet their hubby, I sometimes feel that it’s not the same man that they described me…

Building an idealized hubby is also sometimes a way to fulfill happiness in a buzy or difficult life. It’s a way to write a film that gets well with her, that reassures her. It’s like opening a luxury cookbook with delicious recipes, opening a new page of the cookbook each day and savoure. Imagination is a way to keep a love in shape and to savoure it better.

Obviously it works, you just have to control the proportion…you will learn how to do that soon in my book! We talk about cookbook, what about talking about a recipe? A potatoe salad au chèvre chaud?
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On this day when the US is about to go through the age of the biomass, of the all-vegetable, thanks to the president Obama and his future green team, on this day of coming back to the natural and authentic values, it’s interesting to know that some Kings and Queens of France were also passionate about the all-vegetable, the green luxury. So Marie-Antoinette in 1787, called upon the skills of Georges Jacob, a famous woodsman, for creating a furniture rural style (called aux épis style, ‘ear of wheat’) for her hameau de la Reine’s bedroom at the Petit Trianon of Versailles.This specific style of wood, sculpted in the shape of ears of wheat, flowers of jasmine and woven wicker, is really splendid. Gold, usually used on royal furniture, is replaced by natural paints. The aux épis (’ear of wheat’) style concerns also the choice of the « green » clothes covering up the chairs or the stools.

They could find for example clothes of basin, clothes made with coton yarn and hemp yarn embroidered with wool. Numerous clothes and pieces of furniture with a aux épis style was produced in the French countryside. The Bresse area for example, at 1 hour from Lyon or Genena, was specialized in the wood work.

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Cow pooling and cow traveling !

Do you want to know what is the the bright side of the ecological footprinting analysis ? We do have to rediscover, in the whole world, the delights of the cow pooling, of the local market, of local farm products, of seasonal strawberries. A seasonal style that the French has been defending for centuries ! I’m lucky you know because my grand-mother has passed me on these values. She used to live according to the seasonal rhythm of her organic garden.

At a time when the crisis and our environment impact cause numerous damages, it’s good to find refuge in authentic values and things that reassure us. It’s really good to see that everywhere in the world they rediscover their local culture and culinary heritage. The mistrust of the industrial impersonal food, producer of CO2, pollution and health damages, is growing up.

I know that in some parts of New York, the highest form of chic is now being delivered fresh organic milk or dining herbs of the local garden and berries of the market in a rural decor. Or even to share parts of a cow, the cow-pooling. I was lucky, my parents nourished me thanks to the cow pooling ! I remember that I would pick up the parts of cow and pig with my parents at the farmer’s, the parts of cow we placed in the freezer.

And if the highest of the luxuary was cow-traveling? I mean to travel through France with a cow, drink fresh organic milk, eat medicinal plants found on the side of the road and to rediscover old traditional French jobs! Hadrien, a men of 17 year old I heard about when I traveled through France this summer, is a fan of cow-traveling. He walks through the villages with a cow called Camomille, he drinks the fresh milk of Camomille and nourishes himself with the medicinal plants found along the road.

Hadrien is passionate about medicinal plants, easy he lives near Chemillé , the French capital city of the medicinal plants. His aim of travel is quite funny. Indeed, he wishes to think about his future by rediscovering his past, visiting a smith at the Château du Clos-Lucé in Amboise, an organic baker at Dénézé-sous-Doué (Loire area), a poet philosopher…

I love this philosophy! Heritage & Culture are major values of the French « green » lifestyle. So our today recipe will be totally rural…I thought about a good « galette » à la crème d’ortie (nettle cream potato pancake).
*Crédits photo : AFP
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