The supermarket may have been
small but I was in there a good hour….or two.
With no shopping list, no sense of what I wanted to eat for the next
week and a poor appreciation of what French people actually eat, I found this
particular shopping escapade to be rather adventurous.
My first thought: chicken. I know that chicken translates as “poulet” in
French but as I eyed up the fresh meat aisle I was inundated with breast of
rabbit and a peculiar purple-ish meat which looked a little suspect. Finally I found the chicken section but sadly
there was nothing but an empty box and a ripped off price tag. On the row above was the hugely expensive €5
a breast deal for a chicken reared in a 5* luxury chicken villa. Or wherever they send them to make them cost
so darn much. I think it’d be cheaper to
buy a live chicken and defluff it myself.
After killing it…obviously.
Cheese. Yes, I have a particular appreciation of the
stuff. Especially cheddar. Vintage cheddar from the Deli counter in
Sainsbury’s is nothing short of beautiful; the way it crumbles onto the cheese board
when you cut it. C’est parfait. To my disgrace, the French don’t really eat
cheddar and instead their cheese of choice is Emmental. All I can say to that is: bland, bland,
bland. Oh, and plastic. It’s the cheese you give to mice, not
humans. So I spent about 30 minutes
alone in the cheese aisle attempting to find my beloved cheddar, hoping,
somewhere deep inside the crevices of a French cheesemaker’s soul, he may have
had it in him to pasteurise some frickin’ cow’s milk into some frickin’
cheddar. Alas, this was not the
case. So I had to give in and buy some
pre-sliced orange cheese which was not
Red Leicester. They didn’t have that
either. Boo to the hoo.
Next stop: Cereal. The French aren’t as big on their cereal as
they are in the UK but I can’t survive without my morning bowl of cereal (thanks
Rebecca Black for turning this sentence into a song…forever indebted to you…). To my dismay I found no cereal. And I mean…no cereal. I must have done at least 20 laps of the supermarket
from all different directions until I came to the conclusion that there simply
must be no cereal. I was saddened by the thought that I might
have to give in and eat bread for breakfast until suddenly, almost as if it had
appeared out of thin air, a box of Weetabix caught my eye. THERE’S ANOTHER FLOOR TO THIS
SUPERMARKET. Yes, in my naivety I’d completely
missed the second floor, and the third one for that matter. I’ll be putting that 450g pack of Special K
into my shopping basket thank you very much!
*Sigh of relief*
Vegetables. All I’m sayin’ is the red peppers in France
are GIGANTIC. The one I picked up was a
funny shape, covered in dirt…and the size of my left bicep (i.e. massive…ish). I need something that I can actually fit in the fridge…I’m not planning on
growing a vegetable patch with this oversized specimen you call a red pepper….just
want it in my stir-fry. Is that too much
to ask?
I also spent a tediously long
amount of time staring into bottles of olive oil. I know this sounds fun, so don’t get too
excited. The nice stuff was a little
over-budget so in the end I decided to go for price over matter and chose something
with an incomprehensible label - but the contents looked reasonably
yellow. I just hope it’s for cooking
food and that it aint lighter fluid.
Guess I’ll find that out tonight when I’m retching over my chicken substitute.
I also splashed out on some baby
yoghurts, grated emmental (wanted to see what all the fuss was about), honey, brown
bread, salami, butter, milk, noodles, soy sauce, mayo, rocket, tuna, mushrooms,
broccoli, garlic, pasta, tomato sauce, petits pois, camomile tea, tortelloni
and orange juice. I’m 50 euros down and
I didn’t even buy caviar!! This food
better be darn tasty.
Watch this space.
Montana
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