Nathalie Bouffe

Nathalie's Famous!

Check me out in Mississippi...

I take exception to the first sentence, though.  OF COURSE I came to enjoy the Southern cuisine!  I ate fried catfish that very night....

Unfortunately, it gave me food poisoning.

Wild Peaches

1
When the world turns completely upside down
You say we'll emigrate to the Eastern Shore
Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore;
We'll live among wild peach trees, miles from town,
You'll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown
Homespun, dyed butternut's dark gold colour.
Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor,
We'll swim in milk and honey till we drown.

The winter will be short, the summer long,
The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot,
Tasting of cider and of scuppernong;
All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all.
The squirrels in their silver fur will fall
Like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot.

Well, That's Cool

Check it: Sweetnicks has picked me as her "New (to Me) Blogger on the Block" for the week.  Sweet!

On a wholly unrelated note, according to Sweetnicks, Rachael Ray's first word was "vino."  Yesterday, an English girl who sells Comté on the Borough Market told me her first words were "cup of tea."

English people drink a lot of tea.  Why isn't the tea they drink better?  At the dairy, people are obsessed with (we even stock it, mainly so staff members can take their addiction home) Barry's Tea, black Irish tea typically sanded with sugar and sludged in milk. 

Even the actor Martin Clunes (who?) drinks Barry's Tea, and he buys it at Neal's Yard.  To the Observer Food Monthly he says:

My drink of choice is Barry's tea, because of its strong taste, always served with a milk jug - I've become very particular about that in my old age. I discovered Barry's years ago. You can get it everywhere in Ireland but the only place I can find it in London is the Neal's Yard Dairy cheese shop where I stock up on tea and buy my cheese. I like a lot of the smelly fellows and brie is a favourite.

Finally we know who that one dude is who comes in to buy Barry's.  Incidentally, I recently sold Brie to Suggs from funky 80s band Madness, according to the BBC "the missing link between the Kinks and Blur."  They had twenty songs in the top twenty over seven years.  It was nine o'clock in the morning and he was wasted.  His picture is to the right; he is significantly older now.

I don't dislike Barry's, and, like the company claims, there is something satisfying and congenial about taking a tea break with Barry's ("To Chill, Add Boiling Water"), but I can't really claim that it's very good tea.  I still end up drinking a cup or two of the stuff a day, and some far foodier colleagues of mine drink even more of it.  Only at home in Hackney do I ever see anyone drinking loose-leaf tea, which, honestly, is not a pain in the ass to make (for more on the merits of loose-leaf, check out my friend Pim's take).  What's the deal?

And Barry's accounts for 37 percent of Ireland's tea sales, turning over 31 million euros a year.  They only have 73 employees.  Someone is making a fucking killing.

Clearly, choosing cheese was not the wisest of my business decisions.  Then again, what the hell was?  The nutritionist responding to Martin Clunes' food choices in the article quoted above says about cheese, specifically "Brie (Neal's Yard): "Tasty though Brie and some other cheeses are, there is little to recommend them from a nutritional perspective."  However, she has lots of good things to say about Barry's.

What's going on?

Maps of the Places I've Lived in

Google.  Is. The. Best. Company. Ever.

1982-1995; The Crossings, West Kendall, FL
1995-2000; Banyan Drive, Coral Gables, FL
2000-2004; Thayer Street, Providence, RI 

2005: Glenarm Road, London....

Provides HOURS of procrastination!  If they continue at this rate, I'm never going to do ANYTHING with my life!!

Nathalie Bouffe!

Last year I pegged myself a narcissistic fool for writing a blog.

This year I bought a domain name.

www.nathaliebouffe.com

Currently it links to cabbagesandkings, but you should start using it anyway, if only because it's French slang for "nathalie eats," which covers my subject matter much more accurately and comprehensively than leafy veg and royalty do.

Love it.  Enjoy.

NJ

Wow, Cool!

Check it out:

             

AUTHOR         TITLE         WORD(S)         SUBJECT         NUMBER         RECORD #

1000 recipes

Check out this project y'all--

http://1000recipes.blogspot.com/

...pretty cool!  Love things that remind me that people crave personal contact and handwrought artifacts still....

Long debates with my Dad

Long debates with my Dad and Grand-père. Both think the profanity I occasionally sprinkle in my blog entries detracts from the writing.  What do you think? As a matter of fact, can I get some feedback on this thing? Who's out there reading this? Email me even if it's just to say you're checking up from time to time. (Send me something even if I already know, just for hello's sake!)
-N

p.s. if you're a super-fan i believe there is an option to have my posts sent to you directly every time there's a new one. use with caution, though. i talk a lot.

Blog sees the light!

Two pieces that originally appeared on the blog have made the big time, check out www.mytravelbug.org and click on "Current Travelers" on the left, then scroll down to "China."  Woo!

A Night of Belgian Television

Just wanted to insert a little note about what I’ve been watching on TV. I haven’t spent that much time with it, but television is so excellent, especially in other countries. In one night I flicked between:
• Fat Nation: The Big Challenge, a BBC reality show about fat people who are trying to lose weight. Two fit people on one side of a table filled with food critique the alimentary choices of the two fat people on the other side. They confiscate the fat people’s chocolate, and wine. The skinny man  leaves with the wine. Food is talked about as a “weakness.” A banana plays soccer with a little kid.  • The new Eminem video. Outstanding.
• On a Dutch channel, a drag race that involves minivans dragging caravans. Oh, the Dutch.
• The Green Day “American Idiot” music video. Oh, the Americans.
• A documentary that follows a group of German lesbians around.
• Dressage, that most patrician of already-stodgy sports, performed by a Cirque de Soleil imitator.
• A show about a man, forty years old and eight hundred pounds, whose mother, seventy and insane, follows him around everywhere, including the workplace and the discotheque. And he puts up with it.
• The 1981 Concert in Central Park, with Simon and Garfunkel. They are so amazing.

Big discussion today about whether it’s better to let your kids near the TV or forbid them from it. What do you think?