Join us on a photo journey of France, Europe and beyond on our photoblog. Click on the photo or go to: www.france-and-beyond-photoblog.com
Chambery App
If you have an IPhone or IPod and are planning a visit to Chambery, buy my ITunes App. It will walk you through the city of Chambery to each historic landmark with walking directions, history, a map, and narrative. It's just $2.99. Click on the above photo of the elephant fountain for the link to the app.
Travel Resources
Planning a trip to France ? Stay in a Paris apartment during your trip to the city of lights.
Get my Chambery, France Guide Book free with the purchase of my Cookbook: 'French Comfort Food: Recipes of Savoie and the French Alps.' Get both for only $7.99. Click the photo to get more information or to purchase your books now.
French Tutorial
A basic grammar and vocabulary review of the French language, as well as some informal & slang vocabulary and a special section on vocabulary for English-speaking expatriates living in France. Also included is an appendix on French pronunciation for English speakers as well as IPA transcriptions for most of the vocabulary lists and all of the verb conjugations.
Visit the Store to buy the e-book for $9.95 or paperback book for $24.95.
Join us on a small group tour of the French Alps June 9 - 16, 2012. I designed this tour to include the best of the region. Wander the Medieval town of Annecy, nicknamed the Venice of the French Alps, and take a boat ride on its crystal blue lake. Do you like pampering yourself on your vacations, then why not spend an afternoon at the Aix les Bains thermal baths inside your lakeside hotel? Are you the adventurous type? Then take a horseback ride in the Alps or fly through the trees at the High Ropes Adventure. Are you a foodie? Taste local chocolates, cheeses, wines and hazelnut oils. Are you a history buff? Then satisfy your curiosity at Lyon's Old Town or Vienne's Roman Temple and Forum. Or just enjoy watching the hang gliders and sunset while enjoying an outdoor aperitif on the top of a mountain overlooking Annecy's lake. See you in the French Alps! www.french-alps-tours.com
Alps Cookbook
Get my ECookbook: 'French Comfort Food: Recipes of Savoie and the French Alps.'
51 recipes of the region, collected from friends and local cookbooks. This is the only English language Savoie and French Alps cookbook in print. Only $7.99 and includes a bonus book: The Chambery Guide Book.
Click the photo to buy yours now or go to the Cookbook Page on the Navigation Bar!
French Comfort Food
Visit my French Comfort Food website for articles, recipes, videos, tips and products about French Food and Wine. Click on the photo or go to www.frenchcomfortfood.com
Videos, photos and posts can be used or posted noncommerically (this means you can't sell my films, photos or put them in or on anything you sell!), but everything must be linked back to this blog and must list me as the creator.
Here’s another recipe out of my French Alps Cookbook (coming this summer). There are so many variations of this recipe in books and on the internet but the French like things simple with limited ingredients, so here’s one of the French versions. This is perfect for summertime when the cherries are fresh. You can also do it with flash frozen cherries if they are out of season.
This is one of 50 recipes you’ll find in my new ECookbook being released this week: ‘French Comfort Food: Recipes of Savoie and the French Alps.’
Ingredients for one pie:
2 cups of pitted fresh cherries, washed, and cut in half
1/2 cup sugar
1 packet of Sucre Vanilline (if you can’t find it, you can just add 2 teaspoons of vanilla mixed with 2 tablespoons of sugar; or you can make your own Sucre Vanilline by putting a vanilla bean in a jar of sugar for a few days)
4 eggs, beaten
2 tablespoons of melted butter
1/4 cup of flour
1 1/4 cups of milk (or you can do half milk and half cream for a richer clafoutis)
Dash of salt and, if you want, a teaspoon of nutmeg
Butter and flour your pie dish and preheat the oven to 350 degress F.
Combine your eggs and flour. Add the Sucre Vanilla, sugar, butter, salt, nutmeg, and then gradually add your milk (and cream, if you’re using it). Pour the mixture into the pie dish and place the cherries on top. Alternatively, you can put the cherries in the pie dish and pour the mixture on top.
Put it in the oven for 30 to 40 minutes or until firm and slightly brown on top. Enjoy hot.
Every year Vienne, a French town 30 minutes south of Lyon, holds an internationally-recognized jazz festival in its 2,000 year old Roman arena. The festival only lasts three weeks in late June and early July, but the talent featured is exceptional. This is the second year we’ve attended. The two groups we saw were French: Michel Portal & Manu Katché Michel .
You are not supposed to take photos or videos of the groups and we were surrounded by security guards to ensure that people didn’t do just that. As a result, I wasn’t able to video tape the first group but, once it got dark, I was able to sneak out my little camera and use the video function to film a bit of the second group (Manu). Enjoy!
My French husband likes to make his own confiture (preserves) every summer. Since we have a raspberry bush and a cherry tree, he uses these primarily. But come September we also take walks in the countryside and pick blackberries for another batch of preserves. In October we also pick wild walnuts and eat lots of delicious apples and pears from our trees in the garden, but we don’t make preserves from those.
Here’s the recipe for the raspberry or cherry confiture (for the cherry confiture, be sure to remove the pits). It’s basically the same recipe, using different fruits. It is an estimate since my husband does things by ‘feel,’ so I had to do my best to duplicate it. This recipe, among another 50, is in my French Alps Cookbook: ‘French Comfort Food’, which will be available in early August on this site and www.frenchcomfortfood.com (my new site).
Ingredients for 4-5 small food jars:
- 1 – 1/4 lbs of raspberries or blackberries or cherries
- 2 ¼ cups sugar
- Juice of one lemon (optional)
Delicately rinse and pick over the raspberries (or cherries or blackberries), discarding any that look mushy or moldy. In a preserving pan (ours is copper), combine fruit, sugar and lemon juice. Bring to a boil, stirring gently.
Continue cooking on high heat for 5 to 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Return to a boil. Skim the surface, if necessary. Cook another 5 to 10 minutes. For the raspberry confiture, use a seed remover grind (see the video) to remove as many seeds as possible before canning.
Put the jam into sterilized jars immediately and seal. Mark the jars with the contents and date. Turn upside down to set which will also seal the joint. Refrigerate the jars you will be using soon, once they are cooled. Store the others in a cool place.
If you read my Dental Day from Hell post you’ll know I had a very bad day at the dentist a month ago. Well, last week I went back for the third time to have my permanent crown put on. I was still having some pain on the tooth which concerned me since he did a root canal and I shouldn’t have any feeling at all. When I told him, he brushed it off saying, ‘it must be from the other tooth.’ I thought to myself, ‘oh yea, you mean the one you were supposed to do instead of this one?’ But since my French husband was with me I decided not to make a scene. He put the crown on and when we finished he handed me a bill for 756 euros! I had already paid 200 euros and had asked the receptionist at that time if I owed more (in my incredibly crappy French). She said ‘no, c’est tout’ – no, that’s all you owe. I thought that was a rather low price for a crown but I had already learned that health care in France is much cheaper than in the U.S. so I accepted her answer. Obviously, my French is worse than even I thought since she hadn’t understood my question.
But this extra large bill did explain that when I asked how much the crown and root canal would cost when I first went to the dentist’s office, I never got a straight answer. He would say, ‘it depends,’ ‘it’s cheaper than the U.S.’, ‘don’t worry about it since you’ll be reimbursed by Social Security.’ I was in pain and figured as long as I got my money back, I didn’t care what it cost. So I had it done. Then when he handed me the bill and he saw the stunned looks on my and my husband’s faces, he started doing the verbal dance he had been doing from day one. Then when my husband started asking questions, and the dentist knew he couldn’t BS a Frenchman, he said that the Social Security system would only reimburse a small percentage of the cost and that if I had Mutuelles insurance, they would pick up a bigger percentage (Mutuelles is a supplemental insurance that French people buy but I don’t have since I still don’t have my Carte Vitale after waiting for 7 months, and I can’t buy Mutuelles without it). So I will be paying most of the 1,000 euros myself (that’s about $1,300). Now I’m a reasonable person and think that if that’s what it costs in France then that’s what I’ll pay so I did pay the bill. But here’s the problem with that philosophy. HE DID THE WRONG TOOTH in the first place. I still have a tooth that I will probably have to have done at the same cost and pain as this one, and I’ve lost one of my good teeth in the process. If that was not bad enough, I have consistently had pain and sensitivity in the tooth he did since he put the permanent crown on it. So $1,300 later I have more pain than when I originally went in to see him.
But it gets worse. When I was in Grenoble this week for another doctor appointment, I ran into the dentist on the street. He immediately said “I want to know when you are going to pay me.” Keep in mind, against my better judgement, I sent a check to him for the full amount the day I had the work done. I have no control over the French Postal System, especially given that we had a holiday this week, so no wonder it took more than 5 days to arrive. I told him I sent the check but he clearly did not believe me and looked at me like I was a criminal. And to add insult to injury, I feel totally taken advantage of by the situation. He saw a foreigner (an ignorant one at that!), and told me some lies as well as lies of omission and took me for a ride. He didn’t even bother with a discount, especially given he knew he did the wrong tooth nor offer to do the next one at a discount (although I would NEVER go back to him). He figured he had an American in his chair, and after all, all Americans are rich. Right?
Every year on July 14th the French celebrate Bastille Day (their version of Americans’ 4th of July). The day has an interesting origin. The Fête de la Fédération on the 14 of July, 1790 was a huge feast and official event to celebrate the uprising of the short-lived constitutional monarchy in France and what people considered the happy conclusion of the French Revolution. Today, to celebrate the event, the larger cities like Paris celebrate the holiday BIG. Our region celebrates with smaller versions like this festival at the small town of Bourget en Huile, which has no more than 500-600 residents. The celebration included a BarBQ, dancing, and fireworks. This celebration video is from 2009.
The second video is from this year, July 13, 2010. I took this video of Chambery’s fireworks from our home balcony at 11pm. The big crane was in the way, unfortunately, but it still was fun to watch and made me feel a little better about missing my July 4th Fireworks Celebration this year.
As promised, here’s the video of the Tour de France, hot off the press (took it this morning and produced it this afternoon). It’s a 3 1/2 minute video of the race which went right by our house. It started at 11:00am with the Sponsors Parade and then the Tour de France went by our street at 1:00pm. The Sponsors throw candy and goodies at the onlookers to get people to come out onto the streets. What’s funny is that I literally went down on the street 5 minutes before the cyclers went by. If I had been in Los Angeles for an event like this I would have had to arrive 5 hours early and the crowds would have been 50 people thick against the street.
Enjoy the video and send it to your Tour de France friends.
Tomorrow the Tour de France comes to Chambery! I don’t know if it has come through town before, but I know it hasn’t since I’ve lived here in the past 2.5 years. And here’s what is really cool – I can watch them go past on the main road (one house away) from my balcony! I haven’t decided if I’m going to watch and film it the lazy way (from my balcony) or head out of town further down on the route on the motorbike with my husband. It would be less crowded to do it that way. Either way, I’ll be filming it and putting it on the blog. I just can’t tell you yet if you will see it from up high and further away, or see it from down low and up close. So stay tuned….
Here’s another recipe out of my French Alps Cookbook (coming this summer). There are so many variations of this recipe in books and on the internet but the French like things simple with limited ingredients, so here’s one of the French versions. This is perfect for summertime when the cherries are fresh. You can also do it with flash frozen cherries if they are out of season.
Every year Vienne, a French town 30 minutes south of Lyon, holds an internationally-recognized jazz festival in its 2,000 year old Roman arena. The festival only lasts three weeks in late June and early July, but the talent featured is exceptional. This is the second year we’ve attended. The two groups we saw were French: 
If you read my 
Tomorrow the Tour de France comes to Chambery! I don’t know if it has come through town before, but I know it hasn’t since I’ve lived here in the past 2.5 years. And here’s what is really cool – I can watch them go past on the main road (one house away) from my balcony! I haven’t decided if I’m going to watch and film it the lazy way (from my balcony) or head out of town further down on the route on the motorbike with my husband. It would be less crowded to do it that way. Either way, I’ll be filming it and putting it on the blog. I just can’t tell you yet if you will see it from up high and further away, or see it from down low and up close. So stay tuned….
