¡French-Mex!

            Living in France is great.  The food is delicious—cheese, baguettes, cured meats, pastries—they have almost everything.  I say almost because they do not have beans of the black or refried variety or true tortilla chips and chunky salsa.  Coming from Southern California, all of us UC students eat a ton of Mexican food and we have all been missing it so we decided to have a pseudo-Mexican-food lunch.  We found tomato-y/onion-y rice, tortillas, cheddar cheese, and the weirdest tortilla chips I have ever eaten PLUS we made some bomb guacamole with bell peppers and onions.  We searched long and hard for black beans, pinto beans or refried beans, but we didn’t find any.  We finally settled on baked beans that surprisingly did not turn out too bad.  It was not bad, but it was definitely not Mexican food.  I am just glad that I have a wonderful Uncle Keith and Auntie Barbara who are sending me re-fried beans so that we can do this Mexican food dealio again only better!  For dessert we bought a galette des rois (it’s like a marzipan tart/pie thing with a ceramic figurine baked into it) and we designed our own drink that we have thus named: the Frenchmex.  Really the Frenchmex has nothing to do with France or Mexico, but it was created during frenchmex lunch so it makes sense.  The drink consists of pear or apricot nectar purée and cider—it’s really good and the nectar we found is ridiculously delicious.  When we cut the galette I found the fevre (ceramic figure) for the first time! Which means that I am going to have good luck…and I got to wear a crown.  After eating we were so stuffed that all we could do was sit around for a while and let the food coma set in.