NEEDLING

NOT FEELING SO GOOD

Difficult morning. I’ve got to stop drinking or I’m gonna end up with a heart attack. And that certainly wouldn’t be good for my health.

The food came out great. I used a mixture of flour, corn meal, red & black pepper, cumin and basilica for the crust. To get that sticking to the chicken, I mixed melted butter, milk, and a couple eggs. I would have preferred buttermilk but I don’t know where to find buttermilk in my neighborhood. I added a couple of large carrots cut up in slices and a large yellow onion roughly cut to the beans about forty minutes before they were done. Some long grain white rice, some tomato & garlic & fresh parsley salad with lemon-mustard-olive oil dressing. Simple stuff with a little green leaf lettuce. It all turned out quite nice.

However, the fact that I don’t own any proper glasses – I use ex-yogurt jars – and that half my plates are broken, made a bigger effect on my guests I think than the food itself.

Everybody loved the bread from my favorite boulanger, the best boulanger in Paris (I should know, I’ve tried bread and different baking goods in lots of boulangeries throughout Paris). It’s too bad that when he retires there won’t be anybody to replace him. Like so many of the artisan food-makers in Paris, when they retire there’s nobody behind them to take the reins of their stores, so they close down and eventually the stores reopen as take-out fast-food shops, or cheap counterfeit clothing stores.