France: Gastronomie de Lyon

One of my favorite parts of exchange so far has been making friends from so many places.  There are exchange students at CPE Lyon from Germany, Brasil, Belgium, Poland, Spain, and Argentina.  When we get together there are up to 7 languages flying around! For most people, it is easiest to communicate in English.  It’s kind of a drawback I think, because when were speaking English all the time my French isn’t improving as fast as I think it could.  I’m also the only anglophone I’ve met so far from my school.

Feeling a bit homesick around Thanksgiving, I organised a Canadian Thanksgiving dinner with the international students.  This was a ton of fun!  However, this is also when I realised that pretty much everything in the grocery stores is French.  I was especially stunned to see Campbell’s Soup and peanut butter in the foreign food aisle!

The foreign food aisle - Campbell's soup.

Maple syrup (imported from Canada) and peanut butter in the foreign food aisle.

Found this in the tea section!  Tastes like apples and maple syrup.

Thanksgiving dinner was a lot of fun, although due to the lack of suitable ingredients at the grocery store we ended up using pre-cooked chickens instead of turkey, a slice of pumpkin I baked with brown sugar on it in a toaster over and an apple pie instead of pumpkin pie, and “rasperry sauce” made with boiled rasberries instead of cranberries.   That’s pretty much the 3 main ingredients required for Thanksgiving dinner out of the picture, although we still had a lot of fun.

Cooking was a bit of a challenge – our kitchen doesn’t have an oven, so we borrowed a friend’s toaster oven, and in the absence of a potato masher used an empty wine bottle to smash the potatoes!

Mashing potatoes with an empty wine bottle, in the absence of a potato smasher.

Thanksgiving dinner.

Thanksgiving - hard to fit all these people in our tiny kitchen.

Since Thanksgiving the international students have also organised a German food night, a Brasilian night and a Spanish night.

Brazilian Fejoada - rice, beans and oranges.

Spanish paella.

Enjoying Spanish paella and sangria with Steven (Belgium), Tomás (Brazil) and Jan (Germany).

I also had a lot of fun cooking French toast and pancakes with the Catalán (area of Spain that includes Barcelona – they have their own language) and Brasilian students on my floor.  Nobody else had ever heard of it!

Banana pancakes.

One of the great things about France is that  there are so many types of cheese and for about 25% of what you would pay back home.  Same goes for wine, plus they conveniently sell it in the grocery store (so much better than the trek to the LCBO).  One of my favorite things to eat here is cheese on a fresh baguette or loaf of bread.  Conveniently, there are bakeries everywhere.

In Vieux Lyon, the main tourist area of the city, there are lots of crêpe stands.  My favourite is the nutella crêpe, but I have also made them for dinner with cheese and ham.  In the winter there are also lots of people selling Vin Chaud (mulled wine), sometimes even out of a grocery cart!  They sell it out of a thermos or from a pot over a kerosene stove.  It still amazes me that it's completely legal!  

Crêpe stand. A great snack while wandering the city.

Lyon is known as the undisputed gastronomical capital of France, which makes it one of the culinary capitals of the world!  Besides the world-famous chefs, Lyon is well known for its "bouchons", small restaurants that are everywhere in Vieux Lyon.  One of the foreign students was going back home to Brasil, so we all went out to a bouchon to enjoy some typical Lyonnais cuisine.

 

My appetizer - Salade Lyonnaise.  Lettuce, bacon and a poached egg. 

Entree:  I can't remember exactly what this is called but it has Lyonnais sausage in it.  Desert was a chocolate mousse.

My friend ordered tripe, a.k.a. stomach!! Not exactly my cup of tea...

Rhône-Alpes (the Lyon region) is well known for it's wine, including Côtes-du-Rhône and Chateauneuf-du-Pape.  Nearby is the Beaujolais wine region, and every November there is a festival in Lyon called "Beaujolais Nouveau", where you drink wine that has only been bottled for a month.  It's a lot of fun to watch them roll the barrels of wine through the old streets but as for the wine it's not so good!

"Girls Night" with Julia (Germany), Elaine, Daiane and Camila (Brazil).  Salad and Côtes-du-Rhône.