July 2012

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A chateau along the road to the Normandy coast.

A Letter from Katie Botkin in France:

It’s my birthday in Normandy. I wake up in the Mazo’s attic bedroom, in a bed older than myself. It’s fitting that I’m spending this holiday with the Mazos, a French family with whom I spent Christmas 2004 and Easter 2005, in the French Alps and the Loire Valley, respectively.

Christine is working, but Pierre, a short, exuberant Frenchman of about 60, says we will go on a historical tour of the Seine, all the way to the coast. He wants to go by motorbike, but I’m less keen about this, especially since it’s raining. So we go by car. He starts off the tour with loud, almost explosive, explanations in English. He seems to be making up for his hesitation over word choice in volume. I respond in French, and he gets the hint and switches, which is far more efficient. He begins again, explaining the Viking invasions up the Seine, the subsequent Norman invasion of England, the Norman kings, and the Hundred Year’s War.

Most of this I am well-acquainted with, but Pierre wants to quiz me. He jumps about three centuries ahead and asks me if I know why the Hundred Year’s War started.

Oui,” I say, thinking of the opening dialogue in Henry V.

Pourquoi?” he asks. I think: “The right and title of the female,” but I’m not sure what the quote is in French, so I say: “Ils étaient cousins.”

It’s not enough: he explains the causation in grand detail, how Isabella of France, who produced Edward III with her husband Edward II of England, got denied her right to pass down the crown of France because she was a woman. The crown of France got passed on to Edward III’s cousins instead. Because the Dukes of Normandy ruled England anyway, all the more reason they should sail back to France and assert themselves. Pierre insists that Joan of Arc should have left well enough alone, since it was essentially a civil war. But she did not, so she was killed in Rouen, the capital of Normandy.

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How to eat chicken feet

David Lang showing the proper method for eating chicken feet. Dangle the toes out of your mouth. Photo by David Lansing.

So anyway, about those chicken feet. You know how you can bite into something like a kogi taco and go, Ohmygod, that is so good!

Well, you’re not going to do that with chicken feet. I guess for some people chicken feet might be comfort food. You know, particularly if you lived on a farm in China and had a hundred chickens running around and you had to feed the chickens and then your dad, maybe once a week, put a dozen or so chickens in a wire cage and took them to the local market to be sold alive, and your reward for feeding the chickens was to have your mom make you steamed chicken feet on Sundays.

But none of that ever happened to me so I don’t have those chicken feet memories. I don’t think Mijune does either.

Anyway, I ate the chicken feet. Not much to it. Little bit of meat around the ankles (do chickens have ankles?) and then you could kind of suck on the toes if you wanted.

David Lang, who moved to Los Angeles from Hong Kong 18 years ago, liked the chicken feet more than I did. He ate several of them.

“You not going to eat more chicken feet?” he’d say. We’d all shake our heads. “Okay then,” he’d say, grabbing for another one, using his chopsticks to stick the skinny leg part in his mouth first so the toes dangled from his mouth like the fingers of a baby’s hand. I think I liked watching David Lang eat chicken feet more than I liked eating chicken feet. But that’s just me.

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The festival of Joan of Arc in Rouen. Photo by Katie Botkin.

A Letter from Katie Botkin in France:

I’m reading the local paper at breakfast and notice that the annual fête Jeanne-d’Arc, commemorating Joan of Arc, is in Rouen today. I check the clock. I have enough time to take the bus down and catch some of the festivities.

Once in town, I head to the Vieux Marché, where little Joan was burned as a witch, just in time to see two girls astride horses in faux-medieval armor. The horse nearest me breaks the picturesque scene by splattering the cobblestones with what looks like diarrhea, close enough that I hope I haven’t been hit. I follow the parade anyway, down under the Gros Horlodge, past strings of shoppers, past the Cathedral that Monet painted so repeatedly, down to a bridge over the Seine. Here, I’ve read, flowers will be thrown, echoing the ashes that were cast into the river so many centuries previously — on May 30, 1431.

I position myself with my camera and take some shots of children peering over the side of the bridge, waiting for the signal.

They throw their flowers all at once, and their roses float away, into the deep, wide, muddy waters of the Seine. They are more visible than ashes.

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Dim sum at Fisherman’s Terrace

Dim sum at Fisherman's Terrace in Richmond's Aberdeen Centre. Photo by David Lansing.

Slipping inside Richmond’s Aberdeen Centre in search of Fisherman’s Terrace, I feel like I’ve been transported to Hong Kong (it’s named after the famous Aberdeen Harbour in Hong Kong). There’s a large Daiso, the $2 Asian bargain shop, and little shops selling bubble tea and Chinese beef jerky and herbal stores selling shriveled up god-knows-what for whatever ails you.

When I walk into Fisherman’s Terrace a minute or two before ten, there’s nobody there. I mean nobody. I wonder if perhaps I’ve got the wrong restaurant. Or if Mijune is just messing with me.

But a couple of minutes later, she shows up wearing an absinthe-colored short dress and matching green stilettos. She’s also brought a couple of other foodie bloggers with her, David Lang and Amy Sherman. I guess I’m not the only one hoping to have chicken feet with Mijune.

Mijune doesn’t mess around. Within minutes of sitting down (and without consulting the rest of us), she’s circled at least ten different items on the dim sum menu: shrimp dumplings (of course), stuffed eggplant with shrimp paste, shrimp spring rolls, turnip cakes, taro root with minced pork, bbq pork pastries, triple mushrooms in rice noodle wrap, pork blood and chives, sticky rice in bamboo leaves, and the steamed chicken feet.

It arrives in a whirlwind of plates. I want to try the chicken feet first but Mijune won’t let me.

“Always start with the shrimp dumplings,” she says, dropping one with her chopsticks on to my plate. “You see how good these are?” she says before I can even taste one. “They don’t stick to the paper in the steamer. And they have lots of crow’s feet on them. Like at least seven. And look how translucent they are—you can see how delicate the dough is.”

“Can I taste one now?” I ask her.

“Of course,” she says, laughing. “But try it with the XO sauce, which is excellent here. In fact, the XO sauce here is so good I sometimes could just eat that.”

And it is an excellent sauce, with lots of dried shrimp and dried scallops floating in it. But the shrimp dumplings are even better.

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Mont Saint Michel

A chapel along the beach at Mont St. Michel. Photos by Katie Botkin.

A Letter from Katie Botkin in France:

I’ve been wanting to go to Mont Saint Michel for about seven years, based on the ethereal photos I’d seen of the place. So I convince Sophie and her boyfriend to drive down with me, and we make the trek of about 2.5 hours from Rouen. When we’re a few miles out, we start seeing parking lots, which the French call les parkings. That’s my first clue that this might be more touristy than I’d envisioned. We can’t even get close — we have to stop the car and resign ourselves to walking the last couple of kilometers, although it turns out there’s a bus as we get closer.

Sophie exploring.

We get up into the city, if a little place run entirely on tourism can properly be called a city, and I start feeling claustrophobic. There’s just too many people with cameras in the narrow passageways. Sophie sees a tiny street of stairs, and dodges into it, running upwards until she emerges into a less crowded place.

Over the next three hours, we trip up and down stairs, exploring every corner — especially Sophie, la sale gosse, who disappears at one point and emerges from a thicket of trees with an unripe fig — and then walk outside, all the way around this city on a hill surrounded by wet sand. Sophie gets her flip-flops, which she bought in Idaho, fantastically muddy.

I’m starving by this time, so we walk back to the car and have leftovers from breakfast as a picnic in the grass: large, dusky grapes, pain au chocolate, French bread with cheese. The pain au chocolate is still good, crispy-soft and decadent without being too sweet.

I tell Sophie, I have dreams about pain au chocolate like this. And I’m not even exaggerating. I’m sure they think I’m crazy to be having pain au chocolate for dinner, but faut que j’en profite. I cram the last bit into my mouth and sigh with weariness and contentment.

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