Happy new year, everyone! Hope you’re having a wonderful start to the year! Today was the beginning of a cold snap here in Paris — the high was 32 degrees. It’s been trying to snow through the day, and this evening it started getting heavier and sticking. They’re predicting an inch. I suspect Paris is about as savvy about snow as Seattle is, which means not very. Fortunately, Paris is fairly flat, which Seattle is not.

One of my projects since I moved here is to see what it’s like to eat locally and seasonally. As you may recall, when I first got here in September, the markets were overflowing with just a huge variety of produce — luscious tomatoes and grapes and chanterelles and just everything you can imagine.

I can still get a lot of that variety, but since I’m trying to eat locally/seasonally, the options are somewhat reduced. So we’re talking of course the alliums — onions, garlic, shallots, leeks — and roots — potatoes, carrots, parsnips, celery root, beets — and the cabbage family — cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, romanesco broccoli, brussel sprouts, kohlrabi — and winter squashes and a few random leafy things — chard, belgian endives, escarole. Oh, and how could I forget the mushrooms! And then there are also a whole variety of apples and pears.

I’ve been mainly shopping at Les Saisonniers, a little food market a couple blocks from my apartment. In addition to produce, they also stock meat, dairy, cheeses, a bit of fish, wine, cider and bread, and it’s all mainly local and organic.

The map on the right shows where everything comes from. Note that it is not a map of France — it’s actually just the region around Paris. For some sense of scale, the northern bit of the map is pretty much the northern tip of France, and the northwest border on the map is the English Channel. Paris is the tiny circle toward the bottom center. So everything is pretty much coming from less than three hours from Paris.

It’s funny — with the carrots you have the choice of clean carrots and carrots caked in dirt, with the dirty carrots actually being a bit more expensive. I haven’t asked what that’s all about. Belgian endives also come in two varieties — grown in dirt and not grown in dirt — with the grown in dirt ones being a bit pricier (though not too much). And then there are the yellow onions. They are about a quarter the size of American onions — about one-and-a-half to two inches across — they’re just so cute, I’ve fallen in love with them!

A few days ago, I went to the Edgar Quinet market to get some meat to make Carbonnade, a beef stew with lots of onions and Belgian beer. And while I was there, I picked up the most beautiful cauliflower and cabbage at a local farm stand. Last night I boiled some of the cauliflower florets with a bunch of the leaves and just put some butter and salt and pepper on it and ate it with a merguez sausage. It was probably the freshest cauliflower I’ve ever had. So delicious!

I’ve been keeping a log of what I’ve been making out of all this lovely produce, in part to keep track of what is in season when. My go-to’s have been quiche, cream soups, omelettes, stews, sauteed meat or sausages with shallot or mushroom sauce, boiled vegetables with butter, potatoes mashed with parsnip and/or celery root, endive and shallot salad. One night I made crepes and stuffed them with chicken and mushrooms and baked them in a cream sauce topped with gruyere. That was lovely!

One thing I’m learning is also that the French are very specific in their food terms. As was checking out at Les Saisonniers one evening, I noticed that they had a few loaves of bread on a shelf behind the counter. So I asked for one, “et aussi un pain, s’il vous plait.” The woman apologized, saying they were all out of “pain.” I pointed to the ring-shaped loaves on the shelf. “Oh, those aren’t bread, they’re brioches.” So I got a brioche. It was delicious!

And then just before Christmas, I went to the Bastille Market to get a chicken to roast, along with a bunch of vegetables. At one farm stand, I saw they had a rather large chicken, nearly the size of a small turkey, sitting in a display case, so I asked for “un poulet.” The response was, “Oh sorry, we don’t have any more chicken.” I pointed to the chicken in the display. “Oh, that isn’t a chicken, it’s a capon. Would you like that instead?” (Capon, “chapon” in French, is a type of rooster.) I said I would, so they wrapped it up and weighed it and let me know it would be 89 euros. Was I sure I wanted it? I politely declined and ended up going to another stand where I bought a lovely farm-raised chicken for a much more reasonable 18 euros. It even came with the head!