What’s in the fridge?

What’s in our fridge after three weeks in France?

And what’s on the counters? In the pantry?

We’re leaving in four days. We aren’t going to finish it all. And we can’t take it all home. (Mark has said he will take responsibility for packing food items home and declaring it.) What have we bought?

Dry goods first. We have:

• Cereal. The favorite brands of cereal that we can get here but not at home are Chocapic, which is vaguely like Cocoa Puffs only darker and petal-shaped; and Fitness, which is a flaky cereal that comes in chocolate or fruit flavors. We haven’t seen the fruit Fitness and are sad about it. We’ve also bought Cookie Crisp and something that’s very much like Cocoa Krispies.
• Pasta. I’ve got some leftover Barilla tagliatelle from the time I made chicken noodle soup. It is, essentially, an egg noodle.
• Ketchup. We just might finish off our second bottle before we leave. They have Heinz here. The kids approve.
• Honey. Lavender honey. I’ve mostly put it in salad dressing, but I’ve also stirred it into yogurt and made peanut butter and honey sandwiches.
• Peanut butter and Nutella. I think we’ll finish off the Nutella.
• Nespresso pods. Last time, I seriously considered buying a Nespresso machine for at home. The only thing that stopped me was the packaging waste inherent in the Nespresso pods (and, uh, the fact that I already have a functional drip coffeemaker, and a French press, and an Aeropress, and a portable thingy that makes one cup at a time). Nespresso is much better than Keurig. I don’t even know why Keurig exists, to be honest.
• Wine. Pretty sure we’ll finish this off before we go.
• Bottles of mineral water. I am seriously going to miss the French mineral water situation. On the one hand, it’s kind of funny how many kinds there are. I have read French articles online in which, with a straight face, they write that you should drink several different kinds of mineral water in rotation (like having five vegetables and fruits per day) in order to make sure you get adequate amounts of all the different minerals you might need. But I am telling you they all taste different and I could seriously get behind the concept of having different mineral waters for different occasions, or possibly cravings.
• Herbs and spices. I bought cumin, granulated garlic, bay leaves, and thyme to put in my cooking here. I am going to have to leave them in the kitchen, which already has a lot of abandoned herbs and spices.
• Dijon mustard. Like the honey, mostly in salad dressing. Note: Last time I brought French’s mustard with me for Simon. I didn’t need to, as it was in the grocery store here. This time I didn’t bring it, and there wasn’t any. Simon has coped, but he would have been a lot happier with yellow American mustard.
• Square crustless sliced white bread. The Harry’s brand is about as close to American sliced white bread as you get. Labeled “100 percent mie” means that there is no crust. Simon adores it. It is slightly denser and tastier than, say, Wonder bread.. I admit to having made a couple of sandwiches on it with French mayonnaise and Italian mortadella. It tastes like the best baloney sandwich ever.
• Couscous. Simon is rather fond of plain couscous with butter, and it’s about as easy a thing to make as possible (5 min soak in boiling water), so we made sure to buy it on our very first trip to the grocery store. We haven’t come close to finishing the box.
• Cookies. You know the “Le Petit Ecolier” cookies you can get in the regular grocery store at home? They look like a little chocolate rectangle in a picture frame of bland rectangular cookie? Well, they come in dark chocolate here, and Mark adores them. I don’t quite get it.

Now, the refrigerator.

• Milk. Milk here is largely shelf-stable, but you must refrigerate it after you open it. It’s basically here for the cereal. I think there will be a lot left over when we leave.
• Butter. Two kinds. Demi-sel, which is like normal salted butter in the U. S. except ten thousand times better, eat-it-with-a-spoon better. And a kind that has salt crystals in it that make it crunchy. I am actually angry that American butter doesn’t come close to this stuff.
• Blueberries. Fruit takes some getting used to. It’s all perfectly ripe within 1-2 days of buying it from the store. This is okay with melons (oh goodness the melons are so good) as if you stick them in the fridge they stay good for a while. Berries, well, you need to eat them right away. I bought a tub of blueberries-blackberries-raspberries yesterday and didn’t get to them, and they were perfect yesterday and a big fuzzy mold ball today. Really, if you need ripe fruit today you have to buy it today. So we’ve wasted some fruit. But on the plus side, we’ve had some really good fruit when we’ve bought it correctly.
• Bagged salad. This is basically the same as at home, maybe tending to be a little more on the bitter-greens side, which is fine with me.
• Sliced rosette de Lyon salami and sliced English cheddar. This is for Simon, who is content to eat salami-and-cheddar sandwiches on the crustless white bread at any meal.
• Jambon de serrano, etc. This is for Mark and me. We don’t get tired of it.
• A cheese I bought that was a little too stinky for me to comfortably eat. I love cheese, but I have a limit to how much really ripe stuff I can eat at once. This one was Morbier and I was attracted to it because it had a pretty ash layer like Humboldt Fog. But it was fairly strong. I ate some but I won’t finish it.
• Way too many marmalades and jellies. The strawberry went to the kids’ PB&Js and into tubs of plain yogurt. There’s some orange and lemon marmalades from Menton (famous for citrus) that I think we haven’t opened yet? Those might come home with us. Also I bought Mark a pistachio-and-sugar spread that hasn’t been opened and I do hope it comes home.
• Capers and olives. Had to! We were in Provence! Won’t eat them all in time though.
• Several pizza boxes with partial leftover pizzas. Both towns we have stayed in were near the border with Italy. Lots of pizza to be had. Lots of pizza leftovers.
• Yogurt. We might finish the yogurt. Simon doesn’t normally even like yogurt and he has been polishing off French strawberry yogurt. Much like the butter, it’s hard to describe how much better the stuff is than what we can get at home. Especially the plain stuff. And the related stuff like fromage frais and skyr. I love it too.
• Lardons. I bought lardons just today to make pasta with. Every French grocery store has convenient little packages of, essentially, raw bacon already chopped into little matchsticks. Perfect for sautéing in olive oil, then adding minced onion and canned tomatoes for spaghetti all’amatriciana. Or cooking with cream and butter and adding crozet pasta and cheese for a rich Savoyarde specialty.
• Marinara sauce. For emergencies with the kids.
• Old El Paso salsa. Old El Paso is the face of Mexican food in France. They have total market saturation. Leo’s Swiss friend saw the jar on the counter and said swooningly, “That’s my favorite stuff.” We tried to explain Old El Paso’s place in the hierarchy of Mexican-American cuisine and I do not think they believed us.
• Prune juice. To improve someone’s regularity. No more details needed, I trust.

Much more food has passed through the kitchen but only for a couple of hours on its way into a meal: some chicken thighs and celery for soup, spaghetti and canned or jarred tomatoes for sauce, cod and lemons and potatoes for a buttery baked dish that used about half the capers as well. Also, a great deal more charcuterie and cookies. But we won’t need to worry about getting rid of those things in a few days because they did not last long enough to keep.

Cooking in a pristine rental kitchen (especially one as well-appointed as this one) is lots of fun. But I will be glad to get back to a kitchen where the jar of cumin lasts for several meals instead of just one.