30 January 2011

Raclette

Tonight my host brother and his girlfriend came over for dinner, and the five of us had a three-hour raclette dinner.  It was amazing.  They warned me beforehand that it's a dish eaten a lot in the mountain regions, and that it's very heavy.

As we had visitors, the meal began with an aperitif and pistachios.  I had extremely tangy passionfruit juice.  After 20 minutes spent chatting in the living room, we moved to the table and the fun began.

Raclette is beautifully described in this article if you're really curious: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raclette
But basically, you take a large slice of cheese (I forget what kind^) and put it in a big spoon/little shovel on a hot table apparatus, and while you wait for it to melt you fill up your plate with potato, red cabbage, French pickles, onion, thin slices of Italian cured beef, etc.  Then you pull the spovel out of the small hot table and pour it over your concoction.  While you eat this mountain of steaming cheesy goodness, you put another slice of cheese on the spovel and repeat the process.  It's pretty darn good.

Of course, after that came dessert (thin cookie crisps and oranges with a cinnamon sauce, a Moroccan recipe), and after dessert came a tisane (herbal tea) and chocolates.  Needless to say, it was an amazing evening, made even better by my new cello (Stradivarius-modeled 150-yr-old), the new cookies I bought (not good timing, but tasty!), and the Edith Piaf CD I discovered yesterday.  Her song "Non, je ne regrette rien" is featured in Inception, which is where I first heard her, but now I relentlessly play the CD to the point where my host family finds themselves singing Edith Piaf as they walk through the apartment.  I love Saturdays.

2 comments:

  1. Raclette -- yesssss. Not health food but... oh yeah!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh, my goodness! I just had that with my host family this past week! They said it was more typical of France than Spain but I had no idea what it was besides deliciousness!

    ReplyDelete