Niki Bezzant: Why we should eat like the French

The French paradox – eating cheese and drinking wine but practising moderation.

Last Saturday I placed two halves of a ripe, soft French cheese the size of a plate on top of a dish of sliced potatoes, bacon, garlic and cream, and baked it in the oven. Then I ate about half, with a glass of wine.

This is tartiflette, a dish from the Savoie region of France. The cheese is reblochon, a gorgeous unpasteurised washed-rind thing of beauty. If you had told me before I put it in the oven two of us would eat the whole dish between us, I wouldn’t have believed you.

And yet we did, and enjoyed every mouthful.

This, of course, is not the kind of food I should admit to eating.

It doesn’t tick any nutrition boxes. It’s high-carb and high-fat – that deadly combo, making it highly calorific.

I would not be keen to run it through a nutrition analysis.

But obviously (at least I hope this is obvious) this is not the kind of thing I eat every day, or even every month.

It’s in the realm of treat foods, to be savoured and enjoyed from time to time.

The people of France understand this, and practise it routinely. Although we think of French people munching croissants and foie gras daily washed down with lots of red wine, these are not everyday foods for them.

When they do have them, they eat small [ . . . ]

Read More: : Niki Bezzant: Why we should eat like the French – NZ Herald

I sa mok em boo di ay, I sa mok em boo

Bonjour, mes amis.

Yesterday, as I fiddled with my cable remote to find something entertaining on the tube (Springsteen underestimated, “57 Channels And Nothin’s On,” there’s more like 257) I stopped at an infomercial selling a “Golden Oldies” multi-cd package. The product’s celebrity hawker was none other than Sha Na Na’s “Bowser,” who performed his trademarked Bowser muscle pose at the end of the spot.

Despite my deep aversion to Bowser (hated the 1970s syndicated Sha Na Na TV show – especially Bowser doing his muscle pose)  I couldn’t stop listening to the commercial, as each ’50s-era song brought back memories of listening at night to Boston’s original golden-oldie radio station, WROR.

As a teenager, I was nuts about these records, even though many of them were recorded before I was born. While Sha Na Na always sounded like phonies to me, I preferred the originals I would hear every night listening WROR:  “A Lover’s Question” by Clyde McPhatter, “I Only Have Eyes For You” by the Flamingos, “Mr. Blue” by the Fleetwoods, “Sleepwalk” by Santo & Johnny,  “Susie Darlin” by Robin Luke, and “Stranded in the Jungle” by the Cadets. On my morning drive into Pilgrim High School, my 1964 Pontiac Tempest station wagon had only AM reception, so my favorite oldies on FM’s WROR weren’t an option.  Instead I was forced to listen to the AM radio hits of the mid-’70’s: Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles, Peter Frampton, and the discofied Bee Gees, None of these performers were speaking to me the way The Five Keys did in their classic “Ling Ting Tong”

Even though I hadn’t yet discovered that this song was actually about smoking reefer (I sa mok em boo di ay, I sa mok em boo.) I instinctively knew “Ling Ting Tong” was cooler than, say, “Rhiannon.”

Wouldn’t it be nice if every dollar made from the sale of this CD collection (or any oldies compilation) would miraculously appear in the pockets of each of the remaining Five Keys? And not just in their pockets, but in the pockets of every living musician and singer who made these wonderful records: Lee Dorsey, Dave “Baby” Cortez, Bill Doggett, Little Willie John, Buddy Knox, Bruce Chanel, The Hollywood Argyles and Gogi Grant.

“Saturday Night Fever?” I remain unimpressed. Ling Ting Tong? He would never be wrong.

Marais and Cocteau: the whole universe of a mythical couple in 50 photos

Until August 20, the hotel “Les Bories”, in Gordes in the Luberon, hosts the exhibition “Marais and Cocteau – Luck was at the rendezvous”.

A dive into the singular universe of the couple in 50 photos displayed in the gardens of this luxurious establishment, exceptionally open to the general public

Read More: Marais and Cocteau: the whole universe of a mythical couple in 50 photos