For Christmas, Arnie and I bought each other a grown-up* dinner at Les Papilles, a well-established French bistro with a reputation for its excellent market-driven menu and wide selection of wines. And I discovered my new favorite way to have dinner out: without choices.

Because at Les Papilles (translates as "the tastebuds") the day's offerings are the same for everyone and based on what's fresh at the market.

Our first course was a gorgeous cream of zucchini soup ladled over seasoned bread cubes, bacon, and an olive cream fraiche dollop. I loved that we had our own giant tureen of soup so that I could have three servings. (Sorry, couldn't find a picture of our soup.)

The next course was beef cheek slow-roasted in red wine with baby potatoes, carrots and thyme. Tasty, even for this former vegetarian!

The cheese course was a blue cheese served with a prune to balance out the saltiness. Delish.

Finally, the dessert. Oh, my goodness. I wish I could remember what it was called. (If somebody knows from my description, please tell me!) Carmelized bananas on the bottom, this amazingly mild and smooth creamy stuff above that, and a caramel foam on the top. I wanted to die...

Another thing I loved was picking out our own wine from the many choices along the wall...

Not a single disappointment for these satisfied diners. 

*Liam had to sit this one out, but he had a great time with super babysitter Melissa.

In Paris, there's a bakery on every corner offering buttery croissants, but residents are still slim enough to fit into elevators the size of coffins. What do the French know? This is the third of several posts on food and lifestyle in the city of lights. Read the first one here and the second one here.

By American standards, the fridge in our Paris apartment is more appropriate for an office cubicle than a family of three. But it's normal by Paris standards, and it reflects a general underlying assumption the French here seem to have about food: less is more.

Let me be clear that I'm not speaking of the cliché of the tiny portions in French restaurants. That may be the case at some five-star joints serving gold-encrusted truffles over a bed of straight saffron. (We wouldn't know; we haven't been anywhere like that for reasons of budget and toddler.)

What you don't find, though, are the mad-cheap, mad-huge portions of a place like IHOP in the U.S. Three pancakes? 7 Euros, thank you. One espresso? 3 Euros, thank you. No such thing as a bottomless cup of coffee.

The French have a much stronger sense of the law of diminishing returns (Economics 101, anyone?) as it applies to food: one cookie may bring you much pleasure. A second cookie may bring you additional pleasure, but never as much as the first cookie. A third cookie may bring pleasure, but it's even less than the second cookie. And so on from there.

The American philosophy? Keep eating cookies as long as there is a trace of pleasure. The French philosophy? Stop after the first cookie and really savor. It will never be that good again if you keep going.

French supermarkets sell packages of eight cookies rather than eighty. Ice cream comes in "family-size" cartons small enough to confuse your average American into thinking it's a single serving. Even spaghetti sauce comes in dainty little jars.

Let me loop back to our fridge. Here's my theory about why a teensy fridge cuts it around here. Parisians don't panic at the idea of "running out" of something, so they don't feel compelled to stock up. They buy what they need for the next few days without worrying about what they might need in the case of a surprise visit from a troop of boyscouts. One consequence, I think, is that there's not an endless supply of sweets and salty treats awaiting consumption on the shelf. There might be a treat or two, but after that, it's game over.

(Until, of course, you pop out and have to walk past all those bread and pastry shops.)

I like to think of myself as a sensible person. In practice, though, I seem to be guilty of thoughtlessness far more often than I'd like to admit. And sometimes it burns.

Literally.

A couple of weeks ago, after teaching a long day, I came home and decided the time was right for baking. Nevermind that it was after nine, pretty late for starting a new project. Nor that my brain was a bit fuzzy. I wanted to make a cake.

Fast-forward to me stirring a pot of chocolate and butter over an improvised double boiler: two pans nested together, the bottom one filled with simmering water.

In the back of my mind, I knew something was wrong. Vaguely, though. I was using a burner that gets very hot very fast, and I was thinking, "maybe I ought to turn down the fire." About that moment, there was an extremely loud POP! as one of the pans exploded off of the stove. Chocolate and boiling water splattered all over the kitchen. And all over me.

And it scared the shit out of me.

I managed to burn about half of my left arm and hand (all first-degree burns--ugly and painful, but not too serious). Most of all, I was terrified at the thought that Liam could have been playing there while I was cooking.

How do we learn from disasters? A book I read some time ago--The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable--suggests that when things go seriously wrong, we often make the mistake of only changing our behavior with regard to the specific causes of the initial (improbable) event. To quote the book description: "We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know." 9/11 is a prime example; we've adjusted airport security as a consequence, but instead we should (also) anticipate other, different sorts of threats.

For me, then, the moral of my mess ought not merely to be "DON'T USE TWO POTS THAT ARE TOO SIMILAR IN SIZE FOR YOUR CHEAP-O DOUBLE BOILER." Instead, I need to think: what is it about this situation (whatever it may be) that might be unsafe? Is there anything that could become unsafe? I hope my scar will remind me of this. For more thoughts on scars, cruise back to this post from my archives.

(Needless to say, we have purchased a fire extinguisher for our Paris apartment, and Liam is banned from the kitchen when I'm cooking.)

There are some books that just have to find you at the right moment to be loved. The Sweet Life in Paris is like that, a bit. But I'm pretty sure I would have felt like author David Lebovitz--with his social awkwardness, love for chocolate, and baking passion--was a kindred spirit even if we didn't both live in Paris. Now, though, I have this idea that if we bumped into each other on the streets of Paris, we'd be best buds. Maybe I'll see him some time eating tacos at Candelaria, the one decent Latin-infused spot we've found.

Obviously--for anyone whose been to Lebovitz's awesome website and blog--the recipes are fantastic. They're classy but not snooty or overly complicated. And they all tie into the various stories he shares in some way.

But what I really loved were all the anecdotes about daily life in Paris--complete with all its complications, contradictions, and even annoyances. One cranky reviewer complained that the book is not really about a sweet life at all; Lebovitz makes living in Paris look like hard work. As someone living in Paris, I have to say that it can be hard work--especially at first. Let me add bewildering, too, as you can probably tell from my arrival post and my list of Paris surprises. I found myself giggling and muttering "amens" as Lebovitz described his failures and occasional successes.

Another quick note in response to Lebovitz's few detractors (one called him the updated version of the "Ugly American"). That strikes me as very unfair. One thing I loved about the book is how you could tell that Lebovitz hasn't become a new person living in Paris--he's his old self in a new location. The very idea that it's okay not to be transformed by Paris is a bit of a relief.  Lebovitz left me feeling that it's okay not to blend in 100% and pass for Parisian all the time. That's a relief for me as an adult who will probably never perfect my French accent--or my scarf-tying abilities.

Here's my favorite bit:

The image people have of my life in Paris is that each fabulous day begins with a trip to the bakery for my morning croissant, which I eat while catching up with the current events by reading Le Monde at my corner café. (The beret is optional.) Then I spend the rest of my day discussing Sartre over in the Latin Quarter or strolling the halls of the Louvre with a sketchpad, ending with my sunset ascent of the Eiffel Tower before heading to one of the Michelin three-star restaurants for an extravagant dinner.

Let Arnie and me tell you this together with DL: it is so not like that. Because, really, people, how glamorous do you think our life in Paris is with a toddler? We're having a good time, but it's more sandboxes and baguettes than fancy dishes. Anyway, read The Sweet Life in Paris and imagine things a bit closer to the expat life in the city of lights.

Every time I meet a new group of students, I ask them to tell me about themselves. Where are they from? What have their experiences with English or literature been in the past? And what's something most people don't know about them?

These are questions I answer myself, and I always tell my students on the first day this "secret" about myself: most people don't know that I'm actually very shy.

It's important for me to share this with them for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it's not at all obvious. My classroom persona is actually a bit over the top. I'm very smiley, I crack bad jokes, and I address behaviors that don't meet my expectations mostly through humor. If students avoid the front rows, for example, I make a big show of surprise and then explain that I went to extra trouble to bathe and put on deodorant. 

I also think it's important to bring shyness into the conversation because, in every class, there's usually a solid contingent of students who would rather not speak. Ever. Of course, in a language-learning classroom (right now I teach English as a foreign language in Paris) this won't work. Students have to open their mouths, engage, and interact to make any serious growth in their English. So before I ask students to interact with each other, I let them know that it's a challenge for me, too. 

And I tell them it's okay to fake it.

Because that's really the only way I know of dealing with my shyness, and it's been my strategy ever since I began teaching in 2004. I just pretend I'm not shy. I say to myself, what would an outgoing person do right now? And then I do it. Most of the time, it works fine, and I'm sometimes even able to forget that deep down inside I'd infinitely prefer to be tucked safely away in the stacks of a library. 

Also, faking it has its compensations. I always, always learn something from my students, which wouldn't happen if I let them stay silent. And pushing myself in the classroom stretches me and has made me more able to enter social situations that previously would have terrified me.