Paris, France – An Almost Good Dinner!

And they say the French have good taste – ha!  Not when I was there!  Here’s another story for my young son that can’t get enough of my travel stories!  I was visiting Jean Michael and Pierre in Paris, returning the visit they had paid me in San Francisco the previous summer.  (Long story short we met them when the BART broke down under the Bay, and they were on the way to UC Berkeley where my ex worked at the time – they all bonded and my ex invited them to stay as long as they wanted with us in San Francisco, which they did….) So anyway, back to the almost good dinner.  We were invited to their house for dinner, and what we got wasn’t what I expected at all!  We made a quick car trip across Paris to the (then only) take out pizza place in the entire city – Mr. Good Fast.  (Really, that’s exactly what it was called!)  We got take out pizza, and drove all the way across Paris again to get home.  Pierre’s sister prepared the meal, and she didn’t know that take out pizza was already cooked.  (Like I said there was only this one take out pizza place in all of Paris, so it was kind of an oddity….) So she put the pizza, cardboard box and all, in the oven and “cooked” it.  And she cooked spaghetti.  When dinner was served, (and by this time at 11pm we were ready to eat anything, starving!) and the pizza was one with the box.  Charred.  Just cut the pizza, cardboard and all…  Well that was a loss so we moved on to the spaghetti.  She pulled the noodles out of the boiling water, drained them, and put them on the plate.  That was it, just white noodles…  Then Pierra asked if we wanted tomatoe sauce, yes! please!  sauce de tomate!  Alright, here it comes… a bottle of… ketchup!  Heinz I believe!  Cold, right out of the refrigerator!  Plop! right on the noodles!  And to top it off, he offered cheese.  Well that’s got to be edible, right?  He pulled out a plastic box, opened it up, and it was alive with fluffy green and multicolored mold….  Back where I come from we’d have buried that, box and all… Nope – he scraped off the mold and sliced it up!  Well, needless to say, it tasted, well…..  moldy!  So that was my experience with French cuisine!  Viva la France!