11 March 2020
It seems like the world is shutting down for the Coronavirus scare.  The beer festival I was planning on going to at the Romrod Castle in Germany canceled and I’m told the Houston Rodeo has canceled too.  So I guess we are all supposed to sit at home, binge on Netflix, eat canned food and use all that toilet paper we hoarded.  
There is no shortage of toilet paper on the shelves here which surprises me since all the reports from America tell us there’s no bottled water or toilet paper left except on Ebay or Craigslist.   Of course we use triple ply in France unless you are a cheapskate at go to Germany for toilet paper.  There you can get single ply, but it’s made out of embossed cotton and it’s about 5cm thick.   There’s no double ply toilet paper anywhere, and I started to Coronavirus panic but then I remembered that there never is any. 
There’s a marché a few blocks from my house every Wednesday and Friday.  There’s a marché somewhere in Strasbourg every day except Sunday.  I discovered marchés when I went to Provencal in 2005 with my parents.  It’s similar to a farmer’s market mixed with a flea market except the food is local and generally less expensive than in a grocery store and the other crap is Chinese and generally more expensive than in the grocery store.  Most of what we eat is from food I bought in the marché and it’s amazing.  
There are lots of reasons to live in France and there are some reasons not to live in the United States.  My opinions about that and my personal perspectives will show up in multiple other blog posts but this one is about shopping for food (and toilet paper and Coronavirus panic).  The food here is amazing.  I have had one mediocre meal in a restaurant in the last six months.  Everything else has been excellent.  What I buy in the grocery store is of excellent quality but what I buy in the marché is phenomenal.   
Beef is expensive here so I don’t buy much.  When I do buy beef, I miss living in Texas.  Texas beef is the best in the world.  I had heard that Argentina made better beef than Texas but I have tried Argentinean beef three times since moving to Europe and it’s good, but it is comparable to American supermarkets but not a Texas butcher shop.  We have been eating a lot of duck here.  You can buy duck confit as a convenience item in any grocery store but I have never done that.  I did break down and bought some graisse de canard until I had rendered/recycled enough to make confit without store bought fat.   We eat duck or goose confit sometimes but it takes up a lot of room in the refrigerator while it’s curing, and I can’t force myself to buy it as a convenience item, so we don’t eat it all that often.  We do eat duck breast (magret de canard) at least once a week.   Cooking a duck breast properly is one of the most useful things I learned in culinary school.  When you cook a duck breast properly it will taste a lot like a Texas beefsteak.  
We also eat a lot of rabbits.  Rabbits should not taste so good if they didn’t want to be eaten.   I bought a Staub pot for cooking rabbits when we first moved here.  That’s a pot a lot like the more famous Le Creuset except that Staubs are traditionally made here in Alsace and Le Creuset is what my mother used to make soup every Sunday night, the night my sister and I politely ate peanut butter sandwiches.  The pot I bought was wonderful but I bought it when I was still pretending that I could become a minimalist. I went back to Galleries Lafayette and bought the biggest Staub when they went on sale during the autumn soldes.  I get rockstar treatment in the culinary section of Galleries Lafayette for some reason (possibly relating to my priorities when setting up a household), and the clerk promised me that my new pot could easy cook three rabbits.  He was right by the way.   This week I bought a roti de lapin forestier instead of my normal whole bunny or two.  I will let you know how it comes out.