Friday lunch: my last meal

My final lunch in France, on Friday the 26th, was deep-dish lasagna, done French-style. It was very tomato-y, and there were diced carrots in it that were still slightly crunchy despite having been baked. The meat was also a bit chunkier than what I'm used to, but the overall look and smell were quite nice. I regret that I wasn't able to make my Middle Eastern chicken for the family, but Véronique had made a couscous dish, on Thursday (I think), that had many of the ingredients used in my chicken dish, so it didn't seem worthwhile for me to insist on doing a partial repeat of something Véro had already done. Here's the 'sagna:

And, yup: my ragondin cherry has been popped. I have now officially eaten rodent. And you know what? It had no distinct flavor at all; the pâté felt and tasted fairly generic. I had expected to crunch disgustingly on rat-tail meat or something, but no: like many pâtés, this one was more fatty than anything, giving it a buttery/chunky texture. I think it might be even better on buttered bread than on unbuttered bread, but I'll have to wait a week or so before I find out (long story; I'll tell it soon).

I can't remember the name of this next pâté-like product, but it's mostly made of vegetables. When I tasted it, my initial reaction was that Koreans would love this because it's just the right ratio of vegetable to meat (about 70/30). I could see plunking some of this into a broth and making a soup of it. That said, this was not my favorite thing. It wasn't bad, mind you, but it also wasn't something I'd hurry back to.

Thanks to bad lighting, the following photo looks almost like a rehash of the lasagna photo above, but this is an apple crumble. The French actually use the English word crumble to describe desserts and savory dishes like this. It was quite, quite good. All it needed was some vanilla ice cream, but I wasn't about to lodge a complaint.

So there we are: my final lunch—my final meal—in France. I could tell that I had been losing weight during my two weeks, partly because I'd continued my walking, partly because I began skipping dinners after three or four days in country, and partly because I no longer had 24/7 access to all the bad-for-you shit I normally consume, like sodas, fast food, junk food, and sugar. Sure enough, when I got back to Seoul this morning (Sun., 10/28), I weighed myself out of curiosity, and... I had lost nearly six kilos. And that was not by cutting carbs, but just by staying away from shitty food, continuing to exercise, and cutting way back on portion size. Amazing. (I did, however, start to feel distinctly weaker and even a bit depressed as I went through sugar withdrawal. Shades of my flirtation with the Atkins Diet, there.)