Shakin it up

In the interest of documenting accurately my experiences here, I am going to add two new segments to this blog. The first will follow the ups and downs of my feelings about Carla Bruni, otherwise known as Madame Sarkozy. If you aren't au courant with the world of breathy French music, then you may not know that she recently released her third album, in which she breathes heavily while every now and then pronouncing a word in French and singing a note or two. Since the French enjoy this type of music, and since they're extremely fascinated by Carla, one might say that it's nearly a hit here. She has even been making the rounds of the talk shows singing live (and apparently with Metallica in England).



If you might remember, I was extremely skeptical of her when she first decided to become the première dame. After reading the Vanity Fair exposé on her in July and watching eight thousand interviews and profiles of her, my opinion has softened somewhat.

And I am happy that she has single-handedly brought the color royal purple back to the fashion world. It's pretty. Her, on the other hand... still don't quite get it. Is she beautiful? She doesn't blink and she looks like a calculating cat to me. Weird.



She's got her own guignol (the French have a fake news show that takes place with puppets of newsmaking figures - getting a guignol in your image is kind of the height of awesomeness here). When her guignol is on, she says the same two sentences over and over. She says she likes something, but she also likes its opposite, and everything related. Then she says "Je suis curieuse de..." which generally means she is curious about everything and has no opinion on anything. If you can understand any French, you might enjoy this episode of the Guignols (Carla shows up about 4 minutes in, although there's an amusing incident where Sarko arrests anyone who hasn't legally bought Carla's album).



I will update this section when she does something to make my opinion change. She's currently hitting the streets of Manhattan at the moment, so we'll see how the Americans take to her.

The second new segment will relate to you my culinary disasters. I just had one, and am now preheating the oven for the frozen pizza we luckily had in the freezer. Here it is:



It was supposed to be a chicken and vegetable stir-fry with noodles, a recipe from my excellent French cookbook that gave me the recipe for an excellent boeuf bourgignon. It looks like yellow goop and doesn't taste very good either. It is the result of a long series of misadventures. I bought "angel hair pasta" thinking it would work in place of vermicelli, but this angel had hair about the length of mine when it's at its shortest. It turned into noodle paste. Then I couldn't find celery, so I bought canned celery - bad idea! It turned into celery paste. Then with the cornstarch I added to make the sauce thicker, it just imploded further. I'm going to wait until it solidifies and then try to pry it out of the pan.

Contrary to popular belief, I am not a very good cook.