My French-Mexican food attempt

You know those days when you have a craving for some good American style Mexican food? Ever since I was pregnant with Luke I haven’t been able to get enough cheese, salsa and chips! We’ve been here for a few weeks now and I’m starting to need my refill of beans and cheese. If there is one thing France is known for, it is certainly the food, but Mexican… not so much. Luckily we easily found a few of the basic staples, salsa and tortillas. Strangely enough, the other ingredients were a little more difficult to come by.

Tortilla chips for instance were very different; I could either buy the small bag of round “nacho chips” or the larger bag of “chili chips”. I opted for the more economical chili chips that were vaguely reminiscent of Doritos.

I couldn’t find black beans anywhere… perhaps I just didn’t look hard enough. But I did find a can of Carne con chili with beans; it looked like it might be promising.

Surprisingly enough, the hardest item to find was cheese. In the country that basically invented cheese and has isles and isles of it in the grocery store, I couldn’t find any shredded cheese (or non shredded for that matter) that even vaguely resembled Mexican cheese. Mike and I wandered up and down the “fromage” section yesterday trying to find something that was in the same family as Mexican cheese. We found something (one of the few shredded cheese packets) that was either something like Mexican cheese, or Parmesan. We couldn’t quite be sure. We were growing tired and just thought we would chance it.

Everything turned out surprisingly well. Imagine Doritos with a strange chili mush, poor flavored rice, and extremely sweet salsa and you have our dinner. Definitely not the “Mexican” that I’m use to, but it will hold me over until we can make it home. In the mean time I will enjoy the menagerie of ethnic food around us: Moroccan, Cambodian, Lebanese, African, Vietnamese, Peruvian and Indonesian to name a few.