From the Tour de France to Bastille Day: celebrate France this July
July 5th, 2012
The people of France have developed an unfair reputation as cheese eating surrender monkeys in recent years, in blatant disregard of the nation’s valuable contribution to the world’s history and culture.
With the Tour de France back on our screens and Bastille Day less than a fortnight away (14 July, to be exact), it’s high time to start embracing our inner Francophiles.
Here are a few ideas to get you started:
Keep warm with an Atlantic heater
It’s lucky that the French revolutionaries picked the 14th of July to storm the Bastille (the fortress-prison in Paris that held political dissidents along with a whole lot of gunpowder), as it’s certainly a good date for a national holiday. Falling in the French mid-summer, the likelihood of warm weather and clear conditions ensures that a good time will be had by all.
For Francophiles here in the southern hemisphere though, things are still a bit chilly around this time of year. It’s hard to celebrate the culture of a nation when you’re shivering, so a French-made Atlantic wall heater can keep you as toasty as a slice of French toast.
Look swanky with a Tefal iron or steam generator
The French are renowned for their fashion sense. Even if your wardrobe isn’t overflowing with the latest Parisian designs, you can freshen up your Sunday best by giving it a once-over with a Steam Generator from French brand, Tefal.
Here’s how it’s done:
Even just wafting a cloud of steam over a garment will help it look its best after it’s spent some time in the back of the cupboard.
Store your wine in a Transtherm wine cooler
Time for a self-indulgent personal anecdote:
A few years ago I watched the Sydney Mardi Gras with some friends, some of whom were sharing a house with French international students at the time. When the parade was over and gave way to general partying in the streets, some sneaky wine bottles began being passed around in Hyde Park.
When some well-meaning but ultimately anti-fun police officers seized the wine and drained it onto a fern before our eyes in the name of public decency, the loudest outcry came from the internationals:
“You don’t understand,” they wailed. “We’re French! We need wine to live!”
If you appreciate vin as much as these hard-done-by students, you can store your wine in a French-made Transtherm wine storage cabinet and keep the bottles in their ideal conditions, whether your prefer cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, pinot noir, sauvignon blanc, or the classic champagne.
Store your food in a French Door fridge
Not content with having varieties of fried potato, sparkling wine, and custard pie named after the French nation or areas within it (such as Champagne and Lorraine), France has even attached its name to a particular kind of door.
This kind of double-door is uniquely suited to fridges, making optimal use of available space and often including sufficient room to add a water fountain and ice maker right there in the doors.
For an Aussie touch, an LG Blast Chiller could be used to instantly get some Kronenbourg 1664 to optimal temperatures…
Cook up a French feast
French cuisine is well-regarded throughout the world. Case in point – in Japan, it was Hiroyuki Sakai, styled as “the Delacroix of French cuisine,” who took home the title of King of the Iron Chefs during the Iron Chef finale.
Enjoyment of French cuisine is also supposed to be part of a healthy lifestyle, if you agree that French Women Don’t Get Fat, though some people vocally disagree.
French gastronomy has even been added to the UNESCO World Heritage lists as an example of the world’s “intangible cultural heritage”.
While you may not be an award-winning French chef (if you are, we’d like you to visit our office kitchen), you can still create a classy French menu with a small collection of kitchen appliances. For a really smart kitchen, you can use the Qooq, a French-made iPad-style smart recipe book, to manage and organise your collection of French recipes.
Baguettes
When the folks over at Tefal kindly invited us to visit their showroom, one of the tastiest demonstations of their range of French-made products came from the Tefal Breads of the World, which made preparing a quartet of fresh baguettes, a staple of the French menu, so simple that anyone could do it.
Soup
The Tefal Soup & Co is the simple way to produce any kind of seriously tasty French soup, from vichyssoise to bouilabaisse to French Onion Soup, and do so seriously quickly.
Soup preparation can be sped up even further by using the Tefal Fresh Express to chop up the ingredients in next to no time.
Quiche Lorraine
I haven’t been following this year’s Tour de France closely, but I do know that one of the regions the race passes through is Lorraine; one of the many locations in France that has a famous food dish named after it.
A quiche lorraine should be nice and moist when you prepare it, so if you have access to a steam oven, you can use it to lock in the goodness of its ingredients and preserve the flavours. Here’s a recipe!
Terrine
For the unfamiliar, a terrine is a kind of ‘forcemeat’ loaf, similar to a pâté, made with more coarsely chopped ingredients and usually served cold or at room temperature.
Okay, based on that clinical description it may not sound too appealing, but did you know that a salmon terrine is part of what may scientifically be the most healthy meal in the world?
A Tefal food processor can be handy here for reducing the meat of your choice down to the choice consistency for being combined with some extra ingredients and left in the fridge to set.
French Fries
What’s more French than French Fries? Okay, pommes frites may technically be Belgian (it’s subject to debate), but Freedom Fries notwithstanding, their name clearly associates them with the French nation.
You can celebrate France at any time by dropping a bunch of hot chips into your deep fryer, but if you’d prefer a healthier, less oily experience to suit a more modern France, running just a single tablespoon of oil and a kilo of sliced potatoes through the Tefal Actifry will net you chips that taste amazing and have far less fat.
Coffee
Okay, so coffee is traditionally more of an Italian thing than a French one, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a plethora of cafes spread throughout the Gallic lands. According to French Women Don’t Get Fat, the French prefer black coffee to the milky kind, and thus consume less fat overall as part of their caffiene habit.
Apparently, one set of French designers so enjoy espresso that they threw together a portable espresso machine, for when you need a shot of the good stuff on the run.
For an extra touch of the Gallic, drop a shot of Grand Marnier into your brew to create a French Coffee, just like you’d drop Whiskey into an Irish Coffee.
French Toast
We’ve been concentrating on making healthy French meals so far, but there comes a point where you just have to let go and indulge. French Toast, made from frying up bread soaked in a mixture of milk, egg and sugar, should fit the bill nicely.
Making French toast can be a bit fiddly, requiring precise temperature control to keep it from burning or being undercooked. Induction cooktops let you carefully maintain just the right temperature for your cooking, and what’s more, we understand that a French company was one of their first manufacturers, making induction cooking an important part of French culinary history.
Le epic.