Bad tomatoes Archives - The stuff I eat

Sorry about all the pictures, I’m one of those annoying people who take pictures of food in restaurants. But hey, I have an important food blog read by literally 10s of people…I gotta have pix. Bear with me. (For the correct use of bear vs bare in this case click here.) You know, or don’t bother looking at them. I can’t tell if you do or don’t.

Octopus salad (I did not eat or taste but could smell, unfortunately), steak tartar (I did not eat, taste or even smell, thank god), crab pasta, chopped liver, curried lamb chops, curried chicken thighs, curried chicken breast, French ham, French bread, french fries. Some of it good, some great, some not so much, some REALLY not so much.

I grimaced my way through about half a plate of fishy crab pasta before I gave up on it. The cute little pot of chopped liver was surprisingly liver-y, the accompanying pickles and beets helped there. I didn’t get a shot of the mixed appetizer plate in Camogli, Italy where we were with people we didn’t really know so taking out my phone and snapping pix seemed a little, I don’t know, Monaco-tourist-y, but I ate a piece of something that was so filthy-fishy I nearly threw it up on the table (sorry, Cindy). I didn’t feel at liberty to disgorge the offending mess onto the table as I’d have preferred, or bark JESUS H CHRIST THIS IS DISGUSTING (with my mouth full), at the very least, so I swallowed it regretfully. Gagging, I immediately drank water which in turn made my water glass smell like fish so that was good.

I have no idea why I don’t drink beer at home. I love it on vacation.

We had lunch in Vence (a place that in people’s minds takes a back seat to St Paul de Vence, a showier, touristier place that Rick Steves, I am sure, adores, but Vence is a vastly superior experience in my opinion). The curried lamb chops I had at some little place there were just sublime, even the RIMFC Police who has many opinions, not to mention rules and regulations about curry liked them We had to wander around for a good half hour until anyone was ready to serve lunch. (These people eat soooo late). Somehow I seem to have eaten a lot of curry. Curry is popular in France, and India, as it turns out.

I don’t know why the tomatoes here are mostly not all that good you’d think the weather in the south of France, Italy and Spain would offer them pretty much year ’round good tomatoes. But, well, if the tomatoes aren’t that good, the ham is sensational, the bread, well, the bread of the French, there is nothing like it. On Earth. I managed to have eaten a lot of it in France. And butter.

I also tried to stretch my fish boundaries by ordering fish and fish-related things. The crab pasta, for instance, uh god save me. The “fish and chips” didn’t really count since it’s, well, a fish fry. With bad tartar sauce I have to say. But the waitress and chef were adorable. The monkfish was excellent. There was veal with tuna sauce, vitello tonnato, that was great but then it was mostly about the veal and I like tuna already. The Food Control Police who already has a broader tolerance of things fishy took a break from fish early on after the octopus salad nightmare. (He hid a lot of it under the lemon. A trick I learned around the age of 9 from the Gradys, that, and scattering food on the plate, but that’s another story). In Nice he gamely ate an anchovy that came on a platter of grilled peppers and claimed to have enjoyed it. But I noticed that he ate the one and moved the others discreetly off to the side. Still it was an act of bravery.