About

Welcome to My Expat Kitchen! Or one American’s trials and tribulations of learning to cook… in France. Like many expats living abroad, I quickly came to realize that many of the products I took for granted back home are harder to come by here. At first, I didn’t think this would be a problem. After all, this is France! Food heaven, right? True, but for all the delectable goodies France has to offer, sometimes I just have a hankering for the familiar dishes, desserts and comfort foods I grew up with.

So here I was, faced with a choice: live without many of the foods that I love (yeah, right!) or learn to make them myself from scratch. I chose the latter. One of the first challenges I faced was finding the right ingredients. For the most part, it was just a matter of looking them up in a dictionary to find their French names (baking powder = levure chimique. Got it). Other ingredients, such as buttermilk, are simply unheard of in France, and so I had to find adequate replacements, some of which are listed in Equivalents & Substitutions. Baking soda was hard, but not impossible to come by when I first arrived in France, but the increasing trendiness of American and British-style desserts in recent years has made it easier to find this ingredient on supermarket shelves. Most grocery stores now have a foreign foods aisle which is where I usually find things like oatmeal or peanut butter. With time and little trial and error, I eventually managed to stock my kitchen with the cooking and baking staples I needed.

So I tried my hand at cooking from scratch, and now I’m hooked! I’m not an expert, just a self-taught amateur who loves trying new recipes, as well as old,familiar ones, adapting them as needed with the ingredients available to me. I take pride in the dishes and desserts I make and have fun as I continue to learn. I’ve even dared to attempt a few French recipes! Some turn out better than others, of course, and as honesty is the best policy, I will share both my culinary successes and failures in this blog. I hope others will feel free to share their expat cooking experiences – and experiments – here as well.

So happy cooking, dear readers, and bon appétit!

Kelley