KEBAB Sandwiches in the safety of your own home!

Thursday's newspapers ran stories about the unsanitary conditions in the French bakeries and doner kebab sandwich shops that exist here in France.

Before I came here a half a year ago, I too felt uneasy with the unrefrigerated sandwiches, raw and cooked ingredients stored side by side, and the other what we would call violations in the US that I saw on a regular basis.

Here's a copy of the article, in French, if you want to run it through a translation software on some home page somehwere (Google translation or babelfish) ... just be sure you don't read what it says before a meal.

http://www.rtl.fr/imprimer.asp?dicid=517393&origine=/info/article.asp

Just the same, I've gotten used to the conditions and my body seems to hold up all right. If you live here long enough and ride on the less-than-pristine buses and metro everyday your body automatically builds up a kind of immunity to all sorts of things ...

...

With that said, I found a neat new thing at Carrefour.

Kebab sandwich style meat made from turkey meat. During the promotion they're offering right now you can get one pack for 1,50 EUR and the second for half-price, so you get the equivalent of one or one and a half kebab sandwiches in each pack.

Of course it's not quite the same as eating it at the shop (watching them smear the white sauce and spicy harissa sauce on the toasted bread) but I found a way of getting close. I threw the meat and a cut-up onion into the frypan, toasted some brown bread (the kind I always eat for breakfast) and had it for lunch, with a side order of salad (pre-packaged lettuce and greens) and an orange.

It's more economical and the taste isn't so bad: I mean, well, it was red (probably from paprika) and tasted closer to tandoori than the kebab shop meats, but it was close enough and a nice, filling lunch.