Vegetarians beware

We spent our last evening in Annonay with my host family, who had decided to serve the French dish pierrade. I had never heard of this before so I was curious to find out what it was. In fact, it's French style teppanyaki. First of all I should tell you about the raclette we had the time before. Raclette is a smelly French melting cheese, which you melt and pour over boiled potatoes and gherkins. This dish is so popular in France that you can buy electric raclette makers - a heated, two-layered appliance with tiny frypans to put your cheese into for melting. These raclette makers can also be used for pierrade, as the top layer of the appliance is basically a hot plate to cook your meat on. So for the pierrade, my host mother had prepared several bowls of thinly sliced meat - veal, duck breast, chicken and beef. The idea was to take a slice of meat and cook it to your satisfaction on the grill then eat with various side sauces. We started with the veal, then moved onto the next meat and so on. However, by the time we got to the beef, we had all eaten more than enough meat. I'm not sure how much weight-wise we would have eaten but I'm sure we ate at least 8 pieces of meat! After this carnivorous feast I was hanging out for something green and healthy, but instead we were served pommes dauphinois, rich with potatoes, cream, butter and cheese. Heart attack on a plate. Thank goodness it was an unusually cold summer day. I'm not sure we would have coped otherwise. The potatoes were quite tasty, as was the meat, but we left feeling like we'd need to go on detox the next day! Luckily we were leaving the next day to London, the home of such healthy delights as the full English breakfast and bangers and mash...(it's OK, though - we're self-catering).