I'm pretty sure that there's sometimes a secret conspiracy around here to make me think that it's me who is crazy. For example, I bought this little glass dish last weekend. When I brought it to the seller to pay, I said, "This is such a beautiful butter dish."
She looked at me, then at it. Then back at me.
"Non, non, monsieur, it's for garlic."
I just spent a long weekend in the French countryside, trying to enjoy the last bits of summer before the rentrée, when everyone in Paris returns en masse, usually bronzed to an unsavory crisp.
And because last Friday was a national holiday, I spent a prodcutive morning at a vide grenier, an enormous and pretty fabulous flea market in the town of Esterney.
Like anywhere, once you get out the big city, prices drop substantially and I can't believe the stuff I hauled back to Paris!
During the next week, I'm going to do a series: Five Great Places in Paris That You Might Not Know About. In a city that hasn't been overrun by chain stores and restaurants, it's nice to be able to profile some of the smaller places around town that I frequent.
When I've had friends come to visit and suggested we go out for pizza, they balk.
"Pizza? I didn't come to Paris for...for...pizza!"
To which I always want to reply, "Honey, well I didn't come to Paris to listen to you diss my dining suggestions."
But when you live somewhere, no matter how good the local cuisine might be, one cannot live on duck confit and galettes de sarrasin slathered in butter forever, you know.
I happily eat raw-milk cheese. I'll dive into steak tartar without any fear. And heck, I drink horse milk like it's going out of style.
(Actually, if someone could tell me that drinking horse milk never was in style, that'd be great, so I can stop drinking it...)
But I have a confession to make: I wash melons in soap and water.
During the recent site redesign, the feed address for the blog changed and some of you weren't receiving feeds or notifications in your blog readers. Subsequently, my web fellow re-did the feed—so if you're using the old feed, it is presently directing you to the new feed, but you should change it to the new one.
You can get the new RSS feed address by clicking on the little white logo on the far right end of the green menu bar at the top.
Earlier this year I was sent some of the new chocolates from Valrhona to play around with. While I made quick work of the rest of them, one stood out in particular: Xocopili, smooth balls of chocolate flavored with a myriad of spices, including a heavy dose of cumin.
Frédéric Bau, a professor at their notoriously difficult to get into Ecole du Chocolat (I've been invited—and uninvited, a number of times...can someone please put in a good word for me?), developed this blend.
And for the life of me, I had no idea what to do with it.
It's that time of the year—the season for Reine Claude plums in France has arrived!
These little green fruits, no larger than a marshmallow, are perhaps the most delicious fruits in the world. Don't let the army-green color fool you in to thinking these plums might be tart or sour. If you get a good one, Reine Claude plums (also known as Greengage plums), are the sweetest, most succulent piece of fruit you'll bite into.
