We're home.

And what an adventure we've had.

I'm not going to get into it right now, as I haven't showered in three days, but lets just say that we got to know the Milan Malpensa airport REALLY well, and we aren't too impressed with EasyJet right now. And we ended up spending a ridiculous amount of money to get a flight home with AirFrance (all the shoes I could have bought in Milan....sigh).

I've never been so happy to be back in Paris.

Happy New Year everyone!

(edited to add something about food: I don't think I have ever eaten as much as I have in the past week. Steve took pictures. It was ridiculous. They pretty much had to roll us off the plane).


On the way to the airport on Saturday morning, hoping to get some tickets home.


Feeling much better about things with our tickets to Paris for the next morning.


Steve making friends with the information lady at the airport.

Duck

So, Steve's here.

It's been a long week of catching up and not sleeping enough, but as of right now, I'm finally officially on vacation. My students have all been so sweet, and I was surprised to be given a few gifts this week. Our house is overflowing with chocolate, and I am consistantly snacking on all of it all of the time. I'm sure things will get better in Italy...

Last night we had our own 'Christmas' here in Paris. And of course, I made duck. Or magret de canard, to be official, which is actually the breast from ducks that have been force fed to make foie gras. Doesn't that make you hungry? I've always known that duck was fatty, but I had never really realized how much fat until I started cooking these things, and they basically deep fried themselves. And there was still about a 1/4 inch of fat on them in the end. I'm not going to write out the recipe, but the duck was marinated in port and basil, then served with a port-wine reduction of figs and pears. The boys thought it was fantastic, and I did enjoy it although I couldn't eat the fat. It also could have been cooked a bit more, but it was so hard to tell under all the fat. For dessert I had picked up an assortment of pastries from Lenotre, which were all to die for. Sorry, no pictures.

We leave bright and early tomorrow for Italia, and I have to say that I have done the least amount of work preparing for this trip. We have plane tickets and a rental car, and the rest of the details are being left up to the boys (or more accurately Steve, who is talking, I mean shouting, to Antonio right now trying to figure out how to get from the airport to his house. Wish us luck).

Did I mention that when Steve first arrived on Tuesday morning at 5:30am, he was wearing a suit and speaking only in French and Japanese? He's still wearing suits, but luckily has switched to English for the time being..... I have a feeling it will be Italian soon.

Must get packing. On the menu tonight is either Indian food at the restaurant next door, or meat at Les Rendevous des Amis. Did I mention that our plane leaves at 8:00 am tomorrow? So much for sleeping in.

Ciao!

On the Menu

So, there's a theme to blogging this month. Any ideas? :)

Another week has flown by, and I can't believe we're seven days closer to Christmas. Seriously, I feel like I need at least another week or two before we head off for the Italian Christmas Fiesta. We finally put up some decorations, (love the gingerbread people, Karina) and bought some lights to hang around our window, so it's beginning to look a bit festive around here.

It was another pretty quiet Saturday for us. We've made the mistake of starting the third season of 24 last weekend, and have thus been glued to the computer all week, trying to get through the season before our houseguest arrives. The oven saga continued with Erik taking a trip out to some electronics store near Nation to pick up the fancy fuses we need to make the darn thing work. And work it does. After our afternoon gym session, we made the oven make up for the two weeks its had off.

On the menu tonight (recipes from the Williams Sonoma Paris cookbook):

Oeufs en cocotte--another stupidly easy French recipe. Take out ramekins (or cute little yogurt pots). Put a bit of butter in the bottom. Crack one or two eggs into the ramekin. Sprinkle chives on the egg. Drizzle cream. Cover with Parmesan and Gruyere. Put into dish filled with boiling water, and cook in the oven until the whites are set. Enjoy.

Roast Pork--the recipe had some name about the 'flavours of the sun' or something cheesy like that. It got off to a bad start at the grocery store, that has been under renovation for the past couple of months. Which usually isn't a problem, but now that it's Christmas there are tons are seasonal products to display, and they're changing things around daily, it's almost impossible to find things. So, I wasn't able to get ANY fresh herbs and had to use pre-chopped parsley, dried sage, and dried rosemary. The other problem is that when I use English recipes I have no idea what the French name is for the cut of meat, so I just bought what looked like a pork roast in the meat section (which had been moved and minimized since I was there last night). In the end I don't think the roast I chose had enough fat, plus it didn't really unroll, so we had to slice it in half a bit to smear the herbs, garlic and oil, before rolling it back up and roasting it. Easy enough, except that we realized once it was done that there was no salt in it, and we cooked it for too long, even though we halved the cooking time. Must get a meat thermometer. Hopefully the leftovers will make good sandwiches.

Flageolets--these are some kind of French bean (the legume, not the green been). Anyway, could only find the canned kind, tossed them with butter, garlic and parsley, and they were delicious.

Dessert--am waiting for Erik to get off the phone with Steve, who arrives at 5:30am Tuesday morning, so that we can go and get crepes.

*Erik has discovered that there are ten flights coming in from Asia between 5:30-5:45 that morning. Thats a lot of tired people looking for a way into the city. Not sure why we found that interesting.

Life is just one big meal.

Sometimes I feel like I'm just killing time until the next meal. Seriously, work just gets in the way of all the food we could be eating.

Anyway, after a fruitless trip to BHV in search of an oven fuse, where Erik and I got separated, we met up at the gym and had a fantastic workout. I love going to the gym. We're in the process of learning all the new classes right now, and so far they are all amazing. And Erik is revelling in his strength that has all the French gym rats checking out the charges on his bar.

As I mentioned yesterday, last night we were cooking from Ina Gartens Barefooot in Paris cookbook. I received this book as a birthday gift before we left Toronto, and although we've made a couple of dishes from it, for some reason we've never really gotten into it. Until last weekend when Erik made boeuf bourguigion, and we started drooling over all the fantastic recipes that are in there. So last night it was pear, endive and roquefort salad, and steak with bernaise sauce.

The salad was so ridiculously easy, I can't believe we've never made it before. The hardest part was finding the walnuts at the grocery store, without the shell. All you do is arrange the endive leaves on each plate, toss slices of pear in the dressing, arrange the pears on the endive, crumble on the cheese, add the toasted walnuts, and drizzle the whole thing with more dressing. And the dressing was the exact same vinaigrette that we always make, mustard, vinegar and oil, with the addition of an egg yolk, which I added because we're in France, and we're into 'extreme' eating here. I think the egg yolk just thickened up the dressing, and made it bright yellow.

The steak was pretty basic, although next time I think we should head to the butcher to get really good ones. I somehow managed to leave two ingredients for the sauce off the grocery list, so instead of the tarragon, I used parsley, and I only had about half the amount of butter that was required (I'm really getting irritated by the imperial quantities used in American recipes. How am I supposed to know how much two sticks of butter is? What the heck is a quart?). As a result (I think) the sauce was really runny, and very vinegar-y. But Erik liked it, and it still tasted good. We served it with boiled potatoes.

The meal was so good that I'm having a hard time remembering what we had for dessert.

This morning I woke up craving pancakes, and decided to give them a try without butter. I have never made pancakes without butter, because butter makes everything better. I have to say, not only was it way easier to just use oil, I think they came out crispier in the end too. I may be converted. I added cinnamon and banana slices, and we slathered them with, what else, Nutella. To die for.

I wonder what we'll have for lunch....

A New Challenge

I think we can do it! A whole 1500 grams of goodness!


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And on an unrelated note, here is the bounty that we brought home from the wine show we attended a couple of weeks ago. We've polished off two of the bottles so far, and I'd post the names, but we stupidly recycled the bottles. Too bad, because they were delicious. Unfortunately, none of them are available at stores in Paris :(


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An on another unrelated note, Erik has been losing some weight around his midsection. He thought it would be funny to show everyone how he has managed to lose this weight. Well, that and a steady diet of bread and cheese, among other things. I'm only kind of kidding.

(plus, if you look carefully, you can kind of see the amazing watercolour that my mom did of the Time Machine, propped up against our tv.)

More Good Eats

It's been another busy week, and again, I was surprised (and relieved!) when Friday rolled around yesterday.

Last weekend we headed out to Pavel and Tatiana's for a Russian meal. None of us really knew what to expect, except a lot of vodka. When we arrived, the table was set with three large salads (and I mean large, each salad could have served at least 10 people. There were eight of us). One was Pavel's famous layered herring salad which we'd had before, there was a pickled vegetable salad, and a potato-type salad. All were delicious, and were of course accompanied by vodka. Which actually wasn't that bad. And apparently the Russians drink their vodka with pickles, and Tatiana had made her own dill pickles witch were also delicious, and a surprisingly tasty partner to the drink. There were also little homemade buns stuffed with cabbage, hard boiled eggs and cheese, that are called pirogi. Last time we were there we had talked about pirogi, and how they were such an easy thing to cook when we were in university. Tatiana was very confused, and we learned why when she whipped these things out. Apparently the pirogi that we eat in Canada are actually called something else in Ukraine. The main course was meat baked with onions and cheese on top, and was also very good. For dessert we had a red berry semifreddo-type dessert, that was very refreshing. What an experience! There was so much food left over that Erik got to have it again for lunch the next day when Pavel invited everyone back to help finish the leftovers.

Here are some bad photos of the meal:

Tatiana, and the multi-layer herring salad. Pirogi in the basket on the right.


Bicher and Alex behind the two other salads. Note how much was left. This was after everyone had been served.


The aftermath. Pavel has a habit of carting out the digestifs after dinner, and last weekend was no exception. The Suze wasn't too popular though.

On Tuesday we saw the movie Babel. What a great movie. So interesting, neither of us could sleep that night because we kept thinking about it. Highly recommend it, and not just because Brad Pitt is in it. Parts of it also take place in Japan, and I spent much of the movie nudging Erik every time I heard a 'des-ka' or 'konichiwa'. We want to go back.

On Thursday we were woken up at 5:30am by the Braveheart soundtrack, and other surprisingly good tunes blaring from the apartment above. We waited it out for about thirty minutes before Erik decided to be an 'adult' and tell them to turn it down.

And last night, we had dinner at the other restaurant I had made reservations at. This place was right around the corner, but we seriously have to start making our reservations for a later time. I always say 8:00, because it seems kind of late for some reason. But realistically, neither of us get home until 7:00 on Fridays, and we usually eat dinner at 9:00 or 10:00 during the week, so I don't know. Anyway, of course we were the first people there, and it was so uncomfortably quiet until the place started filling up.

I have to say that this place was a bit of a disappointment. We were both seated on the same side of our table, which was odd, and it was right in the entry, which was kind of interesting because we could watch the bar, but we really felt like we were on display once we started eating. The food was nothing spectacular, and certainly not worth the amount we paid for it. We think it was our most expensive meal yet, by a couple of euros. We've come a long way from the 9 euro menus that we were eating in Montmartre when we first arrived, but we haven't come too far.

So, the food. I had warm artichoke salad for an entree and confit de canard for my plat. The salad was fine, and the duck was good, but it was served with sauteed potatoes that were burnt. Erik had foie gras to start, and it's hard to go wrong with that, and andouillettes as his main, but his potatoes were burnt too, and he ranked his cafeteria andouillette higher than this one*. For dessert I had the Grand Marnier souffle, which I actually didn't like that much, and Erik had a yummy chocolate mousse. The bread was good, and I regret not eating more of it.

Anyway the place was called Chez Dumonet and it is at 112 rue Cherche Midi. The food that was being served around us looked good, so eat at your own risk.

This weekend we have a date with Ina and her Paris cookbook. Steak with bernaise sauce; pear, endive and roquefort salad, and some dessert that doesn't involve the use of the oven. It broke again. We're off to the basement at BHV to look for another fuse. Plus, if we do get the oven fixed, I intend to buy some beaters (only 25 euros at Darty!) and do some baking. Wish me luck.

*For anyone who's interested, the first place goes to the Encrier; the cafeteria andouillette is number two and third place goes to the Raspail Vert.

Good Eats.

It's report card time again, which means that I have lots of time to update you on the goings on of our life.

We had a fantastic dinner last night at a restaurant recommended by one of the many Parisian blogs that I read.

The restaurant was Les Fils de la Ferme, and was surprisingly close to our house. We found the service to be a bit snooty, especially towards the end, but it certainly didn't affect our enjoyment. The amuse bouche was a foam of crushed peas and mint, which was a nice refreshing way to start the meal. For our entrees, we had risotto with carrots and caraway, and oeufs en cocotte with foie gras, both were delicious. Our main course consisted of lamb and daurade, which were both satisfying, and not too filling, which left us just enough room for the most important course of the meal. Erik had the chocolate dessert, which was a chocolate ganache with lychee sorbet. I had creme brulee with some kind of honey, which gave it a very earthy flavour. Very interesting, and very yummy.

We've got another selection lined up for next Friday, Chez Dumonet, which I'm sure we've walked past a zillion times on the way to our old standby Midi Vins, so it will be fun to try it out.

Plus, Erik is making beef bourguigon, which smells fantastic. He also thinks it would be fun to do an Erik/Ina challenge, a la Julie/Julia project. I can't complain, but I think I like cooking too much to sit on the sidelines too often.

Plus, we're being treated to an authentic Russian dinner tomorrow night at Pavel and Tatiana's. Erik has been preparing me with stories of vodka being served in large quantities. Hopefully we'll be able to make it home...

Erik just offered to write some report card comments for me (I declined, of course). Then wondered how Azizullah was doing...ahh memories of a life teaching in a system that didn't have holidays every six weeks. What torture.