Praha 2

Photos from our trip to Prague can be viewed here.

Enjoy!

The Visitors

On Friday afternoon, two intrepid travellers conquered the challenging Parisian cityscape to spend some time in a find country we call France.

So far we have enjoyed some delicious meals, done a lot of walking, learned that train tickets should not be booked after two glasses of Champagne, and discovered that most museums (or the ones we want to visit) are closed on Tuesdays.

It's great having them here!

More Snow?

Well, not the cold kind, anyway :)

It was our Birthdays!

This year both our birthdays happened up in the air: Erik's was celebrated on the plane coming back to France after our quick trip to Toronto, and mine on a plane coming back to Paris from Prague. It's been a busy month, and so the celebrations have been more of a drawn out affair, resulting in lots of cake, and lots of reasons to enjoy some Champagne.

The cake above was my new favorite, Nigella Lawson's chocolate Guinness cake, with cream cheese icing. It's easy to make, and Erik likes the fact that there's always a half can of beer left over for him to enjoy. I made this one on my birthday, and Erik got molten chocolate cakes that I made the other day when Karina and Joan came over for dinner.

All in all, it's been a busy month for both of us, full of travel, friends and family. What more could a person ask for? (except maybe a Kitchen Aid stand mixer....) :)

Praha

So that you can join in the fun, here are a couple of shots of our weekend so far....

Two pints are better than one


Erik gives the beer a thumbs up (and tries to pretend he's in Germany)


Erik pulls out the Canadian gear (too bad you can't see the MEC bag on his back). Unfortunately it was too warm for long johns...

Snow

Try to ignore the cherry blossoms and notice the white stuff on the cars.

We haven't had any snow all winter, what's the deal with it finally coming in April?

Picture Time

Breakfast from Bonjour Brioche, a yummy French bakery down the street from Nancy and Daryl.


Nancy's cute baby belly


Riverdale Park


yay! Pete's here!


Can't visit from Japan without a cask of Sake


Mark and Alyssa enjoying the sake

Hannah and Roman's wedding:

Waiting for the fun to start. Recognize the photographer?



The happy couple






Dinner and drinks with the family:

On the flipside

We're here, back in Toronto, and life is good.

So much to say, but I'm way to tired at the moment to articulate any thoughts. Right now we're in Waterloo, getting ready for the wedding. Lots of snow, and lots of Canada geese. Fun.

A bientot :)

Fete du printemps

On Friday at the Nursery School we celebrated the start of Spring. We have these fun little parties a couple of times a year, the kids come dressed up (this time like spring things: insects, flowers, gardeners, and princesses. You know, the spring time princesses like Belle and Cinderella :) ). We all go up to the big classroom upstairs, and they parade around, and sing songs. Then there is a snack. Because this was the spring party, parents were supposed to bring in things like fruits and veggies. Luckily for me, many interpreted this to mean fruit tarts, chocolate cake, and homemade sushi. And even luckier for us teachers was the fact that the kids were way more interested in the fluorescent frosted cupcakes than any of the fancy pastries and absolutely delicious sushi. Paris celebrated along with us by treating us to a whole gamut of weather: torrential rain, bright sun, and hail. We rotated through these three in twenty minute intervals for most of the morning.

It was a fun morning.

Since this weekend is Easter, we're celebrating by stocking up on goodies to bring back to Canada, checking out the deals at Galleries Lafayette, writing report cards (me) and practising presentations (Erik). Erik's big presentation is Tuesday morning, and he's wearing his new suit and practising as I type this. Apparently the drying rack that he presented to this morning wanted to hire him, as did the laundry hamper, and now they are in salary negotiations to determine who can offer him more. At least he still has a sense of humour about it.

Easter Sunday will be spent hunting for eggs at the gym, which is open for business comme d'habitude, and this business requires my services tomorrow.

I hope everyone is having a lovely long weekend, we're looking forward to seeing lots of you next week, when we're back in TO!

Bye Bye Vacances

So, it's back to work for me tomorrow (sniff, sniff). Despite being on holiday for the last two weeks, I've managed to do a fair amount of work, finishing off with a 5 hour marathon at the gym today. And good old Erik came and took his first BodyAttack class, and can still walk, so things are good :)

I have to admit that, aside from the hours I've worked at the gym, it's been a fairly unproductive two weeks for me, but I enjoyed the down time. Some highlights include:
-making bagels. Pretty easy, and almost as good as Kettleman's.
-Les annees folles an awesome exhibition of clothing, accessories and make up from the 20's.
-watching the entire first season of Dexter. And then starting on the second, and getting Erik hooked.
-going for a wine tasting dinner at a friend's house. We were served some fantastic wines, and the food was pretty awesome too.

I really wanted to do a lot of cooking, but soon realized that anything sweet that I make is going to be eaten almost entirely by me and Erik the day that it's made, and that complicated dishes usually produce enough to feed 6-8. We learned the last one the hard way by eating lasagne twice a day for a week.

So voila! Hope everyone is doing well. The next big thing for us is our quick trip home at the end of the month. Can't wait!

Saturday Evening on the terrasse in St Albert

Saturday Afternoon on the terrasse

You should...

Make this*.

And watch this**.

Happy Friday.

*Easiest lemon pie ever. Probably even easier if you haven't had two glasses of champagne before getting started on the filling, resulting in a slightly over cooked crust. But seriously, I can't imagine ever bothering with lemon curd.

**Just freaking funny. Erik is trying to figure out how he can get his accent to sound like theirs.

Queen West

I don't even know what to say. I can't stop thinking about how horrible a fire it must have been, and how sad it is that all those buildings were destroyed, and I keep wondering how much it will change the neighbourhood once rebuilding begins. Mostly I think I can't stop thinking about it because it was literally right around the corner from our house on Augusta, and that was our neighbourhood. We spent the better part of an hour trying to remember exactly what stores were on that particular stretch of Queen, and it just reminds me how much we loved that area. We used to go to the falafel shop all the time, and I got my bike tuned up at the cycle shop. Maybe part of it is that I like thinking that things in Toronto haven't changed since we left, and it's hard to accept that that part of Queen St will never again be how we remember it. Maybe it's hard to realize that although I'm happy here in Paris, and do truly want to stay longer, I really, really miss the life we had in TO.










Well, this last one is just a nice shot of Erik and his mom. Had to post it. :)

More pictures

Since I've finally gotten around to getting them off the camera, here are a few recent pictures:


Sunset from our window

Last weekend's dinner, I was inspired by a cooking magazine that I picked up.

Verrine of langoustine mousse, avocado cream and roasted pepper sauce


Hasan Pasa Koft: Turkish meatballs topped with mashed potatoes in a tomato sauce

Surprisingly, we've both forgotten what we had for dessert. Unheard of!


And pictures of us looking fairly confused with all this picture taking techmology.

Bread

And the winner is....

me, clearly, because I got to enjoy so much bread. I can't believe I'm posting this picture, but hopefully you'll excuse the blanket skirt (cold) and the horrible expression.

But seriously, we did our bread tasting last night, and as I expected, it wasn't too difficult. There was a clear, and expected winner, with the Monoprix downstairs bread coming in a close second. The other two were almost inedible when compared so closely to the others, but I'm sure a nice bath in eggs and milk for French toast will solve that problem.

Here's the play by play, for all who are interested:

Erik's super scientific blind taste test set up. All loaves were of the Tradition variety, except for C which was a regular baguette, and kind of made it pretty obvious where it came from.


D: Monoprix downstairs (2nd place)


A: bakery next to the Monoprix--I absolutely hate this bakery, not only because the bread tasted really chemical-y, but because they once sold me a stale loaf of bread. Last place.


B: Moisan Bakery, the organic bakery near Denfert Rochereau. The line up is regularly out the door when we go there, and rightly so. I've never left with JUST bread. After spending 15 minutes in line drooling over all the other things they've got on display, it's just not possible. 1st place.


C: the bakery on Ave du Maine across from the train station that's open on Sundays and closer to home than Moisan. This was the non-Tradition baguette, which means that its insides were the equivalent of Wonder bread compared to the others. Still better than evil stale bread bakery though.

Funnily enough, the baguette we eat most often isn't even from our neighbourhood. There's an excellent bakery near the nursery school, and since I'm in that area every day either teaching or tutoring, I make an effort to buy from there whenever possible. Unfortunetly the commute usually means that half the bread is missing by the time I get home....

bread and cupcakes

I have a bit of a confession to make.

I have recently rediscovered my love of something that comes pre-sliced, wrapped in plastic to preserve all it's marshmallow-y softness and bears the word 'Americain' on the label.

Yes folks, it's sandwich bread. Which, when I was little, we actually called marshmallow bread. I remember quickly becoming repulsed by the way it would gum up behind your teeth when you had it for sandwiches, but I always loved it toasted with margarine and cinnamon sugar.

Anyway, I've had to buy a couple of packages of this stuff recently for other recipes that I've been making (mainly as a binder type thing in meatballs), and of course once the one or two slices that the recipe called for are gone, the bag stares at me daring me to eat it.

Which of course I do. Because it seems like I've met very few foods that I don't want to eat.

It didn't take long to remember that sandwich bread was basically good for two things: toasted with cinnamon sugar, or grilled around cheese. Seeing as I've pretty much satisfied my sweet tooth into the next millennium with that batch of brioche, that left only the cheesy option left to try. And let me tell you, I think I ate grilled cheese for lunch almost all week. Until we ran out of cheese. And every time I took a bite, I asked myself why I hadn't made this sooner.

My fondest grilled cheese memories are from camp, where one of the most popular meals was grilled cheese and tater tots. Of course the cheese was of the presliced and plastic wrapped variety, but I still remember how excited we would be on grilled cheese day. I haven't yet resorted to buying cheese slices (which are unfortunately available here, I think they call it hamburger cheese, and if I ever blog about loving that kind of cheese, please buy me a one way ticket back to North America because I clearly do not deserve to be living in this land of cheese any longer), so I like to think that my grilled cheese sandwiches were slightly better than the fare being offered by the kitchen staff at RPC. My favorite was the cheddar version, and Erik was a big fan of the bleu d'Auvergne one, and the tater tots were replaced by salad. Although I have been served a scary amount of oddly shaped potatoes as part of my school lunch on Thursdays, but don't even get me started on that...

Moving on to the cupcakes.

It's birthday season at the nursery school, and one of the little American girls in the 2 year old class had her birthday on Valentine's day. And of course her mom brought in a special snack for the class to share. Before I tell you about that special snack, let me just give you a quick recap of pretty traditional French birthday fare: flourless dark chocolate cake. No icing. Sometimes the parents get a fancy bakery cake which may also contain some kind of chocolate mousse. I have never in the three years I've been at the school had any kind of non-chocolate cake for a birthday. Ok, well one time there was a pie and one time a parent brought in boozy fruit cake (for the kids), but never any other kind of cake. I don't think I've seen cupcakes here before either.

So, mommy americain brings in cherry chip cupcakes with bright pink icing. The leftovers always go into the kitchen for the rest of the teachers, and usually they're all gone by the end of lunch. By mid afternoon there are still three cupcakes in the fridge, and I've already heard the verdict from one of the teachers: too sweet! I took one bite into the pink cake and quickly understood the problem. It's about as far away from flourless chocolate cake as you can get. The cherry chips make the cake part pink, the cake itself is light and fluffy and the icing was the stuff from a can, which I used to love eating off a spoon. I loved that cupcake, from the spongy greasiness of the cake to the tooth achingly sweet icing, mainly because I can't remember the last time I had cake like that, and I have so many good memories of making cakes from mixes when I was a kid (which is funny, because my mom's a good cook. What were we doing with cake mixes? And canned icing???)

So there you have it. Don't get me wrong, I'm still obsessed with baguette, to the point that Erik has decided that we need to do a blind tasting this weekend, because I have very particular preferences about where the baguette can come from (at the very least, not the bakery next to the grocery store! And if it has to come from the grocery store, the loaves downstairs are much better than the ones upstairs) and he doesn't think that I'll be able tell the loaves apart. And well, I still love cake, but have definitely developed a love of chocolate cake that I never had in Canada.

Hmm. I guess this has kind of turned into an "I love food, all food!" post, but for anyone who knows me well, that shouldn't be much of a surprise.

I hope everyone had a happy Valentine's day yesterday. We had a very romantic one: Erik came and took my BodyPump class, then I went out to see a movie while he finished up some work :). We're continuing our tradition of not celebrating on the day, and will be going out for dinner tonight, to the awesome little restaurant near our place, la Cerisaie.

The problem with making cinnamon buns is that we eat the whole pan.

Not really a huge problem as it's not something we do every day, but I do feel slightly more guilt than usual this morning after devouring half a pan of these.

My tips for anyone else brave enough to attempt this multi hour task that has created piles of very sticky and still unwashed dishes.

• For the dulce de leche: skip the double boiler, and cook the condensed milk directly over the heat, stirring constantly. Much faster.
• The brioche dough was like no other dough I have ever made. How I wished I had my stand mixer to do this! My cheapo hand mixer was literally smoking while I tried to incorporate the butter. And no kneading? I did knead it a bit (with a ton more flour) after the first rise, because I couldn't figure out how I was going to be able to form the goopy mass that I had into any sort of a bun, and it was fine.
  
• I splite the dough in half, and made one batch of rolls with the dulce de leche and the other with cinnamon and brown sugar. Because of the amount of butter in the dough, I didn't add any extra butter when I sprinkled on the sugar and cinnamon (an effort to cut calories? hah!), and the rolls were definitely missing something. I also toyed with the idea of spreading Nutella on the second batch, and for some reason didn't. Next time.
  
• I was seriously doubting whether the amount of extra effort required to make the brioche dough would be worth it, and it absolutely was. Brioche comes out flaky and almost croissant like. So good.
  

Now I think I'll have one last one, and then it's off to the gym! Gotta love Saturdays. :)

Click

and it's done.

We just bought tickets to come home for Roman and Hannah's wedding at the end of March. Clear your calendars, people, cause it's going to be another whirlwind visit.

Oh, and how much does it suck that the taxes we had to pay were almost as much as the tickets?

It's been awhile....

I know, I know. I've been a bad blogger lately. But since the holidays ended there really hasn't been much to share. We both went back to work ( :( ), I started counting down the weeks until my next holiday (5!), I did another gym training which ate up all of this past weekend plus the Friday, and voila. Here we are. Plus the sales started two weeks ago and I still haven't really checked them out. Hopefully I'll have some time tomorrow.

So there you go. What's new with all of you?