ParisFamilyXmas Day 2: Markets, Churches and Shellfish

Sunday is the day of the big market at Bastille, so of course that’s how we started our day. We walked over to the market on the boulevard just north of the Bastille plaza and started our shopping in earnest. I can’t keep track of everything we bought, but there were some roasted chestnuts, fancy dry sausage, Jordanian dates, olives, and fruit of various sorts.

With our arms heavy with various tasty things, we walked up along the boulevard Richard Lenoir until we got to my neighborhood. We walked around my area and stopped at La Bague de Kenza (WARNING: crazy Flash-intensive, browser-crashing site; try this review instead), a fantastic Algerian sweets shop. We bought a ton of sweets (24, I think), a bunch of flavored flatbreads, and an olive loaf. We climbed the 6 flights of stairs to my apartment and made a late lunch out of the breads and olives we had bought, and then headed over to my parents’ apartment to drop off our purchases for the day.

We had reservations that night around 21h00 at a brasserie specializing in seafood, called La Rotonde. It’s located down near Gare Montparnasse, so our plan was to change into some more formal clothes and then wander around the neighborhood between Saint-Germain and Montparnasse.

After my mother and I spent a while cajoling my dad to put on something reasonably formal (he wanted to go in cargo pants and a hiking vest), we headed over to the Sèvres / Babylone métro station and wandered around the original grand magasin (department store), Le Bon Marché (“The Good Market”, but also “good price” or “good deal”). This remains probably the most high-end and non-touristy of the grands magasins; others, all located on the other side of the Seine river, include Galeries Lafayette, Printemps, BHV, and Samaritaine. We only walked through briefly, taking a moment to check out the elaborate Christmas window displays before leaving the store and walking toward the nearby church, Saint-Sulpice.

It just so happened (by total coincidence! I swear!) that the path to Saint-Sulpice goes right by the store of Pierre Hermé, a famed pastry and chocolate maker who is especially well-known for his adventurous and divinely-executed macarons. Now, I’m pretty sure that I’ve described French macarons in previous posts (nothing like North American “macaroons”) but it bears repeating: macarons are little sandwich cookies made of discs of soft meringue and flavoured cream, ganache or jelly filling. When properly made, macarons are soft, bite-sized clouds of AWESOME.

Of course, we couldn’t just walk by the Pierre Hermé shop without buying a few “for the road,” and I rationalized that a little bit of meringue wasn’t likely to spoil our appetites. My parents were rather easily convinced, and I bought a small collection of 6 macarons, including a salted-butter caramel one, a chocolate-passionfruit one, a coffee-flavored one, and a wasabi-grapefruit one. They were gorgeous.

The square in front of Saint-Sulpice had a Christmas winter market running, so we wandered through and checked out the wares available. Most of it was rather tacky tchotchke and/or from areas of the world outside of France (wooden bowls from Africa, “ethnic” jewelry, Southeast-Asian silks, Peruvian alpaca wool products, etc.), so we didn’t find anything to take as gifts for family and friends back home. If you go to Paris for Xmas, the expectation is that you bring back “French” gifts—whatever that might mean. Nevertheless, we did buy some roasted chestnuts and a few tantalizingly stinky Corsican sheep cheese.

We finally walked around the interior of Saint-Sulpice, a massive Baroque church built on a truly grandiose scale. As we were slowly walking around the church, dad seemed to wait until mom was well out of earshot before looking up at the vast vaults and saying to me, “What a waste of space and resources. Imagine the number of people you could house here; imagine the help you could give to the poor with the money spent here.” I wasn’t surprised at his reaction, considering that he had grown up on a rural cattle farm in Columbia and had always been endowed with a practical, pragmatic mindset. But there was something striking about the fact that he gazed at a monument and asked where the humanity was. My parents are hitting the phase in their lives where I sometimes think about what I’ll say at their funerals, and already at that moment I was bookmarking this remark as something that would encapsulate my father’s view of things.

After leaving the church, we found that we still had a fair bit of time, so we took a leisurely walk around the Luxembourg Gardens and eventually down rue Vavin to where the restaurant was. We circled the neighborhood for a while, popped into another church (with a sideways smirk from my father) and then eventually went into La Rotonde to claim our table. The meal was excellent and a great introduction to French seafood for my dad, but it was a pretty simple affair, so here’s the run-down in point form:

• The main dish was a huge platter of oysters and other shellfish, which all three of us only barely finished.
• We had a delicious sauternes [LINK] wine, which was a bit expensive but so worth it when paired with the brine of the oysters.
• We were total gluttons and had dessert, despite the fact that we were stuffed to the gills with shellfish.
• Including all of that and coffee, the whole thing came to 203€ for three people, 93€ of which was the seafood platter and 50€ of which was the wine.

And, despite the near-fatal doses of protein and phosphorous from all that shellfish, we all made it home OK, I actually biked back from my parents’ place, and I slept like a baby. A very well-fed baby.

ParisFamilyXmas Day 1: Mussels and Arrivals

And we’re back! So I’m about 7 days behind on blogging, but I have a good excuse: my parents are in town, and every night I get home with a bottle of wine in me, and I somehow lack the motivation to write. Anyway, here’s comes the catch-up.

My parents were flying into town today, so I headed up to the airport by RER and sat around reading Lévinas and drinking coffee until their plane landed. It took them seemingly forever to get their luggage and come through customs, but eventually they made it and we hopped into a cab. Traffic was mercifully low on the highways, and so we were downtown pretty quickly. My parents (and, next week, my sister too) are renting an apartment in the Marais, so we spent a few minutes circling the one-way streets that neighborhood before we finally got close enough to the apartment to walk. The guy responsible for renting out the apartment showed up shortly thereafter and gave us the keys and a quick tour. The apartment is pretty rad, all things considered, and it’s about half a block from the old Jewish neighborhood of Paris, rue des rosiers.

My folks were famished, so we dropped off their luggage and headed straight out to a place on rue soufflot (near the Pantheon and the Luxembourg Gardens) called La Gueuze. Gueuze is a kind of lambic beer made in Belgium, often consumed with the traditional Belgian specialty of moules frites (“mussels and fries”). We each had a big kettle of mussels and a pint of fine Belgian beer, and then headed out in the drizzling rain for a walk.

Paris was doing a lovely job of welcoming my parents with its finest winter weather: grey skies, low cloud ceiling, incessant drizzling rain, high humidity, barely-above-freezing temperatures. Nonetheless, my parents have been living in Canada for more than 30 years and they know from cold, so we just kept walking. We wound through the Latin Quarter, checked out the church of St. Severin, traversed the famous rue de la huchette (whose restaurants are now mostly tourist traps) and then over to the island of Notre-Dame. It’s my dad’s first time in Paris, so we were trying to give him the “scenic” route from the restaurant back to the apartment.

Part of the goal of the walk was also to keep everyone awake as long as possible, since they had a 6-hour jet-lag to overcome. The secret to recovering jet-lag is to stay awake until night falls, and then to rise with the sun the next day. This was tough for my dad, who didn’t sleep on the flight; there was a medical emergency on the flight and he was called up to look after another passenger. Nonetheless, I managed to cajole them into walking past the hôtel de ville (town hall), through BHV, down the main drag of the gay neighborhood, and then through the Jewish neighborhood.

While my parents started unpacking and settling in, I headed around the corner and got them some bread and basic groceries, then left them to get some sleep.

Git ur laundry on

I got a haircut this morning. Yay! I’m lookin’ good. So where do I go to show off the new haircut? The Laundromat, that’s where. In additional to my usual loads of laundry, I was in desperate need of washing all of my jeans and bed sheets as well. This is when Laundromats come in handy; I just started 5 loads of laundry at the same time, then loaded them into two giant dryers, and I was out of there in less than two hours. Efficient!

My parent’s are coming to town tomorrow (yay!), which means I need to pick them up at the airport at around 8am tomorrow. This means getting up around 6am, which isn’t going to happen with my current sleep cycle as it is. So I bought a bottle of tasty wine (Fitou), drank it, and fell asleep as I pondered my incipient alcoholism.

(p.s. dear mom: kidding! I don’t drink entire bottles of wine on my own…much)

Hot Indian Action

After work today, I took a short detour by the Indian neighborhood near the La Chapelle métro station to buy some spices. I had been making pseudo-curries in these past few weeks, but I was always improvising with a collection of cumin, garlic, ginger and cumin (and lots of butter, of course). So today’s goal was to get mustard seeds, fenugreek, fennel seeds, cardamom pods, coriander seeds and maybe some lovage. I was successful, but I also managed to leave the store with a bag of spicy yucca chips and spicy murukku. Of course, once I got home, I scarfed down half of the bag of the murukku. That shit is delicious.

Assiette Mouffetard

Oops! I’m behind on blogging yet again. Ever since the writing of the chapter, I’ve been feeling pretty slack, I’ll admit. Anyway, my day today wasn’t worth much of a blog post: drag my ass to work, help get the profs ready for the winter quarter, grab a quick bite to eat, teach English until 7pm, lurch home and eat some leftover curry from the previous night, fall into bed.

The one interesting thing from the day, possibly, was my “quick bite to eat” this afternoon, which was at a cute café/bar at the corner of rue Mouffetard and rue de l’Arabalette. They had an assiette mouffetard (“Mouffetard plate”), which included a small salad with nuts and raisins and an assortment of 3 cheeses and 3 kinds of deli meats…and a glass of wine. This is sort of a typical apéro setting (aperitif, or post-work/pre-dinner drink), including an alcoholic drink and a cold platter of meats and cheeses. However, this sort of cold platter is usually a small thing of a few salty bits of protein, sort of like a dish of tapas. This, however, was a massive party platter of meats and cheeses. By the time I had finished this and downed my drink, I was more in the mood for a nap than a 2-hour English class.

Teaching Canadian politics in the aftermath of last week

Not much to report today, either. In my English conversation class this evening, I had assigned them a couple of editorial essays on the mess that was last week in Canadian politics, and I ended up spending almost an hour just explaining how the Canadian parliamentary system works. The system itself is complicated enough, being a colonial version of Britain’s Westminister system, but as soon as you throw in minority governments, “vote of no confidence” and prorogation, it gets very, very complicated. Then I had to explain the Governor-General and her role as the representation of the Queen. Then I had to discuss the King-Byng affair and how that changed the conventions around the role of the Governor-General. It was a big mess.

Anyway, I went home after that, got some bread and wine, made a super-spicy channa masala, and read with more than a bit of schadenfreude about the arrest of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich on corruption charges.

Meh Monday

Well, nothing exciting to report, really. I woke up this morning and realized that I had been eating rather…well…generously over the past week. Most likely, I was rewarding myself for getting a chapter (mostly) done, but I’m anxious to avoid putting on winter weight, as I’d like to continue the weight-loss trend I started this summer. Anyway, this week will be one of austerity, I think, since my parents are coming to visit starting this weekend (yay!).

On that note, I spent a large part of today scouring through my blog for references to restaurants I’ve visited in the past and started putting together a list of restaurants for my parents. Both of my parents are very adventurous eaters and will love most of what Paris has to offer, but at the same time my father isn’t comfortable in fine dining establishments, so the emphasis is going to be on bistro fare, methinks.

Otherwise, the rest of the day was spent taking care of some administrative stuff at work, and then I headed home, cooked up dinner (re-heated pintade from the day before) and played some video games on my computer. Part of my goal for this week is to enforce a real division between “work and work” and “play at home.” We’ll see how that works out.

Thank you Jeebus for spit-roasting and poultry fat

So, one of the other things I had picked up during my trip to market last Friday was a whole pintade—that is, a guinea fowl. Although rarely eaten in North America, these things show up quite a bit here in France and for good reason. They have slightly pinkish flesh that is a nice balance between the mildness of chicken and the pungency of wild game fowl. They can bit a bit of trouble to cook, since the flesh is naturally pinkish, even when cooked. Nonetheless, you can still test doneness by inserting a small knife into the thigh, right to the bone, and check the juices that come out. If the juice is clear, the meat is ready; if it’s pinkish or red, cook it longer.

Aaaanyway, I digress. I bought a pintade on Friday and I decided to roast it. You see, the gas oven in my apartment has a top-broiler AND a rotisserie attachment. What more could you want, right? I also had a fair bit of winter vegetables sitting around (carrots, onions, turnips, potatoes), so I decided to mimic the poultry shops in Paris and roast the pintade with a pan of thick-cut vegetables underneath to catch the drippings.

There was one small complication: presumably to avoid turning broiling into baking, the rotisserie attachment is actually a bit bigger than the actual oven, and it comes with an extra bit of metal that you attach to the oven door to keep it open 1 inch or so. I suppose this makes sense (although not very energy-conscious), but this also meant that the temperature at the bottom of the oven didn’t get high enough to really roast the vegetables underneath. So, once the pintade was clearly ready, I transferred it to a serving dish and let it sit, while I closed the oven and turned on the regular burners. This seemed to do the trick, and I even re-set the broiler at the end to brown the tops of the veggies a little bit before serving.

As a last step, I took the roasting pan out, placed it on the stove over high heat and deglazed the pan with leftover oyster liquor from Friday. Delicious! Now, if only I had a ton of crème fraîche to finish the job…

Oh, and also: I took a bunch of turnips and glazed them in a butter-syrup. Very tasty. Drank the whole thing with a lot of wine.

Shopping! [girlish squeal]

Today I decided to go shopping, even though I didn’t really have much money to buy stuff with. I just wanted to see the insanity that is Xmas shopping in Paris. To maximize the craziness, I decided to go to places where the shopping would be at its maddest and also most glamorous. I his rue Saint-Honoré (one of the poshest shopping streets in Paris), and then headed up through Place Vendôme (where all of the jewelers have their flagship stores), and then up into Galeries Lafayette and Printemps. The day was interesting and at times vexing, but here are the highlights.

• At the very concept-y store, Colette, you can’t actually carry your purchase to the counter. If you want to buy a shirt but you also want to keep on shopping, you have to leave the shirt with the Person In Charge Of Shirts, and then when you’re ready to make your purchases you have to tell the person at the counter that you had a shirt put aside for you. Now, I’ve done enough time in retail (*shudder* Urban Outfitters for 5 years) to know that most purchase decisions are impulsive and fragile, and every obstacle you put in the way of a purchase encourages the shopper to actually think about their purchase. So, by the time I had finished wandering around the store, I had come to the conclusion that I didn’t need a 55€ t-shirt, and left it there. If he had let me take the t-shirt with me and hold it as I continued shopping, I don’t doubt that I would bought it (and probably had buyer’s remorse afterwards).
• As I passed place Vendôme and past the main Cartier store (flush with guards at the door and unbelievable jewels in the windows), I come across the unbelievable: Tati Or. You see, TATI is a clothing / housewares / whatever chain that is probably the closest thing France has to WalMart. It mostly specializes in dirt-cheap knockoffs and tends to flourish in poor immigrant / minority neighborhoods. So TATI has somehow managed to afford a small shop on this most expensive of streets to open their own hard-discount jewelry store. I looked through the windows and was pretty impressed with their business model: not so much fake jewelry as simple, plain designs with almost-pure precious metals and semi-precious stones. For example, I saw a flat-link 975/1000 silver chain for 49€. Next to Cartier, this seemed like quite the bargain. Anyway, I just loved the idea of TATI opening a jewelry store in the posh-est area of town.
• Célio [Warning: loud webpage] suddenly has stuff I like. In the past, I’ve always seen Célio as a more European version of the Gap—which is to say, a rather monotonous wardrobe for self-effacing privilege / aspiring underprivilege. I don’t think that’s changed much, but at least this season Célio has discovered color. In particular, they’re all about the purple, violet, cerise and pink. These are all colors I can get behind. And the prices are pretty damn good. Woven shirts for 23€ - 30€ is pretty hard to beat on the upper-end of the chain-store scale. I didn’t buy anything today, partially because I got sick of waiting for the group of 4 saleswomen clustered around the cash register to stop talking and help me find sizes. Maybe I’ll try again during the week.
• This may not come as a surprise to those of you who know me, but it hit me while I was wandering through Printemps: Polo Ralph Lauren is my anti-style. Whatever that label does I am pretty much sure to detest. Go figure.
• I bought scarves! At Galeries Lafayette, I picked up a bubblegum-pink cashmere scarf and another wool-acrylic scarf that is dark brown with a series of thin, green-red-orange stripes along one side. It wasn’t the most luxurious shopping spree, but it still gave me a bit of retail therapy. Mmm, the warm glow of consumerism.
• The famous vitrines are in place and it’s chaos. Both Printemps and Galeries Lafayette have elaborate, shiny, moving displays in all of their shop windows. As is the tradition here in Paris, the displays are mostly directed toward children, and so the scene outside these stores are almost crazier than inside, with parents pressing their children against the windows.

Oysterrific!

Well, as I’ve been unraveling myself from my chapter-writing, I’ll admit that I’ve been slacking off on my blogging. I earned it, dammit!

Anyway, my day was mostly pretty uneventful and kinda lame, except for my trip to the market this morning. I was walking through my neighborhood market, buying my usual veggies and fruits and so on, when I came across the oyster stand. It’s been oyster season for the past few weeks, and I’ve been doing my best to avoid the oyster stand, since I was sure that I couldn’t afford the delicacy.

Today, I actually took a good look at the prices and had a shock: you can get a dozen smallish oysters for 2€!! Even more excitingly, I bought a baker’s dozen of Fines de Claires No. 2 for 8€!!!!1!one! These are the third-largest class of oysters you can get (after No. 1 and No. 0), of the highest-price variety of oysters in the world (Bélon oysters). In a restaurant here in Paris, 12 of these oysters would easily cost 4 times as much.

So I bought a dozen (and got an extra oyster for free) and headed home, ready to fill myself with oyster-y goodness. It took a while to re-learn how to shuck an oyster, but I eventually got the hang of it and pulled all of them apart. I was a smart boy and did all of the shucking over a bowl, so any of the liquid that I lost in the process was saved for making an oyster-juice-based Bloody Caesar and the like. In fact, the oyster liquor was really useful as a sort of salty broth for deglazing pans; I used most of it that night when I was sautéing a pile of winter vegetables. Mmm.