The Girl Who Ate Everything

"Miss, come here...hey, don't leave!"

The man hawking bracelets near the Sacré Coeur grabbed my arm as though that action would suddenly make me realize that I needed colorful accessories to feel like a complete human being. Instead it made me think, "What the fuck?" I suddenly felt very relieved that Alex had come with me to the Sacré Coeur because it's about a bagillion times more worthwhile than going alone and he was better than I was at shooing away random people unsuccessfully trying to sell me stuff. Going by myself was my original plan before Anna suggested that we, two of her friends who did not know each other and happened to be studying in the same European city (and were both freakin' awesome...well, Alex at least), should do stuff. Thanks to Anna I can bring you another photograph and food filled entry even though I should probably be going to sleep soon.

I think I found it

Question: Which of the following sound is most appealing?

1. Pouring a stream of coffee into a cup
2. Popping open a can of soda
3. Breaking into the crust of a fresh baguette de tradition

Answer:

Seconds prior to killing it

I used to think that eating a whole baguette in one day was a bad idea. Luckily, my stomach appears to have gotten used to ingesting entire baguettes and has subsequently grown in size or increased its gluten digesting power so that I can look at a baguette that is a third of my height and think, "Pssh, easy."

I have all my original toes.

I wish every day could be carefree and involve thinking of ways to prevent my shoes from falling into the Seine. (Obviously, you take them off. This ain't rocket science.) If you sit by the Seine at night you too can gawk at the Bateaux Mouches as their crowds of onlookers gawk back at you. And it's easy for them to spot you because the Bateaux Mouches are (usually) outfitted with rows of lights on both sides that channel the luminescent power of a nuclear explosion. I haven't been on one of those boats yet, but I think I'd prefer to sit with one or two friends near the edge of the river than ride on it with hoards of other people while listening to a tour guide point out one of a gazillion Parisian landmarks every 2 seconds. Hell, I can do that.

Park

"Look, really cool park."

Water

"Look, another boat."

Don't worry; I won't become a tour guide.

Okay, some food

Unfortunately, most places in Paris are closed on Sundays. Otherwise the windows of the boulangerie/patisserie Adelyn and I passed on Sunday would have been full of baked goods high on the "likely to make you salivate" scale and we would've marred the glass by pressing our faces up to them. Even though bakeries in Paris are so commonplace that the words BOULANGERIE or PATISSERIE—usually in a huge-ass typeface—are usually more noticeable than name of the bakery, each one has it's own style. Since I'm obviously not going to fulfil my goal of learning French to any competent degree, I may as well make a new goal of documenting as many bakeries as possible. For no real reason.

Yup. I'm a useful member of the human race.

The rest of my entry will be interesting to very few people. Although I love writing about food, it's possible to not feel like talking about what I eat all the time. And even though I'm abusing the purpose of this blog by not focusing on food, it is my blog, my bandwidth and HEY I CAN WRITE ABOUT PENGUIN ARMIES IF I WANT!!!

It will be...random. Not so food related. Somewhat personal, but not so much that I'll feel embarrased. Self-deprecating. Commentable-less. It might be funny if I'm feeling comedic. If you want to read about what I ate yesterday, check out my latest post on Parisist. Otherwise, beware of random non-food-porn-ridden rambles.

"Time to go to bed?" asked my mum.

"Are you kidding me? It's 11:30," I replied in a low, lethargic drone. That's how I sound when I feel unexcited—the auditory equivalent of mud.

"You're not going anywhere tonight?" I give an internal sigh.

"Uh...I don't usually go out at night."

"That's good," my mum says approvingly.

"Well, it's not really because I want to stay home. I just don't have anywhere to go."

I don't remember what she said after that. Calls to my mum are infrequent because 1) I don't miss her to death (although I love her, of course) and 2) I don't have much to talk about. At some point I did mention I got a root canal (oh, by the way, I got a root canal on Wednesday and it took about 15 minutes. Are they always that fast or are French doctors extremel efficient?), to which she informed me that root canals are associated with heart disease and perhaps a whole slew of health problems that are probably already in my future considering the way I eat.

macaron a la pistache

Macarons aren't the source of all health problems, but they're sure as hell not making me any healthier considering how many of them I eat. Whaaaatever. If eating macarons and other tasty things are among the most self-destructive things I've done in my life, then it's safe to say that my life is pretty boring.

After a while, you get used to seeing this stuff everywhere.

Latest Parisist post is up if you are in dire need of food porn.

I finished my root canal this morning. Well...my dentist finished my root canal; I sat in the chair while stretching my jaw to maximum openness. After I got out of the office, I went to the supermarket to buy some clementines and figs (my favorites) and then hopped across the street for a gargantuan baguette from a bakery I had never been to before. Longest. Baguette. Ever. Half of it stuck out of my tote bag until it broke from being too damn long. Unfortunately, I would rate it as just okay for being too airy and for having too thin a crust, but it's not that bad, perhaps better than average. I haven't come up with a good rating system yet.

(Wow, I think I eat too many baguettes. It's no wonder my pants, while still wearable, uncomfortably squeeze my organs into places they probably don't belong. But as my housemate Mare said, "You only get to do this once! You can diet when you go home." Then again, she's gluten intolerant and has thus escaped the problem of carbohydrate overdose.)

By the way, it's really weird to eat when the right half of the roof of your mouth has no feeling. People probably wait until their nerves start working again to eat something. I waste no time. Actually, I always waste time, except when eating a baguette. Baguettes wait for no one.

Pillow cake?

chocolate cake with macarons

If more of you lived in Paris I would love to host a cake buffet completely supplied by Secco (Poujauran's adjoining patisserie) resulting in 100% happy bellies with a side of 200% indigestion (which I guess means unhappy bellies, but they're initially happy until the gurgling sets in). But what the hell is that pillowy looking cake? I'm afraid that magical, fluffy, golden bunnies made of mutiple forms of sugar would hop out if I dared pierced the caramelized surface with a knife. Also, I might impale a bunny.

You know you want it.

Alas, you're not here. But you can still help me even if you're not able to combine your digestive power with mine.

Not that people are wondering whether or not I died in a plane crash, but...I didn't. Or else it'd be pretty hard to write this post. From...the grave...

The keyboard is a little different, but not impossible to use like a French one. There's a key that says "turbo" on it. Nothing happens when I press it. Hmmm. This "turbo" is misleading.

Oh, so how much fun have I been having? WELL! Wait in line for three hours to get into the Vatican Museum and then walk around for two hours among hoards of other tourists (because that's where the three hours of people in front of went) and...yeah. Oh, and while waiting in the line for three hours, imagine scribbling notes that you can barely hear since you're outside and your teacher doesn't have a megaphone as you slowly shuffle in the line and pissing other people off because you're shuffling even more slowly than the line would naturally be shuffling at. You kinda just wanna kill someone, you know? I'm under the impression that the line is only that bad on Sundays. Really bad. Sadly, it's very hard to enjoy something like the Sistine Chapel when it's overstuffed with people taking photos (despite that you're not "supposed" to; good luck enforcing that rule) and all you can think about is LEAVING THE MUSEUM FOREVER AND NEVER GOING BACK EVER NOT EVERRRRR.

Um...yessss...but I'm glad I went because I don't intend to ever reproduce that experience.

So! The highlight of each day (as in the two that I've been here) has been eating gelato. Yes. It's. Awesome. The moment I had of awe and wonder and excited high-pitched squeals upon first seeing boulangeries and patisseries when I first rolled into Paris was reproduced in Rome when we passed a handful of gelaterias while driving down one street. ONE STREET = AT LEAST FOUR GELATERIAS. This is magic, folks.

The two places I went (don't recall the names right now) to were better than most gelato I've eaten, which made me uber happy. I tried pistachio at the first place and although I'm sure there are better ones out there, it was...really good. I let some of my friends try it and they thought the same thing: it tasted like pistachio! It had little pistachio bits! Whoa! Yeah. Today I tried a flavor called "crema _______" (yup, totally don't recall the name) that had something like whipped cream as part of the ice cream (whose flavor I honestly couldn't identify, not that it matter much since it was tasty) and YES, BUILT IN WHIPPED CREAM, what a freakin' great idea.

My plan was to eat gelato twice a day after lunch and dinner, but I didn't get to eat any after dinner tonight. Bummer. I'll try to hit the biggies, but it depends. Like...whether I can find other people who want to pig out on gelato with me. There's actually another girl in my class who IS gelato crazy (it's because of her insistence that our whole class stopped for gelato today after lunch), so maybe we can hit a few places. Some people go bar hopping, so I don't think gelateria hopping is that bad. Right? No? I don't care. I have two full days left.

Oh, what else have I been doing? We walked a lot. And I've eaten three pizzas so far. The first one was meh and pricey, the second one was okay and less pricey, while the third was the best and the cheapest. Odd how that works out. Overall I wouldn't say any of them were really bad, but the first two restaurants were more touristy than the last one. Obviously if you're in Rome on vacation, avoid any place that looks too touristy. When you're with a school group, you don't have much say. If everyone's tired, they're going to go anywhere that's open. I hope I can eat something even better tomorrow and maybe on Tuesday night I can finish off with my best meal.

My overall description of the pizza is that...it's good. I like the average pizza here more than the average pizza in NYC at least. I think. The first pizza I had was just mozzerella and potato, the second was buffalo mozzerella and pachino tomatoes, and the third was with buffalo mozzerella, pachino tomatoes and speck. Each time the crust was very thin, fairly crisp and THANK THE LORD, not at all swimming in a pool of grease. If I thought about them hard enough, I could have nightmares about the cheesy-death pizza slices swimming in orange pools of oil I ate as a kid. You know, the ones that people would lay napkins on top of to soak up the fat, as though that would do anything aside from make the napkin transluscent.

I don't have any photos up since I'm at an Internet cafe right now, but I figured I'd let you know the basics: pizza and gelato are very good things. Gelato is happiness. And tastier than ice cream, in my humble opinion. Le sigh.

Also, I didn't realize how much French I knew until I found myself unable to say anything basic in Italian. Oops.

Note (April 12, 2011): I wrote a weekly post for Parisist from October to December 2006. As the site is currently "on hiatus" and you can no longer view my posts there, I've backed up the posts here. They're timestamped with their original post date and haven't been edited aside from pulling images from Flickr instead of Parisist.

An NYU student and NYC food blogger, currently studying non-foodie things in Paris, Robyn of The Girl Who Ate Everything is doing plenty of food studying on her own in the form of eating things from bakeries almost every day and writing about them at least once a week in her food blog.

Robyn will be sharing her discoveries with Parisist every Monday while she explores all the eats that Paris has to offer. This week: baguettes, Japanese curry, and pizza...

Secco/Poujaran

Baguette, eaten.

As I am new to Paris, I haven't have much time to figure out where to get the best baguette. I do have a list of places to check out, but one stomach (well, if it's normal sized) can only sample a limited number of boulangeries.

My current favorite place to exit from with a baguette (and maybe a macaron and a croissant) in tow is Poujauran, (7ème), whose baguette de tradition in all its crispy crusted, chewy innards, sweet wheat scented glory made me believe for moment that as long as I had this baguette, nothing else in life was important. Who needs human companionship when you can have long sticks of carbohydrate-based love?

And then I realized that the baguette was merely an inanimate object that tasted especially good, more so with a slathering of butter, and that trading humans for baguettes is probably not a good idea. Luckily, you can have both in your life, unless you are gluten intolerant (or friend intolerant).

Japanese curry.

Japanese curry has been one of my favorite foods for the past ten years. It may look like brown sludge (or worse; I'll let you use your imagination), but thankfully tastes nothing like that or else god knows who would eat it. Japanese curry is a thick, hearty, comforting, and slightly spicy and sweet stew that accompanies rice and usually consists of onions, carrots, potatoes and pork, beef or chicken.

If you crave a hug pot of it like I did this weekend, check out Japanese grocery store Kioko (2ème) where you can choose a box from the shelves of curry mix.

Note (April 12, 2011): I wrote a weekly post for Parisist from October to December 2006. As the site is currently "on hiatus" and you can no longer view my posts there, I've backed up the posts here. They're timestamped with their original post date and haven't been edited aside from pulling images from Flickr instead of Parisist.

L'Atelier du Chocolat

Even though there is an excessive number of chocolate shops in Paris and god knows I would love to try every one without growing an extra layer of fat in the process, I went weeks without entering a single chocolate coma-inducing haven until one store practically threw a bomb of chocolate delight at my face.

L'Atelier du Chocolat (4ème) knows how to reel 'em in: fill a display case with a sea of chocolate filled baskets and jut it onto the sidewalk so that people like me (gluttons) forget their initial task (unless that initial task is to get chocolate, in which case I applaud you) and instead gravitate towards the huge variety of sweets that look like regular chocolate truffles and bon bons...on steroids.

Feuilleté blanc

My hefty feuilleté blanc consisted of a light, crispy milk chocolate hazelnut praline core encased in smooth white chocolate. Feuilleté praliné tastes microscopically crispy due to the incorporation of finely crushed wafers. Imagine the sensation of Pop Rocks if they were dainty and tickled your mouth intead of making it feel like a bomb testing site. It's mildly addictive.

Ladureé

After numerous people recommended/ordered me to go to Ladureé (6ème), I finally gathered the courage to enter the ostentatious patisserie that treats macarons and other baked goods like fine jewelry.

Although I'm sure they're tasty, I ignored everything that fell outside the "macaron" category, knowing that that Laduree was most famous for their wide variety of the light sandwich cookie..

Note (April 12, 2011): I wrote a weekly post for Parisist from October to December 2006. As the site is currently "on hiatus" and you can no longer view my posts there, I've backed up the posts here. They're timestamped with their original post date and haven't been edited aside from pulling images from Flickr instead of Parisist.

Colas Artisan Bakery

Although you could easily get a sandwich at one of the gazillion bakeries in Paris that would constitute as a sensible lunch, I tend to ignore the idea of a balanced meal and go for what my taste buds crave as opposed to what my organs need to function properly. While gawking at the beautiful goods on display at Colas Artisan Bakery (7ème), two things stuck out in my mind: macarons and baguettes.

Baguette, eaten.

I would feel more guilty about eating an entire few-feet-long baguette (whatever the length, it's more than what a single human should consume in one sitting) if I didn't think that somewhere in the world there was probably an American college student washing down Pop Tarts with Coke as his version of a cheap lunch. I think my version is better.

When I got home, I cut into my fresh, partially eaten baguette (partially eaten because I started to eat it as soon as I walked out of the bakery, of course) and was rewarded by flying shards of golden baguette crust protecting a soft, chewy interior. That's the way it should be. If my airspace isn't filled by sharp, crusty bits, the crust doesn't have enough Awesome Crust Essence. The downside to having a high level of ACE is that I cannot help but eat the entire baguette in all its "marriage of crunchy and soft bread matter" with an excessive slathering of butter or filled with goat cheese and lettuce.

Note (April 12, 2011): I wrote a weekly post for Parisist from October to December 2006. As the site is currently "on hiatus" and you can no longer view my posts there, I've backed up the posts here. They're timestamped with their original post date and haven't been edited aside from pulling images from Flickr instead of Parisist.

Sapporo

Even though I'm not Japanese, I've eaten enough Japanese food while growing up to consider many Japanese dishes as comfort food. I'm not talking about dainty, beautifully constructed sushi; I'm thinking about simple, sodium-laden, gut busting combinations of meat and rice. Sapporo (1ème) fulfilled my desire for tasty indigestion brought on by one of my most favorite brown colored foods: curry.

Katsu curry

One person's macaroni and cheese is my katsu curry. Katsu refers to a lightly panko breaded deep-fried meat cutlet, which in my case was (and usually is) pork. A mountain of rice accompanied by a pool of thick, mildly spicy and sweet curry sauce dotted with tender chunks of pork, potato, and carrot (well, maybe one chunk of carrot) topped with strips of fried pork accompanied by chopped pickled vegetables on the side definitely isn't something you should eat all the time, but I ignorantly justify my actions by thinking, "Hey, Japanese people live long. ...Probably from eating something else." Although I would've liked Sapporo's version more if the pork's breading were crispier and if the curry sauce had more than one chunk of carrot (not that you're eating curry for the nutritional value), it was satisfying and definitely gut busting. [pats belly]

Oyakodon

My friend Annie's large bowl of oyakodon, rice topped with chicken and egg, was more impressive. The slighly sweet chicken was surprisingly juicy and tender. Who knew mommy and baby could taste so good?

Note (April 12, 2011): I wrote a weekly post for Parisist from October to December 2006. As the site is currently "on hiatus" and you can no longer view my posts there, I've backed up the posts here. They're timestamped with their original post date and haven't been edited aside from pulling images from Flickr instead of Parisist.

Ladurée

Entrance

Some people say that they prefer salty food to sweet food. I say that these people are crazy. What they need is a swift kick in the taste buds and to get their bums over to Ladurée. The Champs Elysées location is probably the most intimidating looking of their shops, but don't let the imposing, minty fresh facade keep you from going in. You're not going to spend more money here than you would at any regular restaurant and if it didn't feel so nutritionally wrong I wouldn't have anything against making a three course meal out of Ladurée's creations.

Table of good stuff.

Before you gasp at my gluttony, you should know that these four desserts were shared between four mouths. One person could probably pack away two of the pastries since they're well below the size of satellite dishes, but it's more fun and slightly less sinful to make your own dessert buffet with a group of friends.

Let's take a closer look at the yums, shall we? Just don't lick your screen.

Millefeuille confiture Fruit Rouges

Millefeuille confiture Fruit Rouges: Caramelized puff pastry, light vanilla muslin cream, red fruit jam, whipped cream

Although I don't like millefeille that much in general, I doubt many places make it as well as Laduree. It's beautifully constructed and thankfully tastes as good as it looks. To best eat the double decker sandwich made of fragile, crispy pastry layers. vanilla cream and jam with the least amount of structural damage you should pretend you're trying to cleanly murder someone with a deadly heart pokage and give it a good, solid stab. Make a battle cry if it helps: "WAHRHARH" [stab]. That's probably not what the patissier had in mind when he made it, but it worked for me.