The Girl Who Ate Everything

[Prenote thinger: I'm tired. Very. Much so. Head flump-age has occured a few times today. I don't mean to make you read crap, but I'm banging this out in the wee dark hours of the morning because I'm going to St. Emilion this weekend and won't be able to blog from there. Let's see how well I can shove 4.5 days of Rome into one entry. AREN'T YOU EXCITED?!?! I'm leaving out addresses for now, but will try to update them later.]

Colosseum

Rome has lots of ruins.

gelatooo

Rome has lots of gelato.

Which one do you think I prefer?

"You wanna come out to eat with me and a friend?" I asked Valerie last Wednesday night.

"Yeah, sure!" Our homestay family was still on vacation meaning that we had to fend for ourselves for dinner. Which wouldn't have been fun with our semi-empty kitchen unless I wanted to make a meal out of yogurt and sardines.

"Cool. Uh...by the way, I've never actually met her before."

"Oh, great."

I hadn't intended to bring Valerie to my dinner with Sophie, a friend I made through the magic of food blogging earlier this year. She goes to school in London and had only a few days to hit the best fooding spots in Paris. This may have been the only time that I met up with an Internet friend for the first time accompanied by someone else. The idea of meeting up Internet friends tends to raise eyebrows and I don't usually have much to back myself up with besides, "I've done this a gazillion times before," which raises even more eyebrows.

Valeria and I walked to Trocadero where Sophie and I agreed to meet. Not that it's one particular spot, but rather a large open plaza full of people who want a full-on view of the Eiffel Tower. Crowd + darkness + no idea what other person looks like = great meet-up situation.

"Uhm. Maybe we can just shout her name," I suggested.

"Er, okay. SOPHIE!" called Valerie in a half-joking tone. A few seconds later...

"Are you Robyn?" Whoa, it worked!

Well, my bright red jacket probably helped, but apparently the name calling was also beneficial. The possible awkwardness that may come from meeting an Internet friend for the first time only lasts a few seconds before you start talking about food and how much you love food and then it's like, "OMG I LOVE YOU LET'S GO EAT." (I have to admit though, it may be easier for me to meet up Internet friends because I'm usually the person the other person is coming to meet with. It would feel different if it were the other way around. And sometimes it's equal. Anyhoo, you probably know what I mean without me having to explain it.)

Le Malakoff

I wasn't familiar with places to eat around Trocadero , but after looking at the menu we settled on Le Malakoff, a brasserie right outside the Trocadero metro stop.

Sophie greeted me with a partially eaten apricot baguette at the La Tour-Maubourg metro stop after my computer programming class . Not that I didn't already think she was awesome, but a nearly surefire way to get on my good side is to offer me a really good baguette. A thick crispy crust, soft chewy innards, and the addition of sweet apricot bits equates to mega yumness.

But you can't just eat a baguette for lunch. ONLY CRAZY PEOPLE DO THAT. (Like me. Sometimes.) Combine the fooding powers of Sophie and Robyn and you end up with an afternoon of snacking on a wide variety of baked goods.

First stop: Poujauran.

pissaladiere

[IMPORTANT NOTE THAT I JUST REALIZED WAS IMPORTANT: The follow story is about my third visit to the dentist for my root canal. Just the finishing touches. Nothing invasive! Hence the lack of painkillers. ;)]

"Do you feel anything?" asked Dr. Chargari as he tapped my tooth with something metal and pointy, basically the kind of thing you would rather not have near your tooth.

"I can fell the tapping, but it doesn't hurt."

"Oh good, then you probably don't need a shot. Would you want one?" Would I want a shot? How about I stab your gums with a needle, eh? Would that feel awesome?

"...If you don't think I need it, then no."

He continued to do drilly things to my tooth that caused toothy bits to fly out of my mouth. No pain whatsoever, aside from the sad psychological consequences of being disconnected from my toothy bits. Sweet. After smushing some stuff on my back right molar, he declared my root canal to be finished. MY TOOTH IS FREE! OH BABY.

So if you have tooth problems in Paris (and you never know considering what you'll be eating here), I highly recommend that you visit Alex Chargari. He's quick, friendly, speaks English, and the office is clean and all high-tech like.

And that was your non-food message of the day. BACK TO THE FOOD.

we rock, vegetarian-friendly style

LENNY KRAVITZ-APPROVED!

Last Friday night Sophie, Alex and I went to L'as du Fallafel, the famous falafel joint in the Marais that is loved by many (including Lenny Kravitz, as the restaurant likes to remind us. There's also a "LENNY KRAVITZ RECOMENDED" sticker on the window. A sticker! He has a sticker! When can I get a sticker?).

Prettiness!

Another kind of prettiness!

Last weekend on a school-organized trip I went to Saint Emilion, a weeny lil' town near Bordeaux with lots of history, lots of wine, lots of caneles, and not lots of inhabitants. The sight of neverending vineyards and copious amounts of nature in general is a shocking change from Paris's army of white and gray buildings. Both environments are beautiful, but one is more likely to provide you with clean air and sunshine than the other. If that's your thing.

Saint Emilion is known for its wine, but I was mainly there for the food. In case you didn't already know, I'm not a fan of alcohol, nor do I see myself developing a taste for it in the near future (or the far future for that matter). However, I will admit that there is at least one nice thing about wine: where there's good wine, there's good food! Since I've already taken a class about wine (or alcohol in general), I wasn't really on the trip to lean more about yeast-alicious grape extract. I was there for face-stuffage.

[Once again, I have to do this "splitting the entry into more than one part" thing since it was just getting way too long and as much as I would like to keep writing, I'm sure you want to actually stay awake through the whole entry. As would I. But it ain't happening. I'll leave comments open, but I'd be more inclined to respond to comments on the second part...whenever I get around to writing it.]

meats of various cook-ness at Le Trumilou

Le Trumilou

While walking along quai de l'Hôtel de Ville last Monday night at 7 PM, I noticed that it was a bit...dead. People just don't eat that early in Paris. Well, well, my American stomach isn't used to eating dinner at 9 PM yet.

mm, dusty

Due to the lack of humans and Le Trumilou, Amy and I killed some time at Bistrot Marguerite with some ...ahem, potent potables. Actually, I had a hot chocolate and she had a beer; I just really wanted to say "potent potables".

After ingesting out tasty liquids and shooting the shizz about life and stuffs (if English isn't your first language, I apologize for frequently going into non-grammatically-correct lapses) like all good bloggers do when meeting for the first time, we returned to Le Trumilou for excessive fooding.

If you were in Trocadero around 9 PM on Monday night and your peaceful viewing of the obscenely twinkly Eiffel Tower was punctuated by heavy klunk klunk klunks, you just happened to be hearing Mare and me transport her life's possessions from our home stay (or her former home stay) across the river to her new digs as a house sitter.

"Thanks so much for helping me; I owe you one."

"No prob! I'm helping you because I LUURVE YEWWW."

...Wait, I don't sound that insane. [scratches head]

Okay, maybe I do.

I was sad to see Mare go, even if she's only a 20 minute walk away (well, 20 minutes if you happen to be dragging around luggage). She's a particularly special human being; anyone who met her would agree. Unless they are stupid. You can't help but be captivated by her random slips into comedic characters and her trademark purring sound that is eerily close to the vocalizations of Furby/Gizmo/Pikachu. The woman that was sitting in front of us on the bus last Sunday en route to Jardin des Plantes had to turn her head upon hearing the odd undulating gll-ll-ll-ll sound coming from behind her. Because she was CAPTIVATED!

...Or weirded out. But what can you do? [shrugs]

I'M IN UR TREE, MATCHIN UR LEAVZ

Mare is also special because she will playfully hide under a low, leafy tree that she is unintentionally color coordinated to and let me take a photo of her. (Yes, she does look like Feist, or Liz Phair, or both.)

Being silly is important to me, but I can't act as extremely silly as much as I'd like to. I mean, I could...but many things have to fall into place to make for a perfect silly situation. Mare is one of the few people (and I mean very very few, like 0.276) that I feel comfortable enough around to allow myself to embody the brain of a 4-year-old brain and babble in random sounds and act uninhibited because I know that she can join in on da funs and that she's comfortable being around my weirdness. I don't know how to explain why these things are so so so important to me. Maybe it's evidence of my naivety and reluctance to grow up and enter the real world and become an adult and be an average cog in everyday society consisting of the going-ons of normal human beings and blah blah blah, blah BLAH blah, blah blah, etc.

Perhaps I'd be better off dying before I have to reach that point where I have to actually care about things and be independent. My last moments can be spent hugging my new stuffed sheepie pal from Lee Anne and listening to Oh Mandy until my head explodes with mumbly lilting singing and wondering whether I should go to sleep or continue typing this entry. Typing is so tempting. Sleep is equally tempting.

Methinks I'll go to bed. If you're still here when I come back, I shall talk about food.

[zzz]

fueled by the power of cous cous

Chez Omar

Last Saturday I met up with Malaysian/Singaporean food blogger Umami, her husband (they're moving to Paris and needed to scope out apartments) and her sister at Chez Omar [recommended to me by fellow blog reader Shane] for a night of way too many meats accompanied by way too much cous cous. Of course, it was memorably chaotic and stomach-stretchingly awesome.

mm, tastes like diabetes

Sometimes I recycle material from this blog to write for Parisist, but sometimes I...don't. My latest Parisist post is up with NON-RECYCLED MATERIAL, O-M-G. Which isn't necessarily good or bad. I have to admit that since the Parisist post goes up Monday morning, I usually write it late on a Sunday night when the activity level of my brain resembles a stagnant lake with a layer of algae scum peacefully floating on top...because everything else in the lake has died...

It's nice that Parisist is giving me practice with writing on a schedule though. Now I'm sure that I am doomed in whatever future job I may hold, if it involves writing on a regular schedule.

On that note of having trouble writing blog entries, I injected my neglected vox blog with actual content, thus continuing the pattern of trading sleeping time for blog writing time. It won't be food based (I think I have that blog down), but I'll use it for mp3s, photos and some babbling, if that interests you.

Unless I die tomorrow, my next entry should be awesome. You will see. :)

Happy Thanksgiving to all my fellow Americans! Or even non-Americans! JOIN DA FUN!

It only hit me today that this would be the first Thanksgiving I've ever spent without my family. We haven't always done the turkey-and-mashed-potatoes bit, but we'd always be together out of...habit. (And we kinda like each other, I suppose.) When we lived in Taiwan my school gave us a four-day weekend, which we would spend in Japan amidst the early Christmas decorations. Last year was possibly the first year I had spent Thanksgiving in the US, yet not with home cooked food. Instead my mum, brother and I joined my mum's uncle's family for a buffet dinner at their local country club.

buffet of thanks

There were craploads of food, but it was unfortunately not that great. Just gimme a home-baked pumpkin pie, dammit.

Pierre Herme

"This really feels like we're in a hospital!"

Janice and I are standing in the front area of the Pierre Hermé kitchen on rue Vaugirard. Head chef Colette Pétremant gives us thin plastic jackets, shoe covers and hair nets to put on before we can step further into the kitchen, lest we contaminate it with our mortal germs from the outside world of Parisian grime. And it's totally cool with me, as I am considerably sickly and mucus-filled and do not want to hurt the immaculate creations of Pierre Hermé.

(Yes, I did think that it may not have been the best idea to visit the kitchen while sick, but we didn't touch anything or stick our heads into any kiddie pool-sized vats of cream. Also, it took me a few months to secure the visit. But I shall talk about that laterz.)

I feel incredibly foolish to be standing in front of someone who must be bursting with culinary knowledge that I can't speak to because 1) I don't know French, nor does she know English and 2) I'm not a culinary student and thus know almost nothing about whatever is going on in the kitchen. Janice translates Colette's words for me and my softly spoken questions for Colette. My lack of journalistic ability shines through as I come unprepared and bearing no questions. Crap.

Instead, I try to soak in my surroundings. In the first room a few chefs rolls out lumps of dough into even logs and line them up on a sheet. A machine in the next room declares itself as a macaron machine. BEHOLD, IT IS A MACARON HATCHERY. I don't remember the exact words, but it definitely had the word "macaron" on it. Otherwise, I could've mistaken it as any other nondescript, blocky piece of kitchen equipment, since that's what it looked like. I suppose it's not practical to gold-plate a macaron-making machine, even if it's appropriate.

"It's like when people used to make wine by stomping on grapes!"

This is how not to make bread crumbs

Alex was referring to our hands-on approach to making bread crumbs, which entailed tearing apart semi-toasted baguette slices into what we hoped would become crumb-like bits. Instead, we ended up with what could've been labeled as either steroids-enhanced bread crumbs or really bad croutons. It looked like we were preparing bread to throw to pigeons.

"I was wondering why you wanted to make them instead of just buy pre-made bread crumbs," I commented as we half-heartedly ripped our baguette into little chunks.

"...You can buy bread crumbs?"

...Oh shit. Alex had that tone of voice that implies, "Why the hell didn't you tell me that?", along with a crazy wide-eyed look that said the same thing. But it was hilarious. At least, I thought it was hilarious. I went into a few random fits of nearly tear-discharging laughter as we fruitlessly tried to make our bread resemble sandy crumbs and not soft croutons.

"It'll taste good!" insisted Alex.

"Um...yeah, o-kay." I'm pessimistic by nature.

Luckily, Alex was right. After getting nowhere dipping our eggplant rounds in beaten egg and then in our "crumbs" (of course they were too large to stick), we just dunked the egg-dipped eggplant slices into the pan of hot olive oil and hoped for the best. The resulting velvety soft eggplant was more than edible, it was...dare I say, tasty. Thank. God. Out of boredom/desperation I fried up a handful of our mutant bread crumbs dunked in egg to end up with some kind of fried bread omelette.

"What the..." Alex peered at my handful of lumpy egg goo as I slid it into the pan.

"I...um. I just want to try it."

"Okay. That's all yours."

It was weird, but also tasty. Frying truly saves all. (Except for my soul, which cannot be saved by anything.)

And now, on to the second course.

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.

Hévin²

Hévin² (7ème), a secondary "ready to crunch" chocolate line from Jean-Paul Hévin, is definitely the only chocolate shop I've been to with green glowing lights and a display platform that hangs from the ceiling (which you don't really notice until you bump into it and make it wobble, unintentionally making you look like a clumsy oaf in front of the shopkeepers).

Chocolates and macarons.

After looking at the individually wrapped macarons, individually wrapped truffles and other individually wrapped goods (although I know it's a waste, it looks so much cuter and appealing to me when everything comes in its own little baggie), my friend Sophie and I bought a six-pack of macarons to share. Unlike the original Jean-Paul Hévin shop, Hévin² offers non-chocolate flavored macarons.

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'as du Fallafel

There are many falafel-ries in the Marais duking it out for the title of "best fried balls of ground chickpeas", but only one has been recommended by Lenny Kravitz. If you're anything like me and automatically ponder, "What would Lenny Kravitz do?" when hit with a falafel craving (don't lie; I know that's what you're thinking), you have to go to L'as du Fallafel.

Falafel sandwich

Innards

Their special falafel pita sandwich is composed of cute falafels plops (cuteness is an automatic characteristic of small, round things), tangy sauce stuff (stuff like tahini, hummus and whatnot), chopped cabbage, cucumber chunks, and--my favorite part of all--fried eggplant nuggets, all smooshed together in a soft, thick and chewy pita bread pocket. It's a satisfying meal that even a carnivore can love.

But is it the best falafel I've ever had? Did Lenny Kravitz steer me wrong? Truthfully, it's not as good as my favorite falafel back home in NYC. It's one of the better ones I've had and the large, hearty, not-too-guilt-inducing sandwich is a good deal, but I can't praise this place up the wazoo like so many other people have already done since Taim has already given me a relevatory falafel-eating experience that has apparently ruined all subsequent falafel-eating experiences. Damn.

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.

Gerard Mulot

Chocs

Assuming that you like food and are not gluten or lactose intolerant, Gerard Mulot has a little something for everyone. You're initially greeted by the patisserie section (you know, the best section, hence why it is first), then a chocolate display on the left, a savory food counter on the right and breads/viennoiseries in the back. Since it was lunch time many customers packed into the back to buy sandwiches and other sensible lunch items.

Counter

If you've been keeping up with my posts, you should expect me to eschew sensibility when it comes to eating "real food" versus "things that should be eaten after real food". Pulled in by the glowing shelves of macarons overseen by the friendly Macaron Master (probably not his official title, but it seems applicable) I couldn't help but pick four macarons (out of at least 18 flavors, which you can find on their online shop) as part of my lunch.

Chocolate tart and lemon tart.

The other major part of my meal would be satiated by a milk chocolate tart and a lemon tart. No, I did not eat both of these in their entirety (my gluttony can only go as far as my stomach will expand); I split them half and half with a friend. Both were composed of light, crunchy, buttery cookie-like crusts with perfect tenderness factors insuring that they wouldn't messily crumble upon fork poke-age nor be so hard that you couldn't break it apart with a reasonable amount of fork poke-age.

The fillings also had a perfect balance of characteristics by pairing just the right amount of sweetness with sour lemon or milk chocolate flavor. I was more enamored by the smooth, creamy lemon tart filling that seemed to give no resistance to the sinking in of my teeth, yet still felt substantial due to its solid texture.