Verri-nice (horrible pun, ignore it)

   Backtracking to Paris for a moment, Galeries Lafayette is another of my all-time favourite stores. The fashion floors are jaw-dropping. Name your favourite designer and they're there. The food floor is died-and-gone-to-heaven time with seemingly hand-picked cherries, meat cut with surgical skill, a vast briny choice of oysters and every condiment you can think of, including the blackcurrent mustard that I bought. 

    Across Boulevard Haussman is Lafayette Maison, four floors of gorgeousness for your home. 

    I'd promised myself an extravagant scented candle and, after much sniffing and dithering, walked away with one called "fleurs blanches" made by Gilles Dewavrin--whom I will immediately Google to see if a real M'sieu de Wavrin exists. He does and, wasting a pleasant five minutes at his site, www.gillesdewavrin.net/en/home I can only say I wish Mac would come up with a scratch-and-sniff laptop. Turns out my chosen candle is a blend of lilies, roses, carnations and jasmine, and will burn for 40 hours.

    One floor down from the scented candles is the basement, filled with desirable kitchen stuff. Pots, pans, china, glasses--and little glasses. The restaurant tradition of starting dinner with an amuse has gone mainstream. I began my slide down the slippery slope with  a cookbook on verrines. Then, obviously, I had to buy a half dozen little glasses. A couple of evenings ago, I launched them on their glassy gourmet career. 

    Like most of the verrines, this is just simple assembly and, if you've done your prep ahead of time, it only takes a couple of minutes to put together. The recipe doesn't say you should assmble it at the last moment but I reckon that it might end up looking like a dog's breakfast if you put it together ahead of time. 

So, from the bottom up, we have: 

1) layer of black tapenade

2) first layer of fresh mozzarella

3) layer of combined chopped fresh and sundried tomatoes

4) second layer of mozarella

5) layer of pesto

6) second layer of tomato mixture

...and a basil leaf on top, plus a couple of grissini.  

P.S. I have a feeling that these little glasses will get used muchly for desserts. By the time you've made it through entrée, plat and cheese course, you really only want a few spoonfuls of sweetness. There's a certain lemon-and-white-chocolate mousse scribbled with dark chocolate that's calling my name...

Shops I love.

   I know, I know. This time around, I've only seen the tip of the Eiffel Tower, and the Arc de Triomphe not at all, or Place de la Concorde or...name just about any other famous Paris monument. So why did we make a pilgrimage to one of my favourite stores? 

   Last year, around this time of year actually, we were in Paris. I was researching a story on a shop called "Merci." If I'm doing a story on it, I don't blog about it because, to my way of thinking, that's not really ethical, putting it all out there when someone is paying you for exclusivity. 

   Anyhoo, Merci is the brainchild of a couple who made a fortune in children's clothing. Long story short, they took over an old wallpaper factory, did it up with great panache and élan and give the profits to kids' charities. Nice. 

   A transportation strike notwithstanding (although we saw no evidence of it at all) we Metro-ed over to somewhere near Boulevard Beaumarchais, and wandered into the courtyard that's Merci's entrance. A small scarlet car (Fiat? Can't remember) overflowed with flowers last time we were there. This time around, it was furniture from Egypt made, as far as I could see, from split bamboo. 

   Other things that caught my eye: a vintage Chanel dress (there's a rack of incredibly luscious, very rigorously curated, fashion), an endearing little cupboard faux-painted and distressed to within an inch of its life, a patchwork-covered armchair, and sundry other sundries. The whole place is full of designer moments. Best of all is a Great Wall of Second-hand Books where I found a novel I'd been looking for, for two euros. Come to think of it, all we seem to have bought this week is books. 

London, here we come.

    I always forget how just how vast and sprawling London is. It took two hours to get there by coach, with at least one of those spent crawling through the suburbs past what seemed like endless kebab shops. Mind you, since the authorities started charging drivers a steep rate to take cars into the city centre, traffic has improved immeasurably. Instead of taking the Underground, we filled up our Oyster cards and whizzed around on the red double-deckers. (And for those who don't know what Oyster cards are...think of a credit card that you "top up" and swipe when you get on a bus. Brilliant.)

   Galleries, museums, Trafalgar Square the favourite meeting point on the side of Nelson's column facing the National Gallery, Charing Cross Road bookshops, Camden Lock on a Saturday morning, West End theatre--Felicity Kendal in GBS's Mrs. Warren's Profession, pints at pubs, pub lunches, terrific Malaysian and Chinese meals in Soho. We walked our feet off, my personal best being from the Imperial War Museum  back across the Thames (which I where took these pix of the Houses of Parliament--the classic shot used on HP Sauce bottles--and the London Eye), up Whitehall and finally into Trafalgar Square. As you can see, it was a grey day and, thankfully, not too hot. And did I mention shopping? Shame we were restricted to 10 kg of carry-on luggage each.

    Enjoy the snapshots. 

   

    

Other Sides to Food in France

A day in Toulouse with my Australian friend Lee-anne who, with her husband John, runs L'Impasse du Temple, a gorgeous, Michelin-rated chambres d'hôtes in Léran, as well as a gîte you can rent for a week or weekend that's a French country cottage personified. Oh go on, go have a roam around www.chezfurness.com

   Lee-anne is very busy over the summer so I grabbed at the chance to spend a whole day shopping with her. First stop, an Asian supermarket on the outskirts of Toulouse. It was like being back in Vancouver's Chinatown and I left laden with items I can't find locally (or at least at reasonable prices). Hoisin sauce, pickled ginger, sambal oelek, rice noodles (should have bought more of those) and a ton more. It was pushing 30 degress so I bypassed the--tah-dah--boxes of frozen frogs' legs doing the can-can. 

   Next stop, not far away, was a very big box store called Metro. You can only shop there if you run a business and you have to swipe your card as you enter. Owners of cafés, bistros, little shops and so on all come here buy giant quantities of everything needed to run a café etc. from fresh fish artfully displayed on ice and wild mushrooms to truffled sauce and powder for making candyfloss. Tables, chairs, umbrellas, boxes of little packets of sugar and little boxes of soap, tableware, table cloths: no wonder the carts are as big as gurneys. 

   Only in France I think would you find chunks of baguette, paté and salads to help yourself to as you left. 

Paris--Day 1: Window Shopping

What didn't we see as walked around today? In no particular order, we gazed at Gothic gargoyles, holographic portraits,a beautiful pot--I'm not sure of the era-- and a saucy window display in the Taschen book shop to promote their new Big Book of Legs. A shop that sold manuscripts and autographs had "signed" the back of the model in the window. 

Along beside the Seine, you could stare at a custom-made wedding dress called "Las Vegas" on account of its glitzy trim: yours for only 7500 euros. In the Marais, I lucked into a terrific vintage clothing store and am wearing the five-euro skirt I snapped up as we speak. Long, Indian print, what else.