A mixed day--in the best sense of the word: Part 1

   Feet killing me, hair needs a wash and we have a rendezvous with a friend at a bistro at 8 p.m. which means leaving here a half hour before. I know, I KNOW, it's only a couple of stops on the Metro but we do keep leaving by the wrong sortie, and not knowing which way to turn when we do emerge, mole-like, at ground level. One side of a boulevard looks very much like the other when you're on new ground.
   Anyway, today. I wanted to visit a certain shop over near the Halles so set off ten-ish with the understanding that I'd be back around 1:30 p.m., bearing lunch.
   Even dreary weather can't spoil being in Paris but it was rather wonderful to go out on the street and see blue skies.

 Don't know if you're familiar with the modern Halles--the godawful Forum des Halles shopping complex that moved into the area where the original, famous food market once stood. A massive reno is underway, and I can't work out if they're destroying the old one or building a new one. Maybe both.

   Old and new can live together happily. Here's proof just along the street where the late 16th/early 17th century church of St. Eustache is the backdrop to this modern sculpture.
   From there, I headed south to the Metro station that was the start of my journey to Porte d'Ivry in southern Paris. Who knew that that pink Metro line split up at some point and went in two different directions. I had a 50 percent chance of being right, but wasn't, so off I jumped, backtracked, eventually reached the correct station and emerged to find myself staring at modern Paris.

      I'd come here because this quartier is home to a huge Asian supermarket called Tang Frères. Stocked with rice wrappers, hoi sin sauce and other necessities that are hard to find in our part of France, I joined the queue at a little Vietnamese sandwich shop, and left with a warm bag that, as I rode home on the Metro, emitted petite gusts of spice and savouriness.
     And that was only the morning.

Dinner at BAM

    Set down a tiny side street between Rue de Rivoli and the Seine, BAM stands for "bar à manger"-- "a bar that you eat at" would be the literal translation, although this is about as far from "bar" food as you can get. Dinner here a couple of nights back was one of the most intriguing and imaginative meals we've had in Paris at this price level. BAM can definitely hold its head up and boast that it's a "proper" restaurant. http://www.bar-a-manger.fr

    Diners can't. Hold their heads up, I mean. We turned down the offer of the table right under the bar (where those two chaps are sitting), climbed the narrow, steep, spiral stairs to the mezzanine and found ourselves a better table. To call the ceiling "low"....let's just say that anyone approaching six feet has to assume a Quasimodo-like crouch to avoid smashing their head.
   The service was super-friendly but scattered. Our two menus somehow ended up as a shared entrée and plat (but separate desserts!!)  with the rectagonal platters positioned so we could each start at one end and meet in the middle. We didn't leave hungry either.

   

    "Cube de queue de boeuf confite, pissenlit, carottes croquantes, vinaigrette carotte," it says on the menu. You could cut those cubes of confited oxtail with a fork and the Jackson Pollock-esque splashes of carrot vinaigrette had just the right kick. Another entrée I'd like to play around with at home is the soupe glacée de petits pois à la menthe, sorbet pamplemousse rose, mikado à la coppa. Fresh peas, mint, grapefruit and something bacon-y? Sounds okay by me.

   "Magret de canard au piment d’espelette, aubergines rôties à l’ail & basilic, oignons rouges confits au porto"
   We eat so much duck at home that I rarely order it when we're outside the deep south. But this dish sounded startlingly different--in a good way. I couldn't really taste the espelette pepper on the grilled duck but there was enough going on on anyway in hte flavour department. Halved eggplants roasted so long that they'd collapsed on themselves, glorious red onions sweet from their bath of port and the surprise of a basil leaf of garnish. Might try this one at home too.

    Dessert porn. Think of the traditional banoffee pie. Now destructure it and arrange all the elements separately.

  Roasted figs, cream, etc. etc. A half-litre of a sturdy Rioja. Coffees. Out, smiling, into the night.

Thinking of roof-tops in Paris...

...I suddenly remembered the ending of that heart-rending mid-1950s film, The Red Balloon. Briefly, a little boy living in Paris has a red balloon that accompanies him everywhere until the day when a bunch of evil boys shoot it down. As le petit garcon mourns his lost friend, here's what happens (have the box of mouchoirs handy).

Street food in Montmartre

     Held each October, the Fête des Vendanges in Montmartre celebrates the very small amount of wine actually produced right here in Paris. The harvest, of course, is just another excuse for a helluva street party. Much of it happens around the base of Sacré Coeur, the white onion-domed church that's one of the city's best-known landmarks. The view from the top is staggering, and so are you after ascending hundreds of stone steps. Rather than climbing on foot (or probably on knees by the time we'd made it there) to the base of Sacré Coeur, we queued with dozens of other party-goers and took the funiculaire, a cable car that, for the price of a metro ticket, whisks you from base camp to summit in about a minute.
    Wine, wine, wine, champagne, champagne, champagne. Sample it, buy it by the glass or by the bottle and ask for it to be opened and supplied with a few plastic glasses. Then go find a convenient spot to enjoy.

Then stack your empties alongside all the others.

      It's not all drinking of course. There's also food, food, food. This year's theme is France's various tropical islands. Spicy smells met us as we climbed towards the main exhibition area.

This stall sold sandwiches filled with foie gras--and your choice of fig chutney of confit of onions--or goose rillettes.

     Bad mistiming. It was too late for lunch, and too early for dinner, so we ruined our appetites about 6 p.m. with a barquette of potatoes and cepes, then funiculaire-d back to ground level, metro-d back to the Marais and, a couple of hours later, still found ourselves too stuffed for anything more than a bowl of Vietnamese noodles.

I love Paris every moment...

   You can keep London or New York. Nowhere beats Paris, and I go into a total fizz of delight the moment we climb off the train. We arrived here yesterday after a sleepy race through the French countryside: sleepy because, as usual, we'd left tons of stuff to do till the last minute and consequently had little sleep; a race because we took the TGV, which rampages across the country at hundreds of kilometres an hour.
   Two weeks equals two different apartments, both in Le Marais. The first is on the sixth floor of an ancient building. The smallest elevator in the world takes us as far as the fifth floor so we only have to climb one flight of wide, polished stairs. If I can find the tape measure that I may, or may not, have packed, I'll measure the elevator next time we use it. Small? Let's just say that if you stand facing the door, your shoulders touch the walls on both sides. Two people and two suitcases were out of the question, so we rode up in shifts.
    Large by Paris standards (about 40 square metres) this little apartment has sloping ceilings and four oval windows, which make you feel as though you're coming in to land....  

 Here's the apartment I'd buy if we won the Euro lottery. 

No prizes for guessing that it's the one with all the geraniums. That pipe-covered building in the distance is the Pompidou Centre.

    When we were here in June, we stayed just down the street so we came to know the quartier fairly well. One block over is a little street crammed with Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai restaurants, which is where we ate last night. Nems, squid, chicken with cashew nuts, and a couple of grande Tsing Taos to wash it all down...we can eat French food anytime but we do occasionally crave Asian flavours. 

     

Excuses, excuses...and a look at salades composées.

   Over a month of blog-silence needs explaining so here goes. First, I twisted my ankle. Okay, I don't write with my foot but it slowed me down so that everything took longer and blogging took longer. Then, a head cold. Same reason. Then family and friends staying with us, which was all huge fun but, in the midst of all the days out, lengthy and wonderful dinners, and many, many bottles of wine, something had to give--and that was blogging time.
   Now, we're in Paris for a couple of weeks and, before I get into the heart-stopping delights of being here, I'm determined to finish off a number of partially written posts and write on a few topics that have been kicking around at the back of my  brain.
    Have I ever written about French salads? At length? A simple salade verte is just that, often just lettuce (by the way, lettuce here is called "salade"). Once you get into salade composée country, anything goes. A "composed salade"-- literal translation--sounds like a prim and proper dish, something out of the French equivalent of Jane Austen. Au contraire, these are often lusty Rabelaisian assemblages that fling together vegetables, meats, and even fruits.
   We often order them if we go out for lunch. The usual basket of bread, a jug of water, a pichet of rosé, and a big healthy-looking plateful of salad. What else do you want when the temperature is in the high twenties?
   At home, especially in the summer, we eat the following at least once a month:
   1) Salade Lyonnaise. Salad greens, preferably frisée, sometimes dandelion greens from the garden, crisped warm lardons, tomato wedges, chopped onion, chopped chives sometimes, a mustard-y dressing and, added at the last moment, to sit shakily on top, ready to burst and lavish its warm yolk over everything else, a just-poached egg. God, the poetry. I mustn't forget to tell you that I also ring the salad bowls with croutons and warm cooked cubes of potato to turn it into a meal.
   2) Salade Niçoise, and you know what goes into that. Tuna, hard-boiled egg criss-crossed with anchovies and decorated with a blob of mayonnaise, black olives, scarlet rings of red pepper, cold potatoes, haricots verts, wedges of tomato, sliced green or red onion, all on a bed of whatever lettuce takes your fancy.

For the life of me, I can't remember what this particular salad was called. Place: a little outdoor restaurant in Minerve. Accompaniment: a pizza garnished with chorizo, anchovies, peppers... But to return to the salad. Talk about an all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza. What you see here are only some of the components. What the menu described as "lardons" were in fact entire slices of bacon (or smoked pork belly as it's known here). A hard-boiled egg, tomato wedges, lettuce, so far, so normale...Black olives, marinated green and red peppers...now we were moving into uncharted seas. In there too was a little savoury dollop of onion confit and and entire fruit section consisting of grapes, a cantaloupe slice, and a few slices of kiwi fruit.

A slice of creamy, funky goat cheese on a slice of baguette, popped in the oven long enough for the cheese to soften, warm and take on a golden crust.  Elsewhere, you can see a slice of mountain ham, garnet-coloured and chewy, and a heap of lardons.

Lardons, cubes of Roquefort, walnuts, hard-boiled egg, tomato and lettuce. 

No unrecognizable ingredients here apart from those deep pink thingies at three o'clock.  They're called gésiers, which is French for "gizzards," either chicken or, more likely in this part of the world, duck. Don't knock them till you've tried them. Utterly delicious, as is anything confit-ed in duck fat. I buy confited gésiers in tins from SuperU or Intermarché.

   

Last of the summer wine...

    Each Friday night during July and August, our village holds a marché gourmand. The best way to think of it is as a large street party. What started out as a small local event several years ago now takes up a major section of the main rue and attracts crowds, sometimes of literally hundreds, from several kilometres around.
    Midway through Friday afternoon, barriers are set up to divert the traffic and long trestle tables and benches are put in place. No plates or cutlery or glasses. You either bring your own or rely on the food truck you're buying from to supply them. Lately, we've been eating Asian food made by a lady who lives in nearby Regat but is originally from Vientiane in Laos. She and her family work incredibly hard. I'd already seen her in Lavelanet market that morning selling her noodle stir fry, spring rolls, shrimp beignets and samosas. (The French for chopsticks, by the way, is "baguettes" and, while I'm at it, baguette is also a word for what the conductor conducts the orchestra with.)
    Riiiight, back on to the main topic. You can buy pork chops, merguez, chorizo and regular saucisse, steaks of various kinds, slabs of ribs...from the butcher and have them grilled over charcoal.

    To the right of the butcher's truck, cut off by my inept photography, is a mother lode of spitting, hissing, finger-burning frites with ample dispensers of mayonnaise and ketchup to squirt over them. Elsewhere you can take away escargots, paella, magrets-frites-and-persillade and more Asian food. All of which says something about modern French tastes, at least in our part of the country.

    You sit down where you can with old friends, and with people you've just met. There's bread from the boulangerie. Bottles of wine. A lot of sharing goes on. Here's what the street looks like when the night market's at its peak. This one was less crowded than usual. Because it's September, most visitors had gone home so the night had a friendly local feel to it.

    Dessert was locally-made ewe's milk ice cream. The sharp-eyed amongst you will be able to make out some of the flavours on the list, which includes violet and rose-petal. Peter had chocolate. I licked away at a boule of  caramel flecked with sel de Gruissan. 

     The weather the previous Friday had been so abysmal that the planned fireworks display was rained out. Not this week. So, just before the scheduled starting time of 10:30 p.m., we all trooped through the streets to the rugby pitch on the outskirts of Léran.

Bonne nuit.