Dennis & Aimee's Big Gay Paris Adventure

I'm back! While I was away, I went crabbing on the Wye River with my father (we caught 38 crabs, steamed them, and ate a few -- so good!) attended a family reunion in Charles Town West Virginia with my mother's side of the family, and hung out with my sister's family. Then I flew to Toronto to work with Jim. (Our company in Paris recently purchased a company in Toronto.) Here's a picture of the Shenendoah river in West Virginia, which looked cool and inviting, but sadly I didn't have enough time to get out of the car and walk along the low rocks:


I was exhausted yesterday after the flight, but I took a nap, and then got a good night's rest, and now I feel great. Today was a special treat for me. Dennis had emailed me when I was in Toronto to tell me about this thing called Paris Plage, and we went to see it today. Basically for a mile or two along the right bank of the Seine, they've made a beach atmosphere, complete with sandy areas, lounge chairs, post offices with postcards and special issue beach stamps, food stalls, beach volleyball, bike and rollerblade rental and even a huge fiberglas swimming pool! We walked a total of about 6.5 miles. (Distance thanks to the GPS pedometer that my mom and sis gave me for my birtday. Thanks guys!) So now we're exhausted, but it was a fun afternoon, and while it rained most of the way there, once we got there it was gorgeous the whole time. Here's a small pic (not taken by me). Note the sand!


In other news, I hung the artwork I bought at the flea market in the early spring. It's from a folio-sized book that documents plants and animals in Egypt, from when Napoleon was there. The page has a watermark in it because it's first-edition, and this one is not colored in, but the hand colored ones are even more lovely. Here it is:


We got two other pictures from the Auchan market. Our house needs all the art it can get!

So that's all for now.

--aimee

Here are photos of what was happening when you were up close:

AP Photos/Francis Mori:






REUTERS/Mal Langsdon:




I guess next year we should try to get down there and see for ourselves. You can see the whole slideshow here.

--Aimee

We had off work today! (Almost *everyone* in France had off work today.) We also decided to "prende le pont" which means literally "take the bridge" (meaning take Friday off to make a four-day weekend). A four day weekend demands a celebration!


So, we began our celebration by visiting one of the most famous chefs in Paris, Monsieur Pierre Gagnaire, whose restaurant has three stars in the Michelin guide, the highest rating given to any chef, and a particular honor in Paris. Monsieur Gagnaire is a celebrity, a star-chef in a city known worldwide for its cuisine. You can see his website (english version) at http://www.pierre-gagnaire.com/anglais/index.htm

It was certainly the most expensive dinner we've ever had, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the dinner in Copenhagen, at Noma, was better. Call me crazy, but that's my story and I'm sticking with it. The food at Gagniaire was art, it was science, it was presentation, but it was those things more than dinner. It was a tour de force of colors and textures and flavors and treatments and ingredients, it was stunning, but the food at Noma *tasted better* as a meal. Each of the dishes I describe below is a mini artwork, and if you get tired of hearing how small everything is, remember that we had something like 14 courses overall, so everything WAS tiny, it had to be. Besides, everyone knows that babies taste the best.

I thought for a moment that this was the only three-star restaurant I had ever been to, but then I remembered French Laundry, of course. Mmmm. One of the most astounding things about the meal was that Monsieur Gagnaire came out of the kitchen twice to greet every guest, once near the beginning of the meal, and again before we left for the night. That's unprecedented for me, but he did it with every guest. The restaurant has only one seating per night, and our reservation at 7:30 made us the first to arrive, which was great, because for the next four hours of our meal, I got to watch the ballet of service from our corner table. A meal of this caliber is really a performance, both from the cast you see in the dining room, and from the cast you don't see in the kitchen. The dance of sommeliers, jr. sommeliers, waiters, servers, even busboys, is a complicated choreography, and they performed with grace and dexterity and charm for us last night. I enjoyed the show!

So, anyway, here's what we had (Summer tasting menu):

Amuse bouches: Dried sweet thin sticks of fruit, served sticking out of a dish of brown sugar. Deep fried foie gras balls served with a wedge of plum. Curried snail with a piece of seaweed paper.

Croquant de chocolat au lait : bavaroise de poivrons grillés, fraises Mara et palette ibérique. Polenta et sablé au gingembre.
This was a sweet first course, like starting with dessert. There was a tiny hollow chocolate container, can-shaped, with a square of red pepper on top. Inside of the chocolate were strawberries and a paste of red bell peppers. Then there were two little round cookie sandwiches, one was polenta with cheesy filling, the other was a gingerbread cake the size and shape of an acorn.

Pressée de rouget de roche, pain dentelle aux mendiants et copeaux de foie gras crus au sel de Maldon ; bouillabaisse glacée aux choux fleurs.
Thin slices of toasted walnut bread with papery slices of foie gras on top, salted. Purple cauliflower buds. This was as rich and savory as it sounds, crisp bread and smooth liver.

Olives de Nyons mi-séchées, raviole transparente d’olives noires taggiasche, crème d’olives vertes de Lucques aux supions. Scampi d’escargots petits gris, gras de seiche et crête de coq.
This course was going to be tough for me, because I'm not a big fan of olives, but I enjoyed most of it. There were three parts. Three deep fried scampi puffs with a black olive slice inside (apparently also with cockscomb. yeah, the comb of a rooster.) on a thick noodle that was actually very thinly sliced squid (what a great tooth it had as a noodle!). A transparent ravioli (cylindrical) with minced black olive. And a small dish of frenched green olives with two dried, maybe candied, black olives that tasted sweet and salty like japanese dried plums. I liked the dried black olives best.

Crémeux de riz noir vénéré, au poivre à queue. poêlée de pétoncles au basilic. Bouquet d’artichauts poivrades, amandes fraîches et noisette caramélisées.
A cup-sized bowl with a bit of black rice soup on the bottom, raw scallop, artichokes and leeks, fresh almonds (not roasted, these were interesting, with a softly crunchy yet waxy texture) and a few caramelized hazelnuts on top.

Nage marachére du jardin de Monsieur Pil, laitue "moelle et reggiano frais". Darne du saumon sauvage de Norvége, enrobée d'amertume.
A pinwheel of wild Norwegian salmon with a transparent brown glaze that tasted like a light teriyaki almost. The salmon was melt in your mouth good, and I'm not usually the biggest salmon fan.

Un jus « rouge » : radis, betteraves bigareaux, mûres et groseilles salpicon de langoustine et thon rouge.
Small butter-fried pieces of langustine meat (bigger than a crayfish, saltwater, smaller than a lobster) and little cubes of red tuna in a delightfully miniature salad of radish, micro beets, red currants and some kind of grape-sized sour plum or cherry thing.

Fines aiguillettes de pigeon Gauthier à l’aubergine grillée, biscuit de roquette et marmelade de figue-tamarillo.
A bundle of sliced pigeon wrapped in a slice of roasted eggplant on fig-tamarillo marmelade. This was tasty, with a wild game flavor tamed by the gentle sweetness of the fig.

Glace brebis à l’huile d’olive ardente, granité champagne à la pomme verte et velouté de bleu des Causses. Petit croque Monsieur, vieux beaufort et bocconcini.
Champagne granita with olive oil and microdiced green apple, along with some flavor of bleu cheese. Bizarre, really, but good too. There were strips of another cheese in here, and the combination of textures and temperatures was outstanding.

Le grand dessert Pierre Gagnaire
This is all the menu says. Sounds like one dessert? It was eight. No, I mean we each got eight desserts, served in two courses of four each. I knew there was no way I was going to be able to remember them all, so I took a picture of each course, secretly, with my clie so I'd remember. Here are some of the highlights:

• a bamboo cup with mountain strawberries inside, to be eaten along with sips from a cubical sake-sized cup of saffron juice
  
• a bowl with micro diced cucumber and pink grapefruit that reminded me of watermelon. it had some sort of cheesy creamy topping.
  
• a bamboo spoon with two sweet confitures
  
• a plate full of tiny candies cookies and snacklets, each its own miniature patisserie artform
  
• a tower of chocolatey paste topped with a thin sugar crisp round topped with a super rich chocolate-nut-fudge
  
• a ceramic cup filled with two giant whole cherries and several cooked ones, on a bed of brown sugar in a saucer
  

Wines: We each had a glass of champagne to start, and two half-bottles of wine with the meal. Both of the wines were the best we've ever had in their category. The white was a 2000 Riesling Ecaillers, crisp and soft at the same time. The red was a 2001 Chateau Bellegrave Pommery that was just outstanding.

After dinner, we came home and went to bed, as you can imagine. We were *rudely* awakened by what must have been the entire French Air Force flying up Avenue de la Grande Armée (the major street closest to our house) on their way to buzz the Champs Elysées to start off the parade. It's hot here, all of our windows are open, and those jets are pretty much right overhead. It was loud! I dragged myself out of bed in time to see a few of them. Someone at work were joking as they did a test run on Wednesday that they were testing to make sure they would still fly.

After the jets, we walked around the corner to Bistro Resto to pick up Denis' computer. It was so bogged down with viruses and spyware that it wouldn't run any longer. Dennis spent the entire day cleaning it up, and when he went to return it at 8pm, they were gone for the day. Just gives me an excuse to go back and see Nelson tomorrow morning.

Finally, tonight, we had our friend Shadok over for dinner and to watch the fireworks from our terrace. We ended up having to go upstairs to see them, but the picture at the top of the page is from the bathroom window in our apartment. That bright splotch on the left of the picture at the top of this post is the Eiffel tower. Fireworks were shooting out of it from top to bottom, and spirally around the tip. it was insanity, and it was fantastic. If I find more pictures, professional ones, I'll be sure to share.

Thus ends day 1 of our four day weekend. It was a good 24 hours!

--Aimee

Lausanne, Switzerland!

Our friend Peter and his fiancée Jung are off to Venice in late August, and we'll be heading down to meet them there. I was looking for a destination that was "on the way" or convenient to visit along with Venice (since we've spent some time in Venice already). I decided that one good way to do this was to check to see where the trains stopped in between Paris and Venice, and the first city that popped up was Lausanne. I looked on my handy map of Europe that's thumbtacked to my office wall, and discovered that Lausanne is on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. This satisfies a few very important criteria:

1. New country we've never been to.
   
2. In the mountains, so it won't be stinking hot.
   
3. They speak French (in this part of Switzerland) and our French teacher mocks them for their slow speech patterns, which should be perfect for us.
   
4. They eat Fondue there.
   
5. It is heartbreakingly beautiful. Really, astoundingly so from the pictures. It's terraced up a hillside, has an old gothic cathedral, and the icy blue water of the lake.
   

Don't believe me? Take a look:


Not too shabby, huh? How about this one:


Here's a compelling quote from switzerland.isyours.com:

LAUSANNE tends to inspire hyperbole. In a country of spectacular natural beauty it is the most beautiful of cities, Switzerland’s San Francisco, a city of incredibly steep hills that has developed tiered above the lake on a succession of compact, south-facing terraces. Vistas of blue water, glittering sunlight and the purple and grey of the looming, whitecapped Savoy Alps peep through between gaps in buildings or at the ends of steeply dropping alleys. Much of the city is still wooded, there are plenty of parks, and the tree-lined lakefront promenades spill over with lush, beds of vibrantly colourful flowers. Attractive, interesting, worldly, and well aware of how to have a good time, it’s simply Switzerland’s sexiest city.

So, Saturday August 20 we'll take the 3.5hr train ride to Lausanne, then on the 25th we'll take the train to Venice and hang out with Peter and Jung, and on the 30th of August we'll fly home, returning to work on September 1.

Maybe we'll hit Nice in September for a beach weekend. Dennis' mother is coming to visit in mid-Sept. We'll probably head back to Chicago in October. I like having a trip "on deck" if you hadn't noticed. Using up all of this vacation requires diligence!

I better double-up on my jogging in preparation for all of the food food food.

--Aimee

Before I wrap up my Copenhagen memoirs (until the next visit, of course) I'd like to share a few of the better pictures we took. It's hard to capture the spirit of the place in photographs, and I don't feel like we came close to caputuring the intriguing mixture of old and new that blend so seamlessly in that city. I mentioned to Dennis as we took our ferry ride (which we used as a cheap sightseeing tour) that the people (and by extension, the services) in Denmark seem not so mechanically precise as those in Germany, and not so laissez-faire as those in France. It's a nice blend. Things happen efficiently, but with personality and warmth. I really loved it there, and the spartan yet calming Danish design continues to be a pleasure.

The old:

Here's their stock exchange building. The spire is four dragons with their tails intertwined. I seem to remember some kind of fairy tale with this theme, but I was unsuccessful in Googling it.


Awesome copper clad drawbridge tower (we got to see this raise):


Nyhavn harbor, with lots of cute restaurants:


And some new:
The new Copenhagen Opera House donated by the Maersk foundation is really gorgeous.


Here's a view from the waterbus, where modern office buildings blend with sturdy warehouses that are hundreds of years old:


Windows here are huge and most buildings are just covered with them. That should be a warning to me about wintertime.

One of the best things we did was visit Tivoli Gardens, which is very hard to describe. It's an amusement park, but there are more restaurants than rides. It's not too ooky-fake feeling like the amusement parks I've been to in the past, but at the same time, there's a restaurant on a reproduction Danish frigate. There are roller coasters, but only in one small corner of the park can you hear them. The very best part of Tivoli happens at night, when the whole 15 acres (in the center of town, mind you) is lit with beautiful lamps and light effects. It's like walking through a fairytale -- no wonder Hans Christian Andersen hails from here. 15 minutes before closing, they do this every night:




Tivoli was everything they promised and more. The food was good, if a bit more expensive. The environment was unbeatable. Both times we ate there we sat right on the lake in the center of the park, once at a microbrewery and once at a traditional Danish cafe.

Last funny story, in the airport on the way home (beautiful, efficient, modern, yet still warm with beautiful wood floors and glass everywhere), we sat at a cafe and Dennis ordered a beer. They asked "Small, medium, or large?" and Dennis said, "Uh, whatever you're making now." That was a large, and it was .75 liters! In France, most people drink a beer that's .25 liters. A pint is very close to .5 liters. .75 liters is the amount of liquid in an entire bottle of wine. Now *that* is a beer. They seem to like their alcohol up there.

Ok, so. That's Copenhagen for you. Magical I say. Truly magical.

Next stops on our itinerary over the next half year (we predict): Venice, Nice, Chicago, Japan (if we're lucky) and Capetown, South Africa, which is my current obsession. For now, we're looking forward to the three day week next week, because Thursday is Fete Nationale (Bastille Day). We have plans to stay at home!

--Aimee

Today I roasted a pork shoulder with the skin on. Braised it, more specifically. I asked my butcher yesterday for an "epaule de porc" (shoulder of pork) and he pointed to the de-boned, tied one that he keeps in the display case. But I've had that one (which is generously wrapped with a skin of fat and tied up for you) and it's good, but it wasn't what I was looking for.

So I tried to tell him that I wanted it with the bone in, but I don't know the word for bone. I pointed to my wrist, but that's just another cut of pork, a "jarret" and he never has that (even though I love it so much).

Anyway, after some gesturing and hemming and hawing, he understood that I wanted the shoulder "entier" or entire. So, get this, he brought out a side of pig, put it on the giant wood cutting board, and cut the shoulder out for me. Now that's just nuts! What a guy my butcher is! Je l'aime bien! After he plopped the half a pig down on the cutting board, he asked if that would suffice, the whole side he meant. He was kidding. I said in feeble French "I think my pot is too small for that!"

It had a thick skin which I cut into a diamond pattern (I didn't know it was so hard to cut) and I covered the whole roast liberally with salt and pepper and a bit of chipotle powder. I braised it in a liquid containing pork stock, a bit of sweet wine, onions, garlic, salt, freshly ground pepper, and red pepper flakes. I used a recipe as inspiration that suggested roasting the pork for 45 mins in a very hot oven first to toast the outside, so from the beginning, the skin had an awesome bubbly crispy appearance.

My father used to make pork roasts like this one when I was a kid, and I was so excited to eat the crispy skin that I nearly burned myself more than once. After only 6 hours, we had awesome tender pork, crispy cracklins, and home-made bourbon scented barbecue sauce. Here's a picture:



I also wanted to share this picture from Copenhagen of the best carousel animal ever. Some of you know this, most of you probably don't, but I have this thing for chickens and roosters. I toned it down a bit when I moved into Dennis' house, but there were at least 10 roosters and chickens in my house in Palo Alto. And the other morning when I was jogging I saw a soft stuffed one that I may well go back and buy. I have no idea why I love them, but they just make me feel at home.



Alton Brown (cooking show on FoodTV) has a ceramic chicken in his kitchen that I'm in love with, too.

Anyway, pigs and chickens. Mmm!

--Aimee

We're back from Copenhagen. There are many stories to tell, but as you know, we tend to talk about food a lot, and we had a meal that was probably our best meal ever, so it warrants talking about. The restaurant is called Noma, and you can see more at http://www.noma.dk Here's a little quote from their website, which I found compelling:

We want to go into depth with the matters before us. We are paying careful attention to the qualities in our culinary legacy, but we also aim to generate something new and innovative. We are exploring the potential of milk and cream in today’s modern cuisine. We are developing new ways of preparing the well-known and other not so well known kinds of cereal grains. We are constantly on the lookout for berries and herbs in the natural environment, including certain varieties that other people do not generally feel like gathering. We are also interested in working with raw ingredients which have no part in any systems of formalized cultivation and which therefore cannot be obtained through the ordinary channels of distribution.

We are smoking, salting, pickling, drying, grilling and baking on slabs of basalt stone. We are also preparing our own vinegars and concocting our own distilled spirits. However, we are making use of the most up-to-date kitchen appliances and “cutting-edge” techniques, of course, because we are paying just as much attention to the food’s consistency as our colleagues are busy doing at today’s top international restaurants.

Whereas others are using wines in their sauces and soups, we are making a systematic use of beers and ales, fruit juices and fruit-based vinegars for imparting a lively freshness and “edge” to ours. Vegetables, herbs and spices and wild plants in season play a decidedly prominent role in our cooking. Consequently, they take up more room on the plate than what is generally served in traditional gourmet restaurants.

We started on the patio with a French champagne which came with some fried fjord shrimp, strips of toasted flatbred and home made potato chips, along with a dish of lobster mayonnaise.

We went with the 7 course menu paired with 7 wines, and were offered a bonus opener (amuse bouche) of raw shrimp from Greenland, mini cucumber balls the size of English peas and micro radish slices.

The bread for the meal came in a little square brown wool felt pillow with a diagonal slit across the top which was tied closed with leather string. The bread was hearty white, mini cupcake sized served with both slightly smoky, dark lard with crushed, toasted pumpkin seeds and butter with danish herbs, tiny flower petals and a touch of buttermilk. We each had a salt cellar that contained lovely flaky salt that we rarely used because the food was so perfect. Here's what we had:

Tartar with woodruff and horseradish
Tarragon and aromatic juniper
The tartar was thinly sliced organic beef tenderloin in a rectangle, garnished with what looked like a layer of four leaf clovers. We were instructed to eat it with our hands as people have been eating food with their hands for thousands of years. "So, we though it would be fun to eat raw meat with your hands." The trick was to pinch a piece of meat and green, then touch it in the tarragon sauce, and then in the juniper powder. It was stunningly good.

Glazed lobster with green peas
Shoots from "Bregn" and herbs from the shoreline
Black Danish lobster. With another French champagne. One of the tastiest ever. The peas were perfect, there were tiny potatoes the size of marbles with the tops cut off, with little micro potato chips balanced beside them. There were several fresh herbs that I've never tasted, and there was a smear of pea sauce on the plate "essential for balancing the flavor of the herbs." Fantastic.

Pike perch and sauce of smoked fish
Purée of potato and wild herbs
I think this dish was different. I don't recall any potatoes. We were starting to get drunk about now, as you might imagine.

Aspargus
Green strawberries in different textures
When we were debating between five and seven courses, this is one of the ones that would have gotten cut. That would have been a huge mistake. This dish was unlike anything I've ever had. Shoots of green aspargus white aspargus were wrapped in a light dough and deep fried, and served with with a green strawberry sauce and super thinly sliced green strawberries. It was remarkable. There were a few steamed slices of asparagus in there too. What an amazing flavor unlike anything we've ever tasted.

Summer game, snails and hazelnuts
Mushrooms with buds and shoots
Venison tenderloin, possibly a rib cut. Bloody. Awesome. Tiny perfect mushrooms no larger than a kidney bean. Every bite was an explosion of flavor.
It was served with (finally) nice light red. French. Possibly a bordeaux.

Mousse of sheepmilk-yoghurt
Iced "green acid" and raps seed oil
This one also would have gotten cut if we'd gone with the five course, and it would have been another HUGE mistake. On top of a square slab of rich yet delicate yoghurt was a thin slice of sugar ice called nougatine. The iced green acid was some sort of local green, maybe even ice plant, made into a sort of granita. It was chunky green stuff, semi frozen, kinda slushy. It had a fresh green flavor somewhere between mown lawn and green apple, and was the perfect counterpart to the creamy yogurt and sugar. Another incredible blend of tastes, this one really secured the *best meal ever* title for me. The inventiveness, presentation and perfect balance were stunning.

Rhubarb and ginger-bread
Cream-ice cream and fresh herbs
When they set down this plate, the server warned us that it might be the best ice cream we'd ever have, and it was. The ice cream was a vanila with local fresh herb. Also with a rhubarb sorbet. Tangy. This was served with a sweet italian sparkling dessert wine. Spectacular.

Of course the server explained every wine grape, winemaker and region and the foods in extreme detail. Many of the local herbs did not really have an english name.

The only way I can begin to describe my total delight with this meal is that I was giggly-giddy like a schoolgirl for (Dennis swears) an hour afterward. I could *barely* contain myself in the restaurant, so pleased was I with the service, the food, the presentation, the venue... Even the classic Danish furniture was lovely, and our chairs each had a curly piece of sheepskin tossed over the back (which you can see on the website) which was so soft and comfortable and delightful to touch. No detail was spared, and it showed. Spectacular.

Stay tuned -- week after next we go to Pierre Gagnaire http://www.pierregagnaire.com to check out one of Chez Pim's strongest recommendations. In the meantime, I'm going to recommend this Noma place to some of the other food blogs I read. I can't believe they're not more famous.

--Aimee

We've been here roughly 24 hours, and it's after midnight. Today we ate herring and smørrebrød (which means open-faced sandwiches) at Tivoli park. We took a nap. We walked through Christiania, which is a "free city" of hippie squatters who took over a bunch of buildings in an area which didn't used to be popular, but now that the new opera house is nearby, that may be changing. We had pizza at a small restaurant in Nyaven, which is so so pretty. Here are a few pics to get you in the mood. We'll post more as the long weekend goes by (we had to charge the camera today, but tomorrow we'll be stocked with full battery.

The thing about the long days isn't so much that the light lasts forever (though it does) but as Dennis pointed out, it's that sunset can take three hours, rather than one. The light changes slowly, the clouds turn every color of orange more slowly, everything happens at a snails pace. I don't know about you, but a long slow gorgeous sunset doesn't suck where I come from.

Here's a picture of Nyaven (a funny canal street we found almost accidentally as we turned the corner:




And a little more sunset. These are lacking spirit, but they'll give you an idea.



The Opera house was a gift to the city from Danish shipping magnate Sir Mærsk McKinney Møller (presumably of Maersk shipping lines). It's spectacular. I'd love to see a performance there, but they're sold out this year.

Click here for outstanding opera house pictures not taken by me.

More, better, to follow.
--Aimee