Tulleries

Sparrows

The Sparrows here are remarkably tame. In certain areas, they will come and perch on your hand if you hold out a bit of bread for them. Kind of a waste of the holy goodness of a baguette, but entertaining to watch.

Goth

The rose garden in Le square Jean-XXIII, right next to Notre Dame.

Socks

I haven't had too much time or motivation to get any crafty things done, but I did start a pair of socks.

They are the Elm Socks by Cookie A, from the Knitter's Book of Socks. I love these big, slowly undulating cables. They are loads of fun to knit and actually fairly intuitive once you've gotten cozy with the pattern. It's pretty hot out this week, but I want my first winter here to be cozy. Also, all my linen and silk and lighter yarns...who knows where they are right now. I wasn't in the right mind when I was trying to pack up to figure out what to bring along and what to store. I have a feeling I'll be pleasantly surprised when I get the shipment next week. Hopefully I did remember to pack a few skeins of linen- a swingy cool top would be nice right now.

PS, the sock yarn is String Theory Caper Sock, and it's brilliant to work with.

Marché des Producteurs

In addition to all the markets that pop up around the city daily, sometimes there are extra-special markets. These are Marche des Producteurs.

The regular markets are more like an outdoor grocery store. You can get produce out of season; apples from Chile, oranges from Spain, melons from Morocco. Most of them do have a great deal of locally grown produce, and the quailty is almost always much higher than the local supermarche, and there are plenty of specialty vendors.

The Marche des Producteurs are all France-based farmers in artesianal food vendors. Lots of cured meats, foire gras, honeys and jams, wines and beers. All the good stuff.

We did have quite a nice afternoon, wandering the stalls, being forced and coerced to try all this great stuff. There was soap made from horse's milk, and hamburgers with pedigrees. The vendors were chatty and in love with what they did. It was less of a job to them as a passion, and what the final results were pretty heavenly.

They don't happen every weekend or in the same spot, so you have to go to the website to track them down. There was only two vendors selling fruit, which was lucky since it was peak strawberry season. Most strawberry vendors sell multiple varieties, so it's good to buy as many kinds as you possibly can, just in case you don't care for one or the other. We liked them all just fine and made a nice picnic out of them.

It was hard when to walk away, as we still don't have a proper kitchen or storage. We promised ourselves we'd go easy until then, but for me, it basically means staying away from all markets all the time. Seeing all the beautiful things to cook and not being able to treat the ingredients respectfully (hello, microwave...I'm looking at you) means I have to lay off.

Luckily, we move on Friday. Just in time...there are beautiful tomatoes and cherries to be had, and I'm still finding strawberries that are fantastic. I want nothing more than to bake them in a pie.

Bonjour Vietnam

One of the things that I'm trying really hard not to do is have a fatal overdose of cream and butter based sauces. It's really hard, but I am determined not to get sick of French food.

In previous, shorter visits, I've gotten too excited about a list of places that I had to try. Duck with blue cheese and steak with bordeaulaise and delicate pike dumplings in a cream sauce. It's all so good, but no one can eat like that for long without either having to buy a seatbelt extender for the plane ride home or perhaps getting gout. I always find I can take it for a few days, and then I get the craving for a spicy curry, a vegetable stirfry, just something with a bit more spice and, sigh, less butter. It's maddening.

So we've been quiet on the French food scene knowing that it will be available to us for a long while now, and maybe we should limit it to once a week or something. I don't have a full kitchen yet, but I've been making salads and simple dishes to go with the really good bread I get every day. Nice and light and a good way to try all the interesting produce, but eating at home isn't the most exciting way to experience the city.

The first time I got a craving for noodles was impulsive. There's a pretty big block of Japanese places nearby, and I picked a random one based on the fact that it looked clean and it wasn't too crowded.

Big mistake.

I got shrimp Udon, but there was something really weird about it. The fact that it was topped with a pancake of fries that were quickly sopping up the broth and becoming really unappealing and sad should have clued me in that perhaps this isn't the best place to get my noodle fix. It's really hard to move from New York, with it's abundance of really excellent ethnic food, to a place that seems to take them seriously at all. Kind of depressing.

No worries though...the internet saves the day. We found a great little Vietnamese place in the Latin Quarter called Bonjour Vietnam.

Really nice noodles that I don't have to gripe about how much I miss my haunts in NYC. Which I do. Just not as much now.

They had imitation Sriracha, but I won't hold that against them. I haven't seen the real-deal hot sauce at all here, but I'm pretty good at searching these things out.

It was exactly what we needed as we had been holding out hope that we would find a good place for Asian food since we first conceived of moving here. It was like a big bowl of anti-anxiety noodles, with a good clear broth and veggies and a few slices of beef on top. Nom.

It's the perfect anecdote to all the good French food that we are about to eat.

Happiness

It took me a couple weeks, but I found it. It's called beurre de cacahuète here It took me forever to figure out what the word for "peanut" was. I don't think it's very widely consumed. I kept looking for it where the nutella and jams were (which seems familiar enough to American eyes at first glance), but apparently it's considered a foreign food, so I was finally able to find it between the Thai and Mexican shelves in the "Anglais" section along with mostly British foods. It feels a little sacrilege to smear it on a baguette but I keep doing it anyway.