This past week has been quiet and largely uneventful – so why are you reading this you ask, this bit about “nothing”? Well I suppose because we are doing nothing but we’re doing it in Paris, the city of light, the city of love, the city of “chocolat” (show-koh-laht). As the Parisian photographer Robert Doisneau once remarked, “Paris is a theatre where you book your seat by wasting time.”
Tomorrow, Wednesday is All-Saint’s Day (1 November), one of the biggest holidays and since everything will be closed we will be out in Pere Lachaise cemetery. Rumor has it that quite a bit goes on in the cemeteries on All-Saints’ Day and we aim to find out if that’s true. Anyway there’s been a lot of activity in Pere lately; all new flowers (mostly mums) being placed in the various gardens around the cemetery and many of the tombstones have received fresh plantings as well. (Quite a cottage industry, mobile landscaping services that cater just to cemeteries; that goes to show you how important fresh flowers are here and the constant cleaning of many of the stones, often by family also demonstrates the care given to many graves here.)
Last week Susan finished the Intermediate level, scoring well on both written and practical portions of her final exam. For the practical exam she drew the recipe a passion fruit cream, raspberry tart. She considered herself fortunate since a number of others in her group drew more elaborate recipes with various layers of cake, cream and chocolate and so forth. (Upon entering the exam kitchen you draw a card from a piece of equipment to see which recipe you will have to make.)
So that’s behind her. Graduation is this Friday and we will be there – although apparently many others have chosen to take an extended vacation. Indeed, the last day of class (the final) was 25 October and except for the graduation on 3 November they don’t have to be back in class until 13 November! But we wanted to stay around this week so we plan to be at graduation. After that we will take off for Italy and southern France for a week.
So the last few days Susan has been baking at home (tarts, puff pastry and muffins) and working on card-making – she’s so happy to be back crafting again. What a lift for her spirits!
The two of us paid a visit to Le Bon Marche (“the good market”) this past week, in particular to the grocery section. The place is enormous – and they have stuff from all over the world, such as the large Oreo cookie display, but hey we did find a bottle of Yamato soy sauce (see my blog entry on the soy sauce presentation)! This is the kind of soy sauce that you use sparingly – and so far I have put it into soup as well as scrambled eggs, in place of salt. Wow! What flavor!
During our outing we stopped by the Opera Garnier, on Place de la Opera, one of two major opera houses in Paris. What an incredible building!
In the wine section at LBM they had several carts scattered around letting you taste different wines: we stopped and tried an Alsatian pinot gris (bought a bottle) and then a moved to another cart to taste the champagne (bought a bottle of that too). What a fantastic store! This should definitely be on any cook’s short list of places to go when visiting Paris. And if you’re renting an apartment by all means plan a stop before you go anywhere else. (Prices were oddly high on some things and low on others.)
Monday late afternoon we headed back to the Parc de Exposition at the Porte de Versailles, where we had seen the auto show, to attend the “Salon du Chocolat”. Susan had gotten tickets for us at school – they also had a booth in the show – and so off we went. We walked to Place d’Italie, took the no. 6 to Pasteur where we changed to the no. 12 and got off at the Porte de Versailles stop.
It was a madhouse. Most of the kids are off from school this week and I swear every one of them was there!
It seemed to us that most of the booths were chocolatiers and local confectioners hawking their wares (photo above) – we commented at one point that there was really very little difference from one high-end chocolate maker to the next, really, it was the marketing that made all the difference. Not unlike vodka I suppose.
Anyway, it was lots of fun. We enjoyed stopping at the booths from Sao Tome and Principe and Venezuela, where they produce quite a lot of raw chocolate so we could see what chocolate looks like at the beginning of its journey (photo top). There was even a vendor from Mexico tasting mole poblano, a chocolate and chili-based concoction that we thought tasted quite good (photo above). But they were the exceptions; it was pretty much all confectionaries.
Of course there were several demonstrations going on (Nestle’s large booth had one for example), usually focusing on an oven-baked dessert of some kind.
There were also the requisite panel discussions, probably with topics like “The timely Temperatures of Nighttime Chocolate consumption Among the Households of Slovenia.”
There were several vendors selling equipment, mainly for baking though.
I saw at least two booths that were promoting the therapeutic usage of chocolate, and of course selling chocolate-based skin and body products. At both locations they were using massage to demonstrate their products; lots of people standing around watching women massaging one another. This is definitely France!
We also paid close attention to the displays of the chocolate dresses (Le Cordon bleu had entered one). The designs were creative and imaginative but aside from one or two creations, we thought the display overall was underwhelming. Maybe it was our expectations: We thought the dresses were supposed to have been made out of only but that didn’t seem to be the case.
Near the display of dresses we came across the chocolate sculptures, which had apparently been part of a juried contest. They were fantastic (photo below).
The Russians had a pretty cool display. Aside from the gimmicky name "Red October" they had these cute but little chocolate creations just standing there doing very little and one in particular we thought darkly funny (photo below).
Surprisingly we tasted very little chocolate. I did buy a piece of something at one huge booth – they were selling chocolate like hotcakes – for one euro. It was a chocolate covered bit of fluff, maybe egg whites beaten with butter and a dash of some flavoring added we thought. Not very appealing to us but I suppose if you were 12 it would be just the ticket.
When we came across the Bellefon champagne booth we had to stop. Actually it was more of an oasis than a booth: they were selling glasses of champagne and there were comfortable chairs and sofas available to sit, sip and watch humanity streamn’ n’ screamin’ by.
After our champagne break we worked our way back to the entrance and headed back to the Metro and home.
Wish you were here,
Steve
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