Paris Airport

We left our hotel at 7 AM, had a comfortable taxi ride, boarded our plane on time, and we are now back home for a while.

Ladurée pastry at the airport: their famous macarons made a delicious last-minute snack.
The rose-colored ones are rose-water flavor, and surprisingly taste like roses.
The salted caramel and chocolate ones are also exceptionally delicious.

DeGaulle Airport: waiting area with duty-free shops

I'll be posting more about Paris.

Saturday Market Near Montparnasse

Lots of fruit and vegetables, beautifully displayed

A man playing and singing old-style cabaret songs: think Edith Piaf

Amazing fish stalls

Divine melons -- if only I had a kitchen!

And the sun was shining

Lots of artisanal food products, cheeses, ham, sausages....

Passage Vivienne

Last night we had dinner at Bistrot Vivienne in the Passage Vivienne with our friends Françoise and Laurent. It's one of the remaining 19th century shopping centers (or at least the predecessors of shopping centers) in Paris. It's a beautifully decorated restaurant with a delicious menu. You can see photos of the velvet couch where we sat, and the appetizers -- gazpacho and beets with goat cheese. The chicken was cooked with preserved lemon and served with cous-cous. Other dishes included asparagus ravioli, and the wonderful melon that's available at the markets and shops. Dessert: ice cream, mousse au chocolate. Needless to say there were many other choices on the menu.

Addendum: Passage Vivienne in Zazie dans le Metro:

More Crepes

Inside Creperie Josselin: there's always been a line,
but today we walked right in and ordered because it was 3 PM.

A crepe with caramel and vanilla ice cream for me
and a lemon-honey crepe for Lenny.

The kitchen.

The outside on the street with all the crepe places (address is 67 Rue du Montparnasse).
Needless to say, we've been eating lots of other things as well, but that will be a future post.

What we did first thing today: we went to the gardens of Versailles where we walked around for about 4 hours.
The lines for entry to the chateau itself looked around 2 hours long -- even if you had bought a ticket online!
So we just enjoyed the gardens.

One fountain was turned on. Every 10 minutes the fountain danced to appropriate
18th century French music. The rest of the gardens were beautiful also: music played,
but the water was not turned on except in this one.

A few good meals

Cold Salmon at Balzar where we met Michelle on Saturday
Dessert: molten chocolate cake

Fish at Balzar

Saturday dinner: a salad near our hotel

Breakfast

Mussels at Brasserie Suffren

Fish with aioli at Brasserie Suffren,
which was near our apartment in 1989 -- still good!

Sunday lunch at Michelle's apartment in Cachan, just outside Paris

A statue by Zadkine on Boulevard Edgar Quinet
Background: Tour de Montparnasse
Besides eating Paris is full of fabulous outdoor art

Also, Paris is full of beautiful old traditional things,
like the fountains of this design that once were really the water supply.

The street of crepes

Once we checked into our hotel after our overnight train trip, we started the day in Paris with lunch at one of around a dozen creperies near our hotel. Most have very Breton names like the Quiberon or La Phare (lighthouse) and Breton traditional crepes, both sweet and savory. We had no idea that we were staying on the street of crepes! I was stunned to recall once again how absolutely wonderful-tasting real fois gras is, and how delicious a real French salad dressing can be. I look forward to trying some of the sweet varieties too.

Lunch: My galette (savory crepe) with fois gras, fig jam, a drizzle of honey, and a salad.
Background: Len's sausage, onion, and potato-filled crepe.
Restaurant: Creperie La Bigoudene

Fish-monger's window not far from the creperies.
I love looking at the food stores, markets, wine shops, cheese shops, patisseries...

Eating in Gottingen

A very fancy greengrocer: we bought our fruit and vegetables
at a supermarket where it looked just like at home.

Gaudi Restaurant -- I guess it was our favorite

We asked for Gaudi's English menu, which used the Spanish names for tapas and other foods.
We had tapas including apricots wrapped in bacon, meatballs, octopus, and serrano ham.
A little bite of herring with beets and cream was served before anything else.
How do you say "amuse gueule" in German, Spanish, or English?

Gaudi: ravioli with tuna

Gaudi: Cherries with ginger sauce and ice cream

Sausalito: a Tex-Mex restaurant with a very multi-lingual menu.
The German menu was full of both English and Spanish mixed together.

Sausalito's version of enchiladas. Note the red cabbage in the salad.
Corona beer tonight...

German food at Ratskeller Restaurant Sunday night:
herring with boiled potatoes and a stein of beer.

Paulaner "Zur Alten Brauerei" Thursday

Rosti potatoes with herring (front) or salmon (back) and more beer.

Click on any of these photos to see more Flickr photos of Gottingen.

Aloo Gobi for Louise's Picnic Game

I'm going on a picnic and bringing Aloo Gobi, an Indian dish with potatoes and cauliflower. It's a virtual picnic that takes place July 1. So...

Happy Picnic Day

Louise at Months of Edible Celebrations has come back to blogging and is organizing her popular picnic game where at least 26 bloggers create an alphabetical picnic menu, beginning here with A for Aloo Gobi. On July 1, she will post a list of all 26 dishes, with photos!

Actually, I really did bring real, not virtual aloo gobi on a picnic while I was in Aspen recently; I shared it with one of the Tuesday night barbecues at the Aspen Center for Physics. It's a good dish for a picnic because it's supposed to be served at room temperature.

Here's what it looked like towards the end of cooking, before being garnished with cilantro leaves:

Aloo Gobi made May, 2013 in Aspen, Colorado

I first became aware of this delicious dish around 4 years ago when I saw the film "Bend it Like Beckham." As I wrote in an earlier post about this dish, the heroine of the film wants to be a soccer player, and is very good at it, but her parents believe that it's better to make good aloo gobi than to "bend it like Beckham" -- another concept, this from soccer, that I learned from the film. The line is pretty memorable, but what's very memorable is the DVD extra of the film director, Gurinder Chadha, in the kitchen with her mother and her aunties, who watch and give advice while she's trying to explain to her audience how to make aloo gobi. This extra feature is fabulous, maybe better than the film itself.

One of my earlier efforts to make aloo gobi looked like this:

Aloo Gobi made April, 2009 in La Jolla, California

When I eat in an Indian restaurant, I often try to sample the aloo gobi, which always contains a number of spices along with aloo and gobi (cauliflower and potatoes), and sometimes contains tomatoes and sometimes not. An example of the dish with little or no tomato:

Aloo Gobi at Host Restaurant in Toronto

We had a great meal including the above dish a couple of years ago with our friends Rashmi and Kappu. Kappu sent me her aloo-gobi recipe that I followed last month. I didn't have the turmeric and paprika, but I did have all the fresh spices, cumin, and garam masala, a delicious Indian spice blend that's also good on other things.

Kappu’s Aloo Gobi

Ingredients 

1/4 C Oil (Vegetable or Olive)

1 large Onion- cut into thin slices and each slice cut in half crosswise

1 T cumin seeds

1/2 bunch fresh cilantro – leaves chopped and set aside separately.

1 t turmeric

1/2 t paprika

  salt to taste

2 to 3- Serrano or any green chillis – chopped (depending on how hot you like)

2 large whole tomatoes, chopped

3-4 cloves garlic – minced

2 T fresh ginger – peeled and grated

1 med – large cauliflower, broken into floweret

3 medium potatoes – peeled and cut into 1” cubes.

2 T water

1 t Garam Masala

1 T unsalted butter or ghee

Directions

Heat oil in dutch oven, or large pan with cover, over med- high heat.  Add onion and stir till translucent.  Add cumin seeds.  Cook until onions are light brown – do not burn them. Stir.  Add turmeric, paprika and salt; stir.  Add chillis, tomatoes, garlic, ginger, potatoes & cauliflower and mix till everything is well coated.  Add 2+ T water, stir and cover.   Reduce heat to medium low and let simmer for 20 minutes until the cauliflower is cooked. Stir and add Garam Masala, stir again.  Sprinkle 1 T of unsalted butter or ghee, and cilantro leaves on top of the curry, cover and turn heat off.  Let it sit for as long as possible before serving – up to 15 min.

p.s. Do not cook after adding the garam masala.

Bon appetite

Louise's Picnic Game Logo:
See This Post for Details

Famous German Asparagus

We arrived in Gottingen, Germany, early this afternoon after a night on a plane from Detroit to Frankfort and a morning on a train. It's the end of asparagus season, which is taken very seriously in Germany, as I had always heard. This white asparagus special dinner included the fresh asparagus, Hollandaise sauce, boiled potatoes, and a breaded pork cutlet. And local draft beer. Lovely! I enjoyed my asparagus, while Len tried a particular type of herring, also in season, which also was on the special menu.

The town is really lovely, and was especially appealing as we walked around before and after dinner in the long rays of midsummer sunlight. Small placards on many buildings commemorate the numerous famous people who have worked and studied here. I recognized the names of at least two Romantic poets, Tieck and Brentano, who lived or visited here for at least a little while. The physicists recognized scientists and mathematicians -- we walked by a statue of Gauss talking to his younger colleague Wilhelm Weber and another statue of the chemist Friedrich Wöhler who described the molecular structure of urea in 1828. The chemical formula is inscribed in the cobblestones at the foot of the statue.

Statue of Lisel the Goosegirl: tradition requires every new PhD student
to climb up on the fountain and kiss her.
She's holding some flowers left from the most recent such event.

Wednesday Night Farmers Market

Garlic Scapes from Dyer Farm;
Early green vegetables at the market stall behind the garlic table.

The Dyers grow dozens of varieties of garlic, and sell garlic scapes for around 2 weeks each spring.
The garlic bulbs are available later in the growing season; each variety is carefully labeled and described.
Unfortunately, at the moment I was not able to try out this delicacy -- maybe next year.

It's so early in the season that the market wasn't very busy last night.
I bought some potatoes and lettuce.
Quite a few mobile food trucks were also at the market, with tables available for those who wanted dinner.