Lunchtime in Paris

No lunch today - just memories

I'm just home from the dentist and so no lunch for me just a walk down memory lane to a lunch I had last October at L'Estaminet, rue Oberkampf, 11th Paris

It's a cute little neighborhood restaraurant with really small tables. I went with a friend, she had the special of the day, shrimp and lotte and I had the steak tartare with fries.

This is the steak tartare. It was already prepared, which is not my preference. I like it better when the meat and the fixings are seperate and I can mix myself. A steak tartare is very fresh raw ground beef with shallots, parsley, capers, worcestershire, tobasco, and an egg yolk all mixed together. Of course there are variations, the weirdest I ever had involved diced peanuts and wasabi...

This was the daily special, shrimps and lotte in a delicious sauce. Kind of messy with the shells still on.

This picture is not from the same meal. It is from one of my trips to Etretat. I just thought the pink religiouse looked so delicious that I'm adding it as desert.

And in an effort to improve my photos I found picasa2 from google  (check it out if you can't afford photoshop). It does some nice things for free!

happy lunching!

Chinese Lunch II

Yesterday's comment from Kirk on my first Chinese lunch has prompted me to have another one. I too am fascinated by the way that "immigrant" cuisine (not just Chinese) adapts to the taste of the local population (planning a trip to MacDo sometimes soon...just waiting til they have one of their weird French specials; perhaps the tartifletteburger?).

Anyway, today's Chinese lunch was purchased at Gourmet Royale, avenue Secretan in the 19th, Paris.

We start off with:

Three "nem aux crevettes" and a "pâté impérial" with dipping sauce. I wonder if there is a site out there with the worldwide names for these things such as nem, egg roll, spring roll, etc.  defined? I'm curious.

Nem is actually a Vietnamese word for what we call egg roll; perhaps this results from the French colonization of Indochina. Tastewise the pâté impérial pictured here is closest to the US egg roll and I cannot think of any translation other than Imperial Paté, how silly. The nems are ,50 euros each and the big egg roll was 1,20 euro. They also charged ,30 for the sauce which I think is really cheap of them, but that's Paris.

Here is the "riz aux légumes", vegetable rice. It is much better than the "riz cantonais" you usually find in Paris with bits of ham. This rice has chopped brocolli and bits of Chinese green vegetables mixed in and costs 1 euro for 100 grams.

The rice with some "poulet croustillant du chef" crispy chef's chicken. Most Chinese restaurants have some variation on this. Unfortunately this crispy chicken was rather soggy...oh well, it still tasted good. The sauce has a sort of sweet vinegar flavor.

And here is the rice again with some "crevettes sautées à la sauce piquante", sauteed shrimp in spicy sauce. So there you have it for today.

Sadly, I will be going to the dentist tomorrow at 11 am  for a root canal...what could be worse? So, I will most  probably have to pull out some pictures from my vast food archives for your viewing pleasure.

Happy lunching.

On second thought - lunch

Well I know I said I wasn't feeling well and that I wasn't having much of a lunch today but around 1:30 I had to go out to the pharmacy and on my way home I passed the Greek place.  It just smelled so good so here is today's Greek lunch:

An assiette grecque (Greek plate). Anyone who's ever been to Paris (especially around the Saint Michel area) should recognize this. I'm not really up on my food groups but I think it covers all of them: Protein (meat) Veg (lettuce, tomatoes, cabbage, cucumbers and carrot), Carbs (wheat, potatoes and bread) and Dairy (the yogurt based tzatiki sauce). Not bad for 6,50 euros.

Here is a close up of the  delicious Greek bread:

and the salad:

Fresh and colorful, and here is the doner kebab:

Actually this is more Turkish than Greek but the menu did say assiette grecque; perhaps it is just an effect of globalization.

See you tomorrow for another wonderful lunch.

Back to lunch

Hello fellow lunchers,

I have the flu. I'm off work and haven't eaten anything interesting for the past two days. But even though I didn't have much of a lunch today (some tea and bread) I found some photos of lunches from last year and they look pretty good.

These are also typically French things so without further ado:

A delicious "croque madame" that I had for lunch in January of this year by the sea in Granville (Normandy). Croque madame is a a sort of grilled cheese, except the cheese is on the outside as well, with a fried egg on top. Even though it's technically a sandwich it must be eaten with a knife and fork. A "croque monsieur" is the same but without the egg.

The traditional "steak frites" (a steak with fries) and yes that is butter on the steak. I like my steak very rare as you can see in the photo. This steak frites was from Etretat in November of last year and I also had:

Some traditional fish soup served with fromage rapée (grated cheese) toasts and rouille (an orange sauce).

One more photo of some delicious scallops

This was right at the beginning of scallop season last year in November served with carrot purée potatos, a tomato and a very lovely sauce.

That's if for today and hopefully I will be feeling better tomorrow and we will be able to get back to the serious business of lunching.

To lunch or not to lunch

I'm going  to be so grumpy all week, but at least I've got an excuse it's daylight savings  and it's so annoying

I thought that France was a civilized country, why must we disrupt our rythms and follow this barbaric custom??? aiee who knows. .here's just

a lovely photo to ease the pain

AOC Lunch

In a comment on my first post my sister Lisa asked me about AOC. I thought it would be easy to explain but after shopping for and preparing my lunch today I am just more confused.

Check out all these guarantees of quality:

Clockwise from upper left, parmesan from Italy, roquefort cheese, roquefort cheese, organic cheese, balsamic vinager from Italy, silver medal from the salon d'agriculture for wine, butter, ham from bayonne and wine from Alsace.

The agency that handles all this in France is the INAO (Institut National des Appellations d'Orgine) there is some info in English on the site but not much. Here is a quote from the pdf brochure:

"Geographical indications are, [...], indications which identify a good as originating in the territory [...], or a region or locality in that territory, where a given quality, reputation or other characteristic of the good is essentially attributable to its geographical origin.

This definition of the GI is extremely wide-ranging, such that the notion can include
agricultural, agrifood or industrial products, or indeed goods originating in the handicraft
industry, whose association with their geographical origin can at times be extremely
tenuous."

That reminds me too much of work (I'm a bilingual secretary in a law firm) so here is a photo showing some AOC butter and then we'll just get down to the business of making a lunch from all this good stuff

Well now that that's settled let's move on to the actual practical aspects of the products and the lunch.

Home from the grocery store and look what I bought,

here are the raw materials:

mmm...a baguette pas trop cuite (not too done), roquefort, parmesan, ham and butter. I also bought some roquette which is so lovely that it deserves its own photo:

You will never go wrong with my recipes if you follow the golden rule "Only the best and who cares how much it costs". I made a lovely salad with this roquette:

This is an easy and delicious salad

What you need:

• Roquette
• Olive oil
• Balsamic vinager
• Fleur de sel (gourmet salt)
• Parmesan

How to do it:

• wash and dry the roquette
• put the roquette in a salad bowl
• pour on some balsamic vinegar (to taste)
• pour on some olive oil (to taste)
• add some fleur de sel (to taste)
• toss and let stand for 5 or 10 minutes (this is so the flavors will infuse)
• add some parmesan shavings and serve

(Note to myself for future food photos: remember to carefully wipe down plate edges before taking photo)

And the final lunch:

Salad, bayonne ham with roquefort on baguette and an apple cake from the bakery.

What a lot of work, I think I'll have a nap now (oh, I do so love Saturday afternoons).

See you tomorrow and have a nice lunch!

Chinese lunch

Today I went to one of my favorite friendly Chinese takeout places, Ming Fan located 4, rue Treilhard in the 8th arrondisement of Paris. This place does a set menu for 6,10 euros including 8 pieces of dim sum, noodles or rice and a dessert. I added a diet coke and some coriander chicken for a total of 9,65 euros.

Clockwise from the upper left: Chinese noodles (nouilles chinoises), soy cake (gateau au soja), coriander chicken (poulet au coriandre), sauce that is not hot (sauce non piquante) and some dim sum (vapeur).

One of the weirdest things for me when I arrived in Paris was how different the Chinese food was. i couldn't figure it out, after all, Chinese is Chinese, isn't it? Well, apparently not. How was I to know that the 007 chicken fingers and the teriyaki beef had been created to meet American tastes and wonders of wonders the pupu platter that we ordered from the Hu Ke Lau in Chicopee Massachusetts was Polynesian and not Chinese! (Tiki fans are advised to click on the link for some real authentic Tiki).

I started off with the dim sum which is called vapeur (steam) in French. All of the items in the picture are called "ravioli" so the har kao is called ravioli de crevettes (shrimp ravioli) and so on depending on what's inside.

Then I mixed the noodles:

with the chicken

It was delicious! This was really quite a big lunch (so much for my diet) but it was really good and it is now officially "le weekend". I post at night when I come home from work so now I am relaxing and concentrating on my projects for this weekend.

Tomorrow I will be preparing an AOC lunch on my balcony and I'm really looking forward to it, so until then, happy lunching!

Paris is lunching?

Here is the chalkboard menu and here is my translation: Cream of zucchini soup with lemon, and a difficult one, "Poelée" means cooked in oil in a frying pan (but not too much) so this would be sauteed in English, "Fruits de mer" is not seafood because it does not include fish, it is everything else like lobsters, clams, oysters, shrimp, etc. and I don't think we have a word for that in English hmmm....how about:

Sauteed seafood other than fish with Thai basil accompanied by whole red rice with mango chutney. Well this sounded interesting and so I had to try it.

The place where I got this is right across the street from my office, they do a set menu for 12,50 euros which includes the "plat de jour", in English that is the main dish, then either a green salad, slice of quiche or the soup de jour and a dessert or beverage. I got the soup and it was good.

Don't you want to dive right in? It was thick and delicious! Then for the "plat de jour"

Interesting, but not as good as the soup. For starters the fruit de mer was almost exclusively squid (calamar), there were maybe two mussels (moules) and the sauce was way too salty. I kept running to the water cooler all afternoon because I was dying of thirst. It's a neat idea but I would have liked less salt and a couple of shrimp.

And that's my lunch for today, how was yours?

An ordinary Paris lunch

This is my first realtime lunch post and it is what I intend this blog to be; a celebration of lunches both ordinary and extraordinary. I often eat at my desk, it's quiet and I can catch up on the news or my emails, so without further ado here are the details of todays lunch.

Today's lunch was a delicious and very simple jambon beurre, this is a ham sandwich with butter on a crispy baguette. I went to my favorite boulangerie which I discovered after a very unsatisfying lunch at a tapas place (since gone out of business). I was still hungry and so what better than a jambon beurre to help me make it through the afternoon. I also got a slice of apricot tart and of course, a diet coke (here we call it coca lite).

The apricot tart was particularly nice so I thought it deserved another photo. I'm going to have to perfect my food photo skills and what better place to practice than here.

This lunch cost me 6,60 euros and was purchased here:

This is a nice inexpensive lunch spot in the 8th arrondisement of Paris not far from Saint Augustin. I come here often and I'm sure I will be posting more delicious lunches from this place.

So, until tomorrow, Happy Lunching

Another Normandy lunch

This was just supposed to be a test to see if I could post bigger pictures, my oysters from yesterday are so small, anyway, it looks so good I think I'll leave it up.

It's a delicious crêpe jambon gratinée that I had for lunch in Granville at this very charming crêperie:

Well that's one problem resolved, now only if I could figure out how to make links...10 minutes later and well I guess a second problem is solved...all I had to do was click on the icon that resembles a link. So if you're in France and in the mood for oysters I've linked in the post below. Unfortunately, L'Echaugeutte does not have a website but when I do find links I'll be sure to post them.