Normandy, France

During our stay in Paris we made a weekend detour to Normandy so that The Boy could fulfill a long-held dream of visiting the WWII d-day battlefields. Queue the yawning from me. Truth be told I could thinking of nothing worse than giving up Paris time to visit old war sites.  I'm not a history buff and definitely have no interest in military history (although I have the utmost respect for those men + women who give up their lives to go to war). But being married is a partnership (so I'm told) and every now + then The Boy gets his way.

There were a lot of whirlwind tours leaving from Paris that did most of the top Normandy sites in a day...but the thing is you didn't really SEE anything and you spent half the day driving to/from Paris in a crowded bus. Couple that with the fact that many of the tour buses would just drive by the major sites, often without stopping the bus and you have a pretty awful sightseeing tour.

After a little research The Boy found the PERFECT tour, D Day 1994 Tours,  run by an English couple (Ben + Jaye) who have lived in Normandy for years.  Best of all we would travel up from Paris on our own by train and stay in Ben + Jaye's manoir house that dates back from the 1550s!  Even better than the tours are private so we didn't have to share our tour with anyone else. The weekend cost us 600 Euros which I think is pretty reasonable.

I have to say I loved this tour which surprised me. I knew I'd like the countryside but had no idea I'd find the "war bits" themselves so interesting. I think this is a credit to Ben who has researched many of the personal stories of soldiers than fought in his immediate area. He brings the individual element to the tour which makes it much more accessible.

Along with details of the major battles, and seeing the major battlefields, we also learned about individuals who fought during D Day, their lives, their families and their deaths rather than just "on this day xxx happened". He also had piles of photos of soldiers taken on the actual spots where we were standing - mainly just happy snaps taken by the soldiers themselves - which was amazing to see! It made it all very real and relatable for me. I actually learned quite a bit on this tour. Yep, really.

Of course touring is hard and hungry work so we had a quick lunch stop overlooking Omaha Beach. I had a croque monsieur (my first ever and it was fantastic) and in honour of the Americans who fought on Omaha Beach The Boy had a cheeseburger...with fries.

An unexpected highlight of the stay with Ben + Jaye (for me) was the food. Whilst Ben was out touring around with us, Jaye was busy in the kitchen making us a wonderful feast. The food she cooked for us during both  nights of our trip was WONDERFUL and it really highlighted the seasonal nature of French cooking. We came home from our tour to find Jaye pouring over cookbooks as the seasons were changing and she was looking for new ways to cook the next seasons ingredients. Fantastic! Whilst we have seasonality at home it's not as evident as it is in France. Once something is out of season that's it....it's gone of the shelves until next year.

Dinner on day one was a wonderful rock melon salad with feta, tomatoes and mint (yum), a very French dish Salmon en Papillote (salmon cooked in a bag) and stone fruit with ice cream for dessert.  I loved these dishes so much that I'm going to make them at home (Jaye kindly gave me the recipe for the salmon so watch this space).

Dinner on day two was also great - we started off trying some of the local apple cider (apples are big business in Normandy) and it was so tasty I think we just about polished off the entire bottle. 

Our entree was an amazing twice-baked Roquefort soufflés. Oh boy, this was GOOD! Main meal was another traditional French winner, beef daube (beef stew with red wine for which I also brought home a recipe for) and we took a trip to the UK for dessert with a delectable sticky toffee pudding.  I was also joined during dinner by their lovely dog Saffy. Sorry Saffy, Miss Piggy never drops her food on the floor (or almost never).

We finished the day with Ben loading up his canon (he has an impressive personal collection of military artifacts, many found locally, including this canon that he built himself) for The Boy to fire. They then spent 10 minutes trying to find where the canon ball went - but I think this rates as one of the highlights of the WHOLE trip for The Boy!

All in all it was a great tour that I would highly recommend to anyone...even to history imbeciles like me.

You can find out more information on the D Day 1944 Tours here.

Frenchie, Paris

Whilst most of our Paris eating was fly-by-the-seat-of-our pants I did book ONE meal. I'd received a few recommendations on great Parisian restaurants but most of them didn't take bookings, or were already booked out.

By some stroke of luck I nabbed a booking a Frenchie, one of the new, hip bistro type eateries popping up in Paris.  This place is notoriously hard to get a reservation for, but I managed to score a table at 9.30pm on our second last night in town. When the day arrived I knew I was mad making a dinner booking for a time that I'm normally getting ready for bed - I want to be in bed at that time of night, not eating! Lady Luck was smiling on me that day however I was able to move our booking to 7.00pm as they'd had a last minute cancellation. Woot!

The style of food at Frenchie is less traditional French - no confit duck, french onion soup or steak tartare was on the menu for us.  The style of food is quite modern, pretty much like the mod Oz food we get at our fancy  restaurants at home. They have a strong focus on seasonal cooking and as such the menu changes almost on a weekly basis.

The menu is three courses with a choice of two dishes for each course.  There's an option to add Foie Gras as a pre-starter which we decided to do for "research purposes" seeing as our first try of Foie Gras on our food tour was...underwhelming. We thought maybe our minds would be blown if we had it prepared in a top notch restaurant.  It was still underwhelming and even though people around us were ooh'ing and ahh'ing I just don't "get" Foie Gras and I don't think it's worth what the animals are put through in order to produce it.

Entrees were lovely - mackerel for me and quail for The Boy. I liked my entree but I had food envy when I tried The Boy's quail...it was GREAT with wonderful smokey, savoury flavours.

We both went with the Pork Belly for mains...because it's pork and noone wants to share pork we decided we needed one of these to ourselves.

And dessert! I can't actually remember what we had now (it's been a few weeks since this dinner) but as to be expected they were lovely, a great way to end a special night out in Paris. It was berry season when we were in Paris so the desserts features loads of sweet fresh berries, berry sorbets and berry jus. It was berry berry good!

Frenchie is at 5-6 Rue du Nil, 75002 Paris, France.  The restaurant is VERY small (only 25 tables) and reservations are a MUST. We watched so many people try to get a table just by walking in...and we couldn't believe it when a group of 8 turned up trying for a table. Crazy!

Paris Food Tour "Paris by Mouth"

I've developed a bit of a thing for food tours over the last few years, but I um'd and ah'd about doing the one in Paris. At 99 Euros it wasn't cheap considering our exchange rate, but The Boy convinced that we may as well do it as you only live once, right?

The tour I choose for us is run by the crew from Parisian food review website, Paris by Mouth. To say they know their stuff is a bit of an understatement. Out tour was run by Catherine, an American ex-pat living in Paris and writing about food, glorious (French) food. She's surely living the dream right?

Our tour kicks off at Laurent Dubois Fromagerie (47 ter St Germaine Blvd). I knew that I wanted to eat A LOT of French cheese whilst in Paris and this seemed like a GREAT place to start my cheese dream, and the food tour. By the way if you're watching this season of Masterchef then you would’ve seen this store on their Paris episode.

 

I was REALLY keen to try Fromage Au Lait Cru, or raw milk cheese, as it's something we don't get at home. I actually thought that Fromage Au Lait Cru was just one type of cheese - you know like cheddar, but it turns out that a whole BUNCH of cheese are made from raw milk (or unpasteurized milk) and we tried a full gamut of them, Chèvre (Sheep's milk cheese), Comté, Roquefort, Camembert with stewed apples in side...or lordly! HEAVEN on earth.

 

 

 

For me the raw milk cheese tasted...more real, more like it comes from an animal that eats grass, grass that has flavours affected by the seasons.  It tasted more pure, more old-worldy, and also other-worldy at the same time. The cheese tasted earthy, raw and of animal...in a good way.  I felt like I was eating REAL food that hadn't been messed about by over-processing and the like.

We tried a cheese that was so oozy and so stinky that I thought The Boy had taken off his socks in order to air them out (it was good cheese by the way).

 

 

 

I kinda loose my mind in this shop - running around like a crazed mouse gaping opened mouthed at all the cheese and stuffing my mouth with any samples I see laying around!  Visiting this store, and trying all these raw milk cheeses was one of my food dreams come true!

Here I am, scoffing ALL the cheese samples!

Next stop was right next door – Charcuteire St Germaine. In fact there are a bunch of GREAT food stores right next door to each other and 47 ter St Germain Blvd is a GREAT place to do some shopping for a picnic, or dinner in your apartment.

 

I guess a charcuterie is best described as a “cured meat” shop that also sells some other things like delicious salads. It’s not a butchers shop – more like a cheeseless deli. If butchery was the domain of the Frenchman-of-the-house then charcuterie, or curing meats was the domain of the woman. We were told that Charcuteries developed as a business after the French Revolution when all the chefs/cooks to the fancy pants royalty found themselves out of work…

 

The Boy and I discussed the “foie gras situation” before we left home – would we eat it given we’re not happy with the farming practices that produce it? We decided that if was put in front of us in France, the home of foie gras, we’d try it. I mainly wanted to see what all the fuss is about and to see if the farming practices of force-feeding the geese until their livers are so HUGE that they simple cannot stand up produces something so amazing that we simple must have it no matter what. Is the flavour of foie gras so mind-blowingly delicious that we turn a blind eye to a bit of animal suffering?

For me, nope it’s not. It fact it doesn’t even rate up there in the top 100 things I’ve ever eaten. I totally don’t get what all the fuss is about – the texture is like hard just-out-of-the-fridge butter and the flavour is, well kind of “meh” to be honest – like pate, but (to me) not as nice at pate (and yes, this was the good stuff! Made in-house and by hand by the crew in this charcuterie. They also only use pure liver – no fillers of other stuff that you may find elsewhere).

Now rillette on the other hand. OH. MY. GOD! This stuff is amazing – I’ve always liked it, but a week in Paris has upgraded my rillette liking into a pure addiction. It may look like cat vomit, but this salted, shredded goose meat (or pork or duck) is wonderful. It’s fatty, salty, unctuous and I was eating it as often as I could (yes, even for breakfast smeared on my morning baguette). The rillette we tried on the tour was goose and it was FANTASTIC (forget foie gras people, rillette is where it’s at)!

So if you have cheese and cured meats you’re going to need some bread, right? We head up the road to one of Paris’ many many boulangeries! Bread is SO important to Parisians that when the whole city basically shuts up shop for the month of August (for their mass exodus for the summer) there is a government department who coordinates the holidays of all the boulangeries to ensure that each neighbourhood is not left breadless. I kid you not.

On the tour we learnt the best way to identify a “hand-made” baguette and also how to order a croissant made with butter (as many are made with margarine – quelle horror)! Both of these tips came in handy during our stay in Paris.

Oh, you want to know the tips too? Well, your baguette should have a smooth base with a material imprint (indicating it’s not been on a conveyor belt), it should be firm, not floppy with uneven air bubbles inside and have a real “crack” when you break it in half. And as for the croissant, a straight shaped croissant is usually made with butter, whilst the margarine impostors are the crescent shaped ones. If in doubt ask for a “un croissant au beurre, s'il vous plait”.

Whilst we were the boulangerie I quickly ordered a few treats that I’ve been wanting to try – a Madeline (tastes like a little sponge cake), canelé and choux topped with sugar crystals (puff pastry type of thing). I LOVED the canelé as it was so moist and dense and had a great rich, smoky flavour from the use of rum in the mixture. I could take or leave the other too -  I guess cheese, not pastry, is more my thing.

 

It would be remiss to have a Paris food tour without stopping at a chocolate shop (or two). Patrick Roger is famous for a few things Firstly his unusual flavours such as basil and lime; and secondly for his enormous animal sculptures made out of chocolate! Sounds weird but he uses the sculptures as a way of drawing attention to the plight of our endangered animals (he’s even made full-sized elephant out of chocolate – wow)!

 

 

 

Henri Le Roux is famous, we’re told, as he is the creator of what must now be the world’s most favourite sweet – salted caramel.

We get to try some of the salted caramel sweets and The Boy buys a big old jar of the stuff to have drizzled over ice-cream once we get home.

 

Henri Le Roux also makes a good range of fruit pastilles and I buy two of the pamplemousse ones as pamplemousse is my ALL TIME favourite French word (it means grapefruit which just sounds so dull in English).

Our tour finishes up at a little wine bar (cave de vin) in the back streets of St Germaine. We ensconce ourselves in the back room and sip on wine was our guide Catherine busts out her bags of cheeses, meats, breads and sweets.

 

It’s a GREAT way to end the tour as we all sit around and relax as we enjoy each morsel of food presented to you.

Places visited during our Taste of the Left Bank food tour:

• Laurent Dubois fromagerie at 47 Boulevard Saint-Germain
• Patrick Roger chocolate at 108 boulevard Saint-Germain, 75006
• Eric Kayser bakery at 14 Rue Monge, 75006
• La Dernière Goutte wine shop at 6 rue Bourbon le Château, 75006
• Henri Le Roux chocolate & caramels at 1 rue de Bourbon le Château, 75006