Fezzik In Paris

Dr. Purrito, Cupcake Surgeon M.D. ( And Apple Pizza)

Purrito

September 20, 2015

( Firstly, I have a bad head cold, so this may seem more like rambling than a composed post, so I’m sorry. However, IT’S MY BLOG, I CAN RAMBLE IF I WANT TO! *throws fit on floor* Being sick sucks.)

Carried in with the new chilly breeze blowing through our chic little city, comes my affinity for cooking and baking. When the temperatures drop, much to the chagrin of Geep, the kitchen maintains a certain level of mess. At least it is a tasty mess. Since we did not go to Greece due to our combined level of sickness (mentioned in the previous post), I have been keeping myself busy. It was better to distract myself from the head cold and stomach cramps by moving around the kitchen, than wallow in self-pity. It started with the idea of making soup again; this time using an oven-roasted chicken carcass left over from the previous dinner for the stock base. So, why not make a dessert, too? We were going to be home for the foreseeable weekend-future anyways.

I found a simple recipe for an apple tart and figured I would give it a try. I went to the market to procure my puff pastry, apples, butter, and an actual pie pan. I had no idea there were so many options for sizes of pie pans in France. The shelf of our local junk shop had about fifteen choices. My recipe did not exactly specify, so I choose one that seemed reasonably middle-sized. I started following the directions and immediately stumbled upon a split route dilemma. The recipe wanted me to pre-bake the crust, but the crust wanted me to bake it with all the fillings. Decisions, decisions. I pre-baked the crust a bit to just give me time to cut up the apples. After my alarm went off to pull the crust, I was a little taken aback to see what looked more like a pizza crust than a tart. The puff pastry, had indeed, puffed. Not big deal, I figured, it would sag a bit as it cooled. Cutting the apples was a bit time consuming, but really not too bad. It said to slice them thinly and place on the crust in a rosette pattern. With the apples cut as thinly as I could manage, I painstakingly placed them in the prettiest pattern I could. Yes! It was starting to resemble what I see in the patisseries! I measured out my sugar and butter and started to shower the rosette with half the sugar. It seemed like a bit much, but I decided I would check on it during baking to see if I would add the rest. I realized the recipe was probably for a much larger pan than I had purchased when I started to “sprinkle” the little pieces of butter all over. My god, this is a LOT of butter… I couldn’t bring myself to add the full amount. I put it in the oven and hoped for the best. Apparently, when they meant cut the apples thinly, they meant like, paper thin. This thing was nowhere near cooked at the 15 minutes mark. It took an additional 20 minutes, and some foil protection for the crust, to get it baked through. The first thing Geep said when presented with the “tart” was that it looked like an apple pizza. Sigh. Failure number one. (Though caloric, it was pretty good!)

Apple Pizza

My second dessert attempt was not actually mutant. I made a simple apple crumble one evening to get rid of the excess of apples I had. It was pretty easy and perfect for a fall evening. Apples+Cinnamon+Crumbles= Yum. Simple.

My third baking endeavor was less than attractive and took on a life of its own. I decided to make Dark Chocolate Banana Cupcakes with a Hot Cocoa Milk Soak, *drooooooool*. Cupcakes are pretty easy and who doesn’t love’em? I made my batter, filled my forms, baked them for 15 minutes and……

AVALANCHE!!!!

WTF? WHY? The funny thing is this photo was of my second batch, the first ones completely keeled over and made little soup puddles down the side. I wish I had known the oven tray had a slight gangster lean before I used it. Merde. As mutantly ugly as these suckers were, they were freakin’ tasty little chocolate-banana pillows. After I trimmed off their hemorrhages, added the hot cocoa milk soak, and frosted them to make them look as normal as possible, I crumbled up a few of the fallen soldiers and added them to the top. Apparently, my make-a-cupcake-look-normal skills are decent. Did I mention these are to DIE for? However, now that I made them, I don’t want to eat them (Chocolate Overload from licking fingers and checking batter). I need cupcake-eating volunteers STAT.

Can’t even tell they had extra appendages at one point. I’m a cupcake plastic surgeon.

failure states

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September 18, 2015

Greece, it seems, was not meant to happen for us.

After initially booking the trip in early April, the Purrito was forced to spend what felt like an inordinate amount of time and effort to re-book the trip once we decided that we’d like to stay another day; the vagaries of Expedia and non-instantaneous hotel cancellations resulted in having to slide the trip back two weeks, and losing the travel insurance. Apparently had we called, cancelled, and then made a completely new booking, we would have been fine, insurance-wise. As we called, asked to modify, but wound up cancelling and subsequently re-booking, the insurance was used and no longer afforded any protection (which we didn’t know).

Then there was the Grexit crisis over the summer which had us wondering if we’d be going at all, or if we’d be risking wading into a disintegrating social situation.

And finally, the cold/sinus infection/whatever-the-hell-it-is that hit me like a truck on Monday, and which ultimately ended up keeping us in Paris on Thursday morning.

I find that I have trouble visualizing myself in random places; whenever we book a trip, I have difficulty imagining myself in that place, and so it’s not particularly real or even very exciting that we’re going (a source of frustration to the Purrito, I’m sure) until I actually get to said place.

I had the opposite experience yesterday; laying in bed, I heard the church bells announce 11:30. Probably due to the fog induced by the decongestant, I found myself acutely aware and incredulous of the fact that there was an airplane sitting at a gate at CDG. Said airplane had two seats (exit row, with an aisle seat for me [thank you, love]) that we should have been in. Yet we weren’t; we were in bed. We wouldn’t be taking off shortly, we wouldn’t be landing in three hours, we wouldn’t be buying a ticket on the 3 line to get to the city center, and we wouldn’t find ourselves standing there, taken aback at the sight of the acropolis.

It was an intensely dissociative and surprisingly confusing mental state.

In the immediate term, our decision to cancel was vindicated by the fact that the walk that we took to what the Purrito terms “our neighborhood greasy spoon,” le Recrutement, was physically taxing. I’m not sure the hike up to the acropolis in 88° (F) weather would have gone particularly well.

Quell the disappointment this does not.

thumb war

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September 14, 2015

We can probably assume that this thumb was the loser.

picture dump: la parisienne

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September 13, 2015

The Purrito kindly volunteered to be the gatherer for our traditional Sunday breakfast; I normally go, but am not feeling spectacular due to an apparent sinus infection (oh the joy).

As she entered the flat, bread in one hand and Starbucks in the other, she mentioned that there was a band of unknown provenance at the end of the street.

After we ate, we put on a couple of layers and grabbed our umbrellas before heading out the door. At the intersection of Rue Saint-Dominique and Avenue Bosquet, we indeed found a band. Said band was set up for the amusement of a seemingly endless stream of runners, the vast majority of whom (there were some apparent roadies, for lack of a better term) were participating in the la parisienne run, which is, per the Purrito’s investigation, the largest women-only run in Europe.

I took a few pictures.

Runners running.

Runners dancing.

Runners dressing in silly outfits.

Dudes fronting.

The band playing. (Per their sign, they’re the science faculty band of the University of Paris South).

Moral support morally supporting.

junk

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September 13, 2015

I’m still processing the full magnitude of the failure of this weekend’s Plan (and I already have a draft of this post written), so I’m going to write about last weekend.

We took a much-needed rest and more or less hid from the world (though sadly not from the cats, bounding bastards that they currently are); while this was not in the original plan, we’re in a transitional period from the perspective of most of the museums, and the summer season exhibits are being replaced with those of the fall, leaving us with fairly limited options, at least so far as attractive List items go. Oh, and the fatigue imparted by the loading doses of a TNF-α inhibitor probably contributed to the decision as well.

What then did we do? Not a hell of a lot. After downing decidedly meh-level hypolites (turkey, honey mustard, pickles, and lettuce on a bagel) from the usually-much-better Bagelstein, we wandered up the street to the brocante, in search of god knows what.

Our neighborhood is no stranger to brocantes; the confluence of the foot traffic of Rue Cler, the proximity to the École Militaire métro stop, and the neighborhood demographics seems to yield a brocante every six to eight weeks. Perhaps due to said demographic, the street tends to be lined with old people selling old (“antique”) junk: postcards, silverware, drinking glasses, terrible art, expensive furniture, candelabras, metal toys, tacky sculpture, salvaged lion-head door knockers, cases of dusty watches, out-of-style-jewelry, random books, and disorganized heaps of LPs (records? Vinyl? “LP” is a term that my mom would (and does) use…) are all there, as is a guy who “sells” vintage corkscrews (scare quotes due to the fact that the corkscrews that aren’t sorted by date and locked up in a case are 50€ each).

In short, it’s a mobile junk heap with the occasional interesting find (though at the last one, we picked up a set of crystal Gatsby-style champagne glasses for under 20€). A trip to my copy of le Robert (side note: I love dictionaries) explained our disappointment with the most recent iteration: where we had thought that brocante meant antique expo, it turns out that it simply means “secondhand trade”; we’re thus being subject to a French flea market and I’m officially thoroughly disgusted (yes, I can be a snob, thanks for asking).

Those champagne glasses are, unfortunately, pretty damn nice…

Fish Beats

Purrito

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September 4, 2015

Since moving to Paris, we have dived head-first into the wonders of french cuisine. With markets bursting with beautiful, fresh, foods everyday, it’s easy to be sucked in. One of the great wonders we discovered is the french (or european, really) approach to seafood. They believe, wholeheartedly, in seasonality. You can find certain foods year-round in some of the supermarkets, but you’ll pay more and the quality won’t be the same.

Our first experience, aside from the discovery that our weekly salmon here is much better than at home, involved scallops, or Saint-Jacques. In Texas, you can find scallops, but they have NOTHING on the ones plucked from the ocean off the coast of Brittany, France in the winter. They are large, sweet, juicy, still have their silky orange roe sacks and are utterly amazing. They require nothing more than a little beurre, salt and pepper. By far, they are one of our favorites when they are in season. Sadly, Texas has access to only frozen scallops due to its geographical location and I can never settle for those again.

The second thing we discovered was mussels, or moules. When visiting Bruges, we tried mussels for the first time and loved them, so after doing a little research, we attempted to make them on our own. Mussels are another winter specialty. In the later months of the year, you can find them in large sacks, big enough for two people, for less than 15 euros. Moules Marinières, or mussels cooked in a garlic-butter white wine sauce) is our favorite. Besides our overzealous scrubbing of their shells that took well over an hour, (we can be a little anal), it was incredibly easy to make and very satisfying with a chunk of crusty bread.

All of these small successes, which also included langoustines and giant shrimps, has lead us to something that is very uncommon in the states: cooking, and eating, a fish whole. We often see beautiful fish at the Poissonerie, but never had the guts to try. Honestly, it seemed a little intimidating. How do you eat around all those bones? What about the skin? HOW DO YOU EVEN DO IT! * HAS BREAKDOWN*

Worry not, my friends, for here is our little fish tale, so you can embrace whole-fishy-goodness and save some serious money!

It started with an evening watching videos from Bart’s Fishtales on YouTube. He is this mellow Dutch guy who cooks, well, all things fish. Some of is stuff is a little too out there for us, but we happened to stumble upon a recipe where he cooked a whole fish in the oven. It looked amazing and possibly simple enough for us to pull off. Later that week, I remembered that French Guy Cooking, also on YouTube, had a crossover episode with Bart. French Guy, who is also amazingly charming by the way, usually takes more difficult french classics and makes them more manageable for those of us not Michelin-star trained. I located the video, showed it to Geep, and we agreed we wanted to give it a shot. This one was pan cooked (Called Truite Meunière), however, so we had to find a large enough skillet. NOTE: the whole recipe is in that video, this isn’t a food blog, dammit.

First, we chose our prey. You can make this with many kinds of fish, but we decided to go with the trout. We picked up these two beautiful specimens from our fishmonger for under 7 euros! Beau, non?

Deux Truites soaking in saltified water.

We bought them already gutted and cleaned, so we really had no work to do. Pro Tip: Rinse the fish with cold water and then soak them in heavily salted water for about ten minutes. It’s supposed to make the meat stay more moist or something. It turned out good, so trust the tip.

Next, we patted our fish dry and seasoned them inside and out with sea salt and pepper.

Seasoned Fish

Then, we had to flour our fish. We used a large glass brownie pan to hold our sifted flour. We salted and peppered the flour, as well. We dipped in the fish, making sure they were good and covered, before doing the strangest part, we went outside to beat our fish. We held them high over Paris, and beat them until the excess flour was on our balcony. Fresh fish beats. The header picture for this post shows the fish beats. We beat them, and it was glorious.

Freshly Beat Fish

It will probably be one of those things we remember when we are really old, “Hey, remember when we beat flour off of some trout in Paris?” says 90 year-old Purrito to 95 year-old Geep. (This will be followed by “What?”, “What?”. How romantic.)

After the fish beats were completed, we threw them, lovingly, into a large pan with un-clarified butter like French Guy’s method, and set them at a medium heat.

Cooking fish

Then, after a few minutes, a careful flip and…..

Deliciously golden-brown fish

After letting them cook for a few more minutes, confirming they were cooked well ( 135 degrees fahrenheit is about perfect), we pulled them from the pan. Add a little fresh butter back in, a handful of chopped parsley, and some fresh lemon juice, and voila! A great pour over sauce.

The skin was crispy, the fish was delicate, and everything from our salad with homemade vinaigrette and our simple potatoes was delicious. Oh, and you can’t forget the wine!

La Belle Vie Chez Fezzik In Paris

Eating around the bones was really easy. If you pulled the skin back, you see this natural line separating the top filet and bottom fillet. We used a spoon to separate along that line and then pushed the bottom fillet down and then the top filet up. Almost no bones.

Why did eating whole fish seam so scary? Why don’t more Americans eat fish this way? Who knows, but this is now one of our favorites. Plus, it’s an excuse to beat fish which pleases our inner weirdos.

science and progress

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September 2, 2015

Scrolling through my Lightroom library, I found myself aghast at the apparent speed with which a year had gone by; in searching for the prior set of pictures that I took from the observation deck of Tour Montparnasse, I discovered that said photos were just short of a year old, which I find hard to believe, even when considering the likely error in the date, due to camera-settings-related idiocy on my part.

Our first visit to la tour was at night; armed with the night shot and (simulated) infrared modes on my camera, I took blurry pictures of various places, only a few of which we had, at that point, visited. It was on that night last September that we first saw l’eglise saint-sulpice, and it was on that night that we looked around, still unfamiliar with the city, and realized that we largely had no fucking clue as to what was going on.

Friday afternoon’s jaunt to Montparnasse was markedly different; upon arriving at the top of the elevator, we hoofed it up the final three flights of stairs to the observation deck. The Purrito and I moved methodically around the roof, me photographing things of supposed interest while both of us more or less automatically named the landmarks, areas, (and in the Purrito’s case, even specifica parks and streets) and features of note that were in view. There are certainly areas that are still unknown (like what the hell anything in the northeastern side of the city is, or any non-la-défense areas outside of the périphérique, but we’ve come quite a long way, and have seen quite a few things, even if it sometimes feels like we’ve seen nothing at all.

Mindful of the tour groups that had been vomited forth from a bus and which had finally come up behind us, we departed the tower and walked, if only briefly, through a couple of the shops in the mall at the base of the building (the experience that provided the material for the Purrito’s previous post).

After eating bagel sandwiches (“New York” bagel places are popular here; Bruegger’s proved to be very mediocre, while Factory and Company in la défense is the reigning king, with Bagelstein in a close second place) we headed home, content, perhaps, with the knowledge that we’d crossed another item off of The List.

A good view of the cleaning rig on the side of the observation deck.

Les Invalides

The Panthéon

Sulpice

The Obelisk.

Luxembourg.

Madeleine.

Pompidon’t.

A shot of the gare’s railyard.

I don’t know; it’s an old advertisement.

It’s the Pasteur statue where I took pictures of people taking pictures. We’ve gone meta.

You can buy overpriced champagne up here.

A crane.

Yeah, yeah. I grudgingly included it.

dumb idea of the week: burning up on rentrée

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August 31, 2015

This week marks the end of the summer and the beginning of the French school year, and, had things gone as planned, our own return to the alliance francaise to continue our respective courses.

As it currently stands, the Purrito is currently in class, while I am at home in our flat.

When last we attended l’alliance, the temperatures were in the triple digits and our respective classes had dwindled to mere handfuls of students. Assuming that this situation would continue, we put off signing back up for classes, only to find today while the Purrito would be able to pick up where she left off, the A2.2 class of my former peers was now full, and the A2.3 class (one is apparently allowed to jump one level [each level is approximately one month]) is as well. I could theoretically meet with a teacher and request a waiver to jump two levels, but I’m disinclined to do so, on account of the fact that early A2 is where I should be, and I’m not inclined to skip material that would be useful. Yes, yes, autodidacts are truly the best, most wonderful members of humanity (or so every one of them ever has told me), but I have a stack of workbooks that I can complete myself. It’s not the grammar exercises that are the most useful; it’s the speaking, the listening, the interaction with others that makes the classroom study of the language so valuable.

The Purrito did not know any of this when she signed herself up (they apparently updated their computer system, so she couldn’t set up and pay for the both of us simultaneously, and same-day registrations are apparently no-refund), so we are, all things considered, trapped.

It’s been interesting to me, realizing how grounded and engaged being tutored and then taking French classes has made me feel; I genuinely have felt a touch adrift without them.

In any case, I suppose we have learned a lesson here: c’est la vie.

Wrong Sound Track

Purrito

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August 30, 2015

It is not uncommon to hear music in stores when shopping in the US, but in France, you only really hear it in larger stores and some of the smaller hipster shops. Usually, it is the ordinary american top 40 stuff you hear, but occasionally they throw caution into the wind and hope no one speaks english in the store. That being said, Geep and I stopped into a Habitat looking for my elusive fish spatula. While wandering around, looking at random kitchen gadgets, and chatting idly, we were suddenly stopped dead in our tracks. The radio was playing a song overflowing with obscenities.

Motherfuckers wanna get with me
Lay with me, love with me, all right

Here, for your enjoyment:

We looked around and everyone was completely cool with it, some were even bopping along. It was like the equivalent of walking into an Ikea and hearing 50 Cent playing. We were extremely amused. It did, however, make shopping for kitchen junk more fun.

Needless to say, this is definitely not America. There would be hoards of pearl-clutching moms running to customer service with their “I’d like to speak to the manager” haircuts crying about their kid’s little precious ears.

God, I love France.

maybe it’s my add, baby

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August 26, 2015

The Purrito and I found ourselves once more (this is visit the third; we’re now almost as comfortable in the ‘Dam as we are in Rouen) in Amsterdam this weekend, drawn by the promise of SAIL 2015. SAIL is a nominally-tall-ship-oriented boat gathering that happens every five years. In practical terms, it’s a number of huge sailing ships tied up at the docks, a number of moderate-sized sailing vessels floating around, masses of ordinary people with their pleasure boats of varying sizes, and a scattering of small military vessels, random workboats, and the hapless normal ship channel traffic desperately trying to claw its way through the flotilla parading around the IJ waterway.

Seeing as we spent effectively all of our time walking around boats or camped out taking pictures of boats (thank you sea captain from our second visit, who introduced us to what would turn out to be the best vantage point of the weekend – a small alcove near bagels and beans), I’ll shut up and let the (ridiculous number of) pictures continue the post.

There were little boats…

…and military boats…

…and pleasure boats…

…and Dutch boats…

…but it was really about these boats. Lots of these boats.

Very large sail-powered vessels are still a thing.

This sign really gets around.

Replica ships abounded, too.

I believe that this was the largest sail-powered vessel: a disturbingly large Russian specimen.

Not all of the pleasure craft were luxury yachts.

Nerdboat.

The range of sizes of Dutch flat-bottom-barge specimens was impressive.

The navy had a warship and a submarine.

Heeeyyyy sexy.

The Eye makes for an interesting background.

Not-quite-lovely-boats were also well represented.

A police vessel.

Somebody lost their cabbage. It was tragic.

The pedestrian drawbridge that takes us to the “island” on which Bagels and Beans is located.

We saw the shoe boat!

Fortunately, we decided to camp out at and then near Bagels and Beans on Saturday as opposed to taking the ferry across the harbor per our original plan.

That boat has a bar. It’s (theoretically [drinking and boating sounds like a recipe for disaster to someone with a very sensitive inner ear]) awesome.