The French & Coca

What is it with the French and Coca Cola? I don't get why it has such a place of honor on the table? It's ubiquitous - on cafe tables...

Even on cafe table mats?!

While I was having an elegant breakfast at cafe Pouchkine...

French-speaking fellow eaters were imbibing horrid caca 'coca'.

What's up with that?

Eating lunch with Jill/Mad about Macarons at Jean-Paul Hevin, I couldn't help notice an attractive couple drinking coca with their lunch! OUCH et yuck.

No wonder French wines are suffering...

Can you imagine my shock to see French sandwiches wrapped in coca-cola bags...

Then put into Coca-Cola carrier bags :O

And worse news yet:

French Girl has mini cans in her frigo. Does it get any worse? I ask you. What can we do as Americans to stop this heresy? 

The French are NOT perfect!!
Au Revoir Coca!!!

Pollock'e Toy Museum

Yesterday Bill said,"the toy theater is just wonderful!" Perfect segway for me to take you along to London's Covent Garden! Where once there was vegetable and fruit sellers, now you'll find antiques and hot chocolate (22 kinds) and... Pollock's Toy museum. Just head upstairs... For a treasure trove of toys, miniatures and papercutouts. So many DIY paper toy theatres.

Reproduced from Victorian designs. Pollock's has been making the best toy theatres for over a hundred years...

You can still buy everything essential (Pulcinella and Cinderella for just a few pounds) to put together an imaginary paper cutout world.

Victorian Times , contact, 9" x 11"

Tiny Mad Hatter's tea party miniatures can perform on your cardboard toy stage...

Plus Buckingham Palace guards.

A Bear will attend.

Wearing a pink clown's hat.

Victorian noise makers and spinning tops are provided should you get bored during the performance.

Post-performance hot-mulled wine awaits you in Covent Garden. And a perfect plate of paella for a fiver.

BONJOUR POLLOCK'S TOY MUSEUM!

Grands Crus de Bordeaux

Last Friday afternoon I got to attend a special event. It only comes round once a year - the Grand Crus de Bordeaux tasting - time for the new 2007 vintage. I admit I made a bee line to the back wall to my favorite, the Sauternes - they have a tendency to run out quickly from past experience. First look at the wine's color in the glass before tasting - it should be a golden yellow that will become progressively darker as it ages. Then the all important "nosing" of the wine to enhale it's aromas - dried pineapple, apricot, caramel, vanilla, honey, peach - miam Then the sip and swill it around inside your mouth so it hits all areas... Ah...very important. Take down thoughtful notes in the little book provided. Then you spit into the sipttoons, so you can go on tasting unfettered, but I have a hard time spitting Sauternes... After each taste/ slug of wine you rinse your glass with water and cleanse your palete with a plain cracker and a bite of fromage. This taster is well armed.

You are given one glass to taste all the wines as you enter - always an Austrian Riedel glass, only the best at the Bordeaux tastings.

The Marriott ballroom was jammed packed with serious trade wine tasters dashing about to get their slug of Bordeaux best wines served up by the chateau owners - a rare treat.

After 2 hours all that's left are the empties. I was ready to say,

au revoir till next year's Grand Crus tasting.

Which brings me to a book I'm waiting for, by cutting edge winewriter Michael Steinberger, Au Revoir To All That. Have you heard? Steinberger thinks French food has gone downhill in the past 25 years. French cuisine is in a rut, ruined by the invasion of le fast food (France is McDo's second biggest market), stringently high VAT charges, strict labor laws, the stifling dominance of the Michelin guides etc.

"The result is a sharp and funny book that will give Francophiles everywhere an entirely new perspective—political, economic, personal, and cultural—on the crisis in the country and food they love."
You can catch Michael Steinberger's wine columns at Slate.

Or hear him at NPR.

I passed Chateau Beaumont's table at the tasting, and remembered my stay at there toute seule for a few very hot July days while on a painting jaunt. 

I wasn't really alone - thousands of Bordelaise buzzing bugs kept me company at night - no AC or screens in a medieval turret. I was happy to bid au revoir Ch. Beaumont a few days early.

I spent last weekend recovering from too many sips of Sauternes.

BONJOUR BORDEAUX!

NY Fancy Food Show

Yesterday I visited the 3-day FANCY FOOD SHOWat the Jacob Javits Center.

Someone once advised me to just taste olive oils the first day.

Tasting olive oils from Spain, Italy, Napa, France, Greece could keep you very busy.

This they advised was the best way to find tune your taste buds.Then you could proceed to Balsamic vinegars or whatever and keep comparison tasting.

But when good old fashioned Butterscotch sauce beckons your taste buds nearby,

temptation gets the better of you and fine tuning goes out the window.

EVERYONE said I must taste Charles Chocolates...David Lebovitz implored readers to taste Charles' bars.It's so much easier to sample at a wine tasting.You sip and spit, followed by bites of bread to cleanse your palate.With food, you taste, bite, chew, swallow.

Often I try to take samples home to taste at leisure.But these chocolate shards, if they make it home without melting, get confusing.

Which was which? I've yet to come up with a solution to these massive tastings...

A VERY BIG item at the show was S-A-L-T !
Was there more salt than anything else at the show?I already have 4 kinds of salt in my kitchen. One I got at last year's show, Cyprus Flakes

I bought Fleur de Sel de Guerande at the Fauchon Closing because you're supposed to have it.I keep forgetting to crack open these jars. And 2 kinds of Greek sea salt I use regularly.

A 250 gram jar lasts me a year.

Do I really need more salt? These are pink Himalayan rock SALT are from David Burke and Donatello

You lay raw tuna on the rock salt and it's cured..?

Bella Cucina had one of the prettiest displays at the show.
They also had SALT - flavored salts. Please tell me why I don't get this?
This I get :) Single origin chocolate and vanilla ice cream from CHOCTAL.
Like all the single origin chocolate bars around,
From Ghana, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic etc. Very Yummy even if my taste buds can't remember what those different chocolates taste like.

Not ice cream but balls of evervescent bath lotions!
This blurry picture gives you an idea what the show looks like.HUGE and this is just the downstairs! I haven't made it to the upstairs yet.
Do you want more? Let me know :)
I've always heard about

The PAVLOVA!

The Pavlova dessert was first created in the early 1930s in honor of Russian ballerina, Anna PAblove by Australian chef, Herbert Sachse.

It's a soft meringue cake, crispy on the outside but light and fluffy inside and topped

with whipped cream and fruits!
In ALMOST FRENCH, author
Sara Turnbull, makes it for her French relatives and knocks their socks off.
Delicious but sweeeeeeeeet!
New Zealand saved the day with their fresh Kiwis.
You long for some real food at these tasting extravaganzas.The spare carrot or a Kiwi cleanses & refreshes your palate
so you can keep going and forge onward tasting, tasting, tasting.
Very selectively of course!