A Second Helping

A second helping Like it or not, from THE FANCY FOOD SHOW at the Javits.

Because these solid chocolate cups from Chocolate by Sparrow could not be ignored.

More SALT, in case you didn't believe me...
Here you can DIY just like Parmesan cheese...
Wine ice cream by Mercer's
The greyish one is Port + Riesling, Zinfandel, Chardonnay
Very refreshing and light.
Tall Salt here...
Spanish Serrano ham was another palate refresher...
HIMALANIA SALT!? This has 84 trace minerals..is salt the new SUPER food?
Help yourself to a scoop.
Texas Pecans from SanSaba River Pecan Company

served every which way - Nut to tart.
Native American Tea kindly served up WARRIOR'S BREW to fortify show attendees.
They give out Oscar-like statues to the best foods purveyors,
And the lobster stew from Hancock Gourmet Lobster Co.
deserved every one of these!
Ahem...Chocolat Chaud...No tastes on offer...
This one is for Merisi from the Austria pavillon.
Mozart cheese! Is he spinning or what?

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!

Visiting Cafés Richard Factory

I've always loved the smell of coffee. When I lived on 13th street, my next door neighbor's morning coffee would waft through the wall and wake me up like the best alarm clock.

And I've always loved coffee ice cream, even if it keeps me up till 3AM. But last Paris trip I learned to love coffee every which way. I tasted this "flight" of different expressos.

When I visited the coffee factory outside Paris. I got to experience every step of the coffee roasting process. These resident antique coffee mills are just for show.

Talk about heady coffee aromas. There is nothing like marching through a coffee roasting factory for a wake-up call. Roasting transforms the green beans into a product that can be brewed and unlocks at least 700 aromatic elements.

A wide range of carefully selected beans are blended just like wine or chocolate.

Freshly roasted coffee is sent out every morning to Paris' cafes and restaurants in these sweet little trucks... guess who's wearing the white coat and hat reflected in the truck.

And lands on your Paris cafe table ready to wake you up! Just enhale...YUM!

 

Have you had coffee at Les Deux Magots, Angelina, Cafe de Flore, Bhudda Bar, La Tour d'Argent, Le Dome, La Coupole, Le Jules Verne Tour Eiffel? You've been drinking Cafés Richard coffee.

La Charlotte de l'Isle

More rats / souris today. Well chocolate rats only.

More Paris cafes

And more HOT CHOCOLATE with Corey of Tongue in Cheek. At La Charlotte de l'Isl 24, rue Saint-Louis-en-l'Isle 75004

This is a tiny shop with limited hours - 2 to 8 PM. Only open on Thursday through Sunday. And why not? When you visit a wizard's parlor, you don't expect regular hours.

A lovely tulip bouquet next to the cash register.

Our table...This picture is courtesy of the La Charlotte de l'Isle website. Merci!

The divinely thick hot chocolate And served like no other in Paris. In perfect Japanese tea bowls with a Moroccan-style pitcher.

La Charlotte de l'Isle is famous for it's antique chocolate molds. I didn't see any milk chocolate at all. We were so satisfied with the big pitcher of hot chocolate we forgot to buy anything.

And to end. MORE RATS. Nibbling on candied orange peel. Attached to a big blob of dark chocolate.

Happy Breakfast 

Ratatouille

Do you love Paris?OUI!Do you love Food?OUI!Do you love RATS?
NON !

No WAY!!
Well you will, after you see Ratatouille.

I promise you will love REMY, the protagonist and creative life force in RAT. 

The cookery details are quite athentic in RAT.
Note here the professional lemon zest graters...
French Laundry chef, Thomas Keller and Anthony Bourdain were consultants..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu-7olnY6Xs&mode=related&search=

The filmmaker, Brad Bird was kind enough to give us a bunch of videos on the making of the film and how they all determined so many indepth details on life inside a Paris restaurant, on speaking French, on haute cuisine.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DVnVZiwzXQ&NR=1

Most of all, Ratatouille is about the creative process.

The New York Times review puts it right: Written and directed by Brad Bird and displaying the usual meticulousness associated with the Pixar brand, “Ratatouille” is a nearly flawless piece of popular art, as well as one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film. It provides the kind of deep, transporting pleasure, at once simple and sophisticated, that movies at their best have always promised.

And here's what the French have to say about RATATOUILLE!

Shooting The Chefs

More brilliant career history, since you loved the Bocuse story. I got involved with The James Beard House because I fell in love with fancy plating while at a French spa, Les Pres D'Eugenie les Bains. I took a cooking tour visiting New York's top restaurant kitchens when I returned.The leader suggested I volunteer at the James Beard House so I could learn to plate on the site.

This chef is 'plating' = creating beautiful plates for the diners. He is making sure every plate is perfect and delectable.That's how I joined the Beard House parsley chopping brigade.

The chefs perform in the kitchen like theater. They dance around like Baryshnikov, working in unison. I loved sketching them. But plating is HARD WORK, and first chance I got, I switched to shooting the chefs.

Watching the chefs move around is like being at a life drawing class... I was dying to draw them! As soon as I got home I'd start sketching and next day I'd shoot off my sketches via fax into the chef's kitchens.

I became the Toulouse Lautrec of the kitchen. I met every chef in the food world and I drew ✏️ them.

But painting those chefs caused me such weltschmerz /world-pain. Finally a week before the opening of portrait show I figured it out. I painted multiple drawings on a toned ground canvas like old master drawings. Plus I added their signatures for texture.

I loved painting chefs from the back especially...so much character is revealed from the back view.
I almost forgot. Part of the hard work of photographing the chefs dancing in the kitchen, was shooting these gorgeous plates. AND eating them. The top dish is a roasted peach filled with berries and ice cream. The bottom dish looks like fish + chips, but is really Rattlesnake + chips. All part of the job of shooting the chefs. More on my brilliant careers to come.

Croissants!

Last Friday Merisi asked me to bring on the croissants 🥐 And I served up Paul Bocuse. So today you get croissants.

This pile of golden, perfect croissant pur beurre 🧈 are fromCADOR Patisserie.

Again Dalloyau's lovely croissant. Now I spy a lone almond sitting on top. Was it indeed an almond croissant peut-etre?

The arms-out-straight croissant from AU CHAI DE L'ABBAYE.The controversey of "the arms" has been resolved by both Kris and Jen .

In addition, Kris says,
Crescent-shaped croissants (hence their name) are croissants ordinaires, and you can eat them with butter.
AND you don't cut it open or slice it or anything,
No, you take a bite. Then you slap a bit of butter (I prefer "doux" or unsalted) on the bit where you've bitten,

Watercolor croissant 🥐 

And then you eat that, and so on.
The straight ones are croissants au beurre,

Petit Dejeuner at cafe Saint Regis letter 💌

Don't add butter 🧈 to them.
Just dunk them in your chocolat chaud, or cafe au lait. Are you confused?No need.
Any reasonably good cafe will serve the arms-out pur beurre croissant.
As well as some very nice Normandie beurre,
if you must put butter 🧈 on your already buttery croissant.

Les Deux Magot Paris letter

This half-eaten one is from Cafe Deux Magots.
Oh and don't forget to listen for the correct "CRUNCH" of your croissant.
They even discuss this at length in the new film, RATATOUILLE! Again Francois Simon and the Figaro testing team are out there helping us to find Paris' BEST CROISSANT
And PIERRE HERMÉ is the winner 🏆 This man can do no wrong.

I’m Carol Gillott, an artist living in Paris. Every month I send out beautifully illustrated letters that capture the true Parisian experience. 

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Thanks for reading PB ❤️

☕️ If you’d like to support my work, you can buy me a KO-FI here  ☕️  ❤️ Thank you so much! 

This is my morning croissant 🥐

Just an imprint on a plastic placemat from China

Found in the $.99 cent store!
I shall wait for October in Paris to take a bite of the REAL thing👏