Dining in London and Paris

My travel buddy has a tradition of eating at Harrods when she visits London. I was up for that so away we went. We were there for tea and spent  perhaps two hours enjoying our champagne and champagne cocktails. The food was very good but what I enjoyed most about the experience was watching the people. I called it the “princess parade.” I’ll add more details later.

 

I had three really nice dinners in Paris. I listed them in order of excellence. At le Dome, I had the best meal in recent memory that started with the best foie gras EVER. Everything we ate was so fresh and perfectly prepared including meats (chicken and lamb), fish, produce and desserts…particularly sorbets and other things made with fresh fruit.

 

Our first night in Paris we went to a bar/restaurant called Cru and had champagne (we ate on the train coming from London). We found Cru while wandering from a Metro station to the hotel where we needed to pick up a key to our apartment…all of this was in Le Marais. I listed Cru last because we didn’t eat there. The food smelled terrific and the ambiance was very nice. I couldn’t find a website for it but did find the link below.

 

We went to Alcazar our second night in Paris because again, my friend has eaten there before and wanted to go again. It was modern and hip and usually features live music upstairs. Due to the August holidays, they only had a d.j.. The meal was superb and I wrote down the ingredients of an appetizer we both had and will include that later.

 

The next night, we were pretty tired having climbed about 400 steps at the Eiffel Tower, walked around the Musee d’Orsay, and everywhere in between. We had a lovely lunch at a cafe at the d’Orsay, under one of the huge rail staion clocks there.

 

We decided to stay in our neighborhood for the night. I looked through a restaurant guide in the apartment and found a place right down the street and made a reservation. Walking there we saw some other historic buildings along the way including the national archives. We were waited on by four people and were given two more courses than the five we expected for the prix fixe meal. The reason: it was the last night before the place shut down for three weeks for vacation and we were among the last half dozen guests. Lucky us. Two hours later, we waddled back down the street and collapsed in bed. I’ll include the menu they gave us later along with other details about the meal.

 

On our last night in Paris we were picked up at the apartment for dinner in Montmartre and an Illuminations tour of Paris at night. Other  tourists were taking pictures of the place and I finally figured out why. We had been taken to Le Bonne Franquette which turned out to be a charming 400 year old restaurant that was frequented by Monet and other artists.  We also met a nice couple there from WDC; Shawn Duffy and Saule Allen. And we had a “fun” encounter with some Italian tourists which I’ll detail later. After our two hour dinner, we were supposed to have a two hour tour. It ended up being three and half hours and I’ll tell more about this later.

 Notice something? Our dinners were all two hour affairs. No fast food here!

Le Dome du Marais

 

http://www.ledomedumarais.fr/

 

 

Alcazar

 

http://www.alcazar.fr/Home/index.php

 

 

 

La Bonne Franquette

 

http://www.labonnefranquette.com/

 
Cru

We had three really nice dinners in Paris. I listed them in order of preference. At le Dome, I had the best meal in recent memory that started with the best foie gras EVER. Everythign we ate was so fresh and perfectly prepared including meats (chicken and lamb), fish, produce and desserts…particularly sorbets and other things made with fresh fruit.

 

Our first night in Paris we went to a bar/restaurant and had champagne (we ate on the train coming from London). We found it while wandering from a Metro station to the hotel where we needed to pick up a key to our apartment…all of this was in Le Marais. I listed that one last because we didn’t eat there. The food smelled terrific and the ambiance was very nice. I couldn’t find a website for it but did find this link.

 

Le Dome du Marais

 

http://www.ledomedumarais.fr/

 

 

Alcazar

 

http://www.alcazar.fr/Home/index.php

 

 

 

La Bonne Franquette

 

http://www.labonnefranquette.com/

 
Cru

 

http://www.qype.co.uk/place/736212-Cru-Paris

 

Fun with Oscar and Jane

A week ago I went over to my friend Jane Snow’s house. Jane is an author, extraordinary cook, food editor, James Beard Award winner, and a good friend to many. She writes an e-newsletter http://www.janesnowtoday.com/newsletter/rss.php?M=840&C=ec4dc8acb4ab29df1c7e178513287840&L=1 to which you can subscribe.
Since I’m a foodie myself and often share ideas with Jane, I have found myself mentioned in her newsletter a number of times. The most recent one (July 17) made me laugh out loud. You’ll have to judge for yourself. Her newsletter always has fun ideas and I’ve seen friends and my own mother become subscribers and receive their own mentions in the newsletter.
I can’t go to Jane’s house empty-handed. Why? Because every time I’m there she cooks for me. Even if I’m not invited for a meal, she feeds me. She wants to serve me tea. Cookies, cake, and ice cream. Tomatoes from her garden. I would be wracked with guilt if I went there without bringing her something. I went to Italy recently and took lots of pictures in the farmers markets, partly because I wanted to share them with her. I found some wooden food ornaments in Greve for her Christmas tree and some canned sea urchin in Venice. Why the sea urchin? Because there have been a few times when I’ve gone to her husband Tony’s Sushi Katsu retaurant http://www.sushikatsu.com/ and he’s been out of fresh sea urchin. I want to see what recipe he comes up with for the canned stuff.

Last week, I told Jane I was on the Atkins diet, and thought, she won’t worry about feeding me. I was wrong. She had made some lean pork loin and put it on top of some delicate salad greens, spritzed it with her own raspberry dressing and set some cute French radishes on the plate. I’m so sick of salad greens that I brought her an entire colander full of them from my garden, to give them away, but you’d better bet I scarfed down my salad.

She even made dessert. It was some high protein thing that was sort of like an ice cream popsicle. And the entire time we were wandering through her large vegetable garden, eating our dinner out on the deck, and talking inside the house, our dogs were playing. If you ever want to see what “puppy love” looks like, come on over when Oscar (her boy dog) and Rudy (my girl dog) get together. They are the best of friends and look at each other like they’re in love.

The first time we got the doggies together, they chased each other around in circles in her living room for what seems like an hour.  On subsequent visits to each other’s homes, one or the other or both of them were trying to pee on the carpet, as if to mark territory. Fortunately we broke them of that habit quickly. In the beginning, Oscar would bark at Rudy if she wasn’t playing enough. Rudy would snap at Oscar as if to tell him to shut up. Then they’d resume chasing each other in circles and wrestling. Now, they are quieter, wrestle more, run less, and stare at each other, like they’re in love. They stop to rest on the couch, panting away, then resume the running around. It is quite entertaining.

Food, friends, and funny dogs. Its all good.

I’m collecting favorite lines

“Sweet Jesus, his bullshit knows no bounds.”

I sent John Ettorre something to read which I thought might amuse him. This was his response back to me. I liked it so much I posted it on my bulletin board in my office. For more of John’s wit go to http://www.workingwithwords.blogspot.com/

While watching the ABC show “The Unusuals” I heard one character say something like “she likes me best when I’m least like myself.” I knew exactly what he meant. There’s nothing worse than being made to feel like you’re not o.k. just the way you are. You shouldn’t have to drastically change who you are, pretend to be something you’re not,  in order to be in a relationship with someone, or worse yet, to be emotionally abused for being yourself.

Another line I liked recently in NBC’s “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” spoken by Jeff Goldblum’s character went something like ” megalomaniacal narcissists forget that other people manipulate too.” Ooh. I got chills. It was sort of karma and what goes around comes around for a really bad guy.

Recently I was at an outdoor concert observing the interesting parade of people in attendance with my friend Susan Parish Schwab, chef and owner of Splendid Fare Catering http://www.linkedin.com/in/susanparishschwab.. I enjoy people watching. Airports are good places to watch people and it turns out, this concert venue was a  gold mine of such opportunities. 

It struck me as I sat there that not everyone was as enamored as I am of both the BBC and TLC versions of “What Not to Wear.” I wondered if some of these folks ever looked in a mirror and the phrase “what was she thinking?” popped in my head a number of times.  No matter what shape or size you are, you can look and feel good about yourself. What you put on the outside can affect how you feel on the inside and vice versa. Of one man Susan said ”he’s in the last chapter of ‘what’s the use?’ ” We were certainly motivated to go home and work out harder. I don’t ever want to look or feel like I’m in that last chapter.

Another line I like is ”he’s a legend in his own mind.” I don’t know who said it originally but it is a good one. It might even describe a particular music-loving ,balding, white-haired man with bushy Elvis-style sideburns, hairy back and tattooed arm,  in his 70’s, dressed all in black, with baggy Jordache-style jeans that he had to pull up while adjusting his rolled-up short-sleeved sparkly, studded t-shirt by sticking his hands down the backside of his pants every time he stood up, all the while waving at people he thought he knew but they acted like they didn’t know him. OK, so he was probably harmless, but it made for great theater at the concert.

What’s Not to Like?

There is so much to say about my trip to Italy. First, my overall impressions.

• Men. Until a taller single female member of our group pointed it out to me, I hadn’t noticed that they were on the shorter side. What I did notice is that they were clean-shaven. Perhaps it is because it is hot in the summer. Whatever the reason, I liked it. Enough already with the little beard and mustache look in the States. And they had nice haircuts. One of the older Aussie gents got a haircut in Florence and he indeed looked more handsome. At least I thought so and I suspect his lovely wife did too. The men were thin. In fact, only the tourists were at all overweight. If you aren’t fit, you can’t do all of the walking required in this sort of travel. The men wore clothing that fit. In other words they didn’t wear baggy clothes or horrible, long, wrinkled shorts, basketball, football or baseball jerseys. The only men in shorts were bicyclists in tight bike shorts. And the men looked at the women in a very appreciative way. Another woman on the tour commented that “they look right through you.” Whatever they were doing, I liked it. They were polite, friendly, helpful, sometimes flirtatious (the waiters were, for sure) and they treated women like women. They talked to you while looking straight at your face, not at your breasts or any other part of your anatomy. Not that they didn’t notice. They did, but it wasn’t in an obvious way. An older man helped me off the gondola and didn’t call me “ma’am.” He called me “amore mio.” Yeah. I liked that.
• Food. Since this was a food-oriented tour we got to go to farmers’ markets in Florence and Venice and the adjacent fish market in Venice. The food was all beautiful and fresh. Wait until you see the pictures. I wanted to go home and plant more in my garden. We bought and ate some of it on the spot. We helped make our own lunch at Baldovino in Florence (I’ve mastered the recipes). We ate whatever the owner and waiter brought us at Il Latini in Florence. The wineries (Castello Vecchiomaggio near Greve in Chianti and Tenuta San Vito near Montelupo Fiorentino) served us food, olive oil they’d produced themselves and delicious chianti and chianti classico and other varieties. We all ate gelato almost every day, sometimes more than once a day. The espressos and cappucinos were fragrant and delicious. Try as I will, I will not find prociutto as good back home. In Italy, it melted in my mouth like butter and it wasn’t too salty.
• Sparkly things. The jewelry in Florence and the glass in Venice. Enough said.
• Monumental things. Rome, particular was overwhelming. There were historic buildings, ruins, statues, fountains, and staircases everywhere. You’d think after having seen the movie Angels and Demons less than a week before the trip I would have been prepared, but I wasn’t.
• Art. From The Vatican to St. Peter’s to the Uffizi Gallery to the Academia, to the new museum at the new Punta della Dogana and the Biennial in Venice…there was art everywhere. We didn’t see most of it either. There just isn’t time. Of note, were the gallery leading to the Sistine Chapel and then the Sistine’s ceiling, the original statues of David and the Pieta. There was a very thought provoking gallery in the Punta della Doggana containing three-dimentional art depicting Nazi war atrocities. That gallery had a big window overlooking a canal where there were ocean liner-sized yachts parked. Talk about a contrast.
• Architecture. First of all, at some point the Italians weren’t good at foundations for towers. The belltowers in Pisa and Venice all lean and the decorative ones in San Gimignano mostly fell down. But other things like the Coliseum are still standing despite being ravaged over the years, stripped of all of their marble coverings and metal support rods. Our hotel in Florence, for example, the Croce di Malta, was a convent in the 1800’s that was built on foundations from Roman times. The variety of buildings evolved and it is interesting how the old and new blend together so well. The homes on Burano were clearly Italian with a flair reminiscent of the Caribbean.
• Smokers. Too many of them.
• People. There were so many looking at all of the historical sites. You sort of don’t pay attention to them because there isn’t anything you can do about them. At the same time, you need to watch for  potential pickpockets and they became pretty easy to spot most of the time. The residents were welcoming, friendly, and talked to you in whatever language they could. I watched salesmen in the Vecchio Murano factory store switch from Italian to German, to English to Japanese without any effort.
• Music. We were treated to one night of opera arias at dinner and another night of cornier fare at a monastery (that’s amore…). Wonderful.
• Gardens. In Rome people had gardens planted on balconies, roofs, and in window boxes. Away from the cities, particularly in Tuscany, everyone seemed to have vegetable gardens. I vowed to go home and plant more. What was I thinking making the rows so far apart? I needed them to be more crowded and full of good things to eat. I loved the Mediterranean Pines and the tree-lined streets (reportedly Mussolini’s idea) in Rome.
• Leaving. Difficult. I want to go back and have a list of places to see the next time. I’ll go back to the three major cities again because we couldn’t possibly see everything there even though we saw a lot.
• Eating. I ate nothing but Tuscan food for a week upon returning home.
• Views. Seeing Florence from the Piazza Michelangelo. Turning a corner at the Academia in Florence and seeing David at the end of the hall. Turning any corner at the Vatican or St. Peter’s Basilica and seeing more and more and more fabulous sculpture, paintings, mosaics, gold, and marble. The Trevi Fountain and all of the people there. The view from atop the Spanish Steps. The beautiful food in the markets. Shiny blingie things, glass, masks, shoes, purses, oh my! That infamous tower in Pisa. Seeing the hills of Tuscany from the top of the village of San Gimignano and the restaurant on the “farm” at Tenuta San Vito. None of us wanted to leave, ever.

Italy-a life changing experience

Over the decades, for many reasons, I never went to Italy. I wasn’t included in other people’s plans, partners didn’t have the same interest in going, I didn’t have money for overseas travel, I was in school, raising kids, supporting a family…blah blah blah. Bottom line: I didn’t go to Italy.

A few years ago, I read the book Under The Tuscan Sun, saw the movie, and met the author. We chatted briefly about our experiences working for the California State University system, and I thought, “gee, if she can meet a younger man, travel to Italy, maybe I can too.”

Still, getting to Italy didn’t happen. I talked about taking my daughter after she graduated from college and then she made plans to go to Costa Rica. Another friend said she wanted to go, but her personal life fell apart so Italy didn’t happen. I started looking at tours that I could take on my own and figured out when I could go. Then I found out that some of my family in California had made plans to rent a villa and go to Italy. I gave up on friends and family, went on-line, picked a tour, and signed up to go…alone. Well not exactly alone. On a tour with a bunch of people who I didn’t know. 

In recent years I’ve gone on a few tours. Some were only a day long, others much longer. In every case I had met wonderful people and made friends with whom I socialize, e-mail, Facebook, and call. My world expands when I travel not just because of the places I see and the people I meet who live there but because of the people I meet along the way who have decided to go to the same destination. We start with that in common and learn that there is so much more.

In the weeks leading up to the trip, I was so busy at work I didn’t really have time to read through the materials about exact sites we’d see or optional activities I could sign up for. All I knew is that I’d spend a few nights in each of three major cities, travel around Tuscany, mingle with real people in real farmers’ markets, and get an opportunity to learn more about Tuscan cooking. Bene.

As the trip got closer, I got more excited, and I packed my bags several days in advance. This is unheard of for me. I make lists and pack at the last minute. Not this time.

I flew from Cleveland to Atlanta. In Atlanta I overheard one of the Cleveland passengers tell someone else that they were going to Italy and were staying in Rome, Florence, and Venice. That was the same itinerary as my trip so I knew we’d be together.

On the flight from Atlanta to Rome I sat next to a charming college professor from the University of Georgia who was on his way to teach landscape architecture for U.GA in Cortona. Tough duty. Before the teaching duties started he was going to go to Croatia, Naples and Rome. I was totally jealous. He said he had to wait seven years for his “turn” to come up so he could go. We chatted a bit about our kids, his wife and her travel-related job, and our experiences at various universities. We also ate, watched movies, slept, and talked about Italy. At the end of the flight, he handed me his business card. I realized then that I’d left a stack of them at home and forgot I had some stuck in my camera bag. I told him my name and he said “it is nice to know your name now that we’ve slept together.” Great line. Why can’t single men come up with those?

At the Rome airport he went off to wait for a flight to Croatia. I met up with the two ladies who had flown with me in Cleveland and discovered…they were from (da da daaaaa) … AKRON. As it turned out, there were 28 people in our tour group. Six were from Australia, two from Canada, and twenty from the States (Texas, West Virginia, New York, Arizona, New Mexico, Pennsylvania…and THREE of us from Akron, Ohio). The mother lived in Portage Lakes where her daughter had grown up. The daughter had moved around, was married and now lived in Knoxville, Tennessee. Her father grew up and still lived a few miles from me, in Bath, near Akron.

That was just the beginning.

Over the next week and a half, I learned something about every person in the group and it greatly enhanced the Italian experience. I not only saw Italy through my own eyes, I got to appreciate it through others’ as well.

Spring

Growing up, I loved to play in the sandbox in my backyard, dig in the dirt, splash in puddles, and run through the sprinklers. I loved the smell of the flowers, freshly cut grass, rain and soil. All of that backyard, outdoor activity was wonderful to me. I remember growing things at our house in Chatsworth, mostly the boysenberries, and eating them right off the vine. We tried other vegetables and had a fig tree behind the garage. My grandparents had things growing in their yards too; the most memorable being the avocados. To this day, one of my favorite things to eat for breakfast is avocado on toast accompanied by fresh squeezed orange juice.

At our next house in Thousand Oaks, we had asparagus, artichokes, lemons, oranges, strawberries, and occasionally other things. Once, my grandfather gave me a spider plant which grew so prolifically that I filled the planter on the front porch with its offspring. My room was filled with posters on the walls, and houseplants by the window. I even liked mowing the lawn and clipping the hedges.

When I left T.O., all I had for several years was potted plants. I had a balcony or a patio at my various apartments and they were filled with plants which eventually included a potted lemon tree. Yes, I moved those plants with me wherever I went.

When I finally bought my first house in Long Beach, the potted plants went with me. By then, I’d inherited some of my grandfather’s prize winning staghorn ferns and had them hanging on the walls on my front porch. The lemon tree was sitting there too. Then one night, someone stole the lemon tree and one of the staghorns. I had to move them all to the backyard.

I started planting more citrus trees along one side of the house and boysenberries in the backyard. I trained thorny bouganvillea along the back fence because they were pretty and discouraged would-be burglars. I planted roses along the side fence for the same reason. I took out large swaths of lawn and replaced them with trees and other native drought hardy plants.

Then I moved to another home in Long Beach that had a very shady yard which was great for the staghorn ferns, but not for anything edible, except a big patch of rosemary. I barely did anything in the yard as someone was paid to do it for us and I didn’t have any choice in that matter. There were automatic sprinklers in the front and backyards. I shopped the local farmers’ market for fresh produce but missed being able to really grow things.

Then I moved to Ohio. I had an acre to play around with. Well, sort of. There were some guys from a lawn service who mowed. I signed up for gardening classes within the first year. I had moved from the dry desert and Mediterranean climate of California’s zone 9 to Ohio’s four seasons and zone  5. I  knew nothing about plants like hostas, or when it was safe to plant and the danger of frost had passed. I started planting bulbs and flowering perennials. I asked the lawn guys not to touch the planting beds because they used weed whackers and cut everything indiscriminately. I started trimming the dozens of bushes and nearly a hundred trees. I liked doing it.

I wanted to plant a vegetable garden. But, I was discouraged from doing this by a short-sighted person who liked the big, wasteful, over fertilized  green lawn, didn’t understand composting, and made disdainful remarks about turning our property “into a farm.” This was actually kind of humorous because at one time, the area had been dotted with small farms.

So I mixed tomato plants, raspberries, blackberries, and boysenberries in with roses along the side of the garage, where he never looked. I tried asparagus near the rhododendrons, knowing that he never set foot in the backyard and wouldn’t know what they were even if he saw them.

And then, I was left with the property, to do with exactly what I wanted. I bought three fruit trees (apples and a pear) at the end of the season, drastically marked down, and planted them. This year, they flowered for the first time. I started a vegetable garden next to a new 8 x 10 foot garden “guest house” where I could neatly store my gardening supplies. I didn’t get the area fenced in as early as I’d hoped but managed to plant several types of tomatoes, tomatillos and a grape vine. 

Suddenly, home gardening has become all the rage. Organic farming, discontinuing the use of chemical fertilizers on lawns, replacing lawns with plants that take less water and no mowing are popular. I’m happy to join in and continue to enlarge my planting beds and eliminate lawn that needs to be mowed. I mow my own lawn. I don’t have sprinklers. If it doesn’t rain, the lawn doesn’t get watered.

This year, that 22 x 24 foot garden patch is fenced. In addition to tomatoes  and tomatillos I hope to plant squash, peas, lettuce, spinach, and other greens. I just hope I can keep the critters out. I had 6 cubic yards of compost delivered which I added to my homemade compost. I may even get a chipper/shredder and start making my own mulch from twigs and branches.

Today I was shoveling mud and compost. I was moving boulders. I took pictures of my garden. Later I used the hose to make puddles so I could clean the compost from the bottom of my shoes.  Soon I’ll be planting. And then it’ll be time to get in the little pond at the base of my fountain and clean out the muck that accumulated this winter. And ordering mulch to spread around the yard.

All of this might sound like work to some. But to me, it is child’s play. It is the same stuff I enjoyed doing as a kid. Yes, I miss my citrus trees. I loved the smell of the orange blossoms and having fresh juice. Luckily, I have many flowering trees in Ohio which are even more spectacular this time of year. Really, it doesn’t get any better than playing in mud, puddles, sprinklers, smelling the flowers, and eating things from your own garden.

Hello blog world!

I have used e-mail for work, pleasure, and community activities since my days at the Los Angeles Times  in the 80’s. I created a MySpace page sometime in this century but haven’t looked at it since. I think I did it just to check up on what my daughters were doing and but in the end it really wasn’t that relevant to my life, so I quit.

Now I’m active on Facebook and even Twitter. Again, I was motivated to follow what the girls were doing but found so many childhood friends, I was hooked. I regularly talk to my kids’ friends, former co-workers, buddies from school, my parents’ friends, overseas travel companions, and some I’ve never met face-to-face but I know of their exploits because of our virtual relationships.

I’ve now been on Facebook long enough to un-friend a few people. Truly, not everyone is my friend. Some just cross the line. And to quote Mary J. Blige, which I do often, “no more drama in my life.” Buh-bye….un-friended. I even learned to send updates simultaneously with TweetDeck (from a friend of a friend) or WindowsLive. I use LinkedIn extensively for business networking and promotion of events.

A few years ago the most exciting thing you could find out about me through a Google search was that I helped to co-write and present a software engineering education paper at a conference in New Orleans in 1999. Woo. there has to be better goodies out there about me by now, so I looked. HA. There are so many of “us” you’d have to know me personally to figure out which C.P. person I was in your Google Search. Maybe some anonymity is o.k.

So what’s next for me technology-wise? I get impatient with my 4 year old computer at home because it is slower than my one-year old laptop at work. What do to? I’ve debated about upgrading my phone. The wireless companies are always pushing us to upgrade very two years, which I almost never do. I was due for a new phone to replace my Motorola Q last August but I’m happy with it, so I haven’t replaced it. With all of the activity on Facebook and Twitter, I thought about getting a BlackBerry but I didn’t like the way the virtual keyboard worked, so I waited. Today, I heard that Verizon is talking to the iPhone people so I may just wait a little longer on that upgrade and get one of those new rumored cool gizmos. And then do I get one that is capable of communicating from overseas? Would that be worth the expense or should I forget about being communicative while on vacation and just rent a cell phone for emergencies. Aack. Decisions, decisions.

But one thing I CAN start now….the BLOG. Contrary to what some people think, these new technologies CAN be timesavers. I spend less time e-mailing because now I can tweet something and have it post on Facebook and Twitter without e-mailing the same information to a bunch of people separately. For longer posts….I’ll have the this. I don’t know what I’ll write about. Not exactly. The usual, to be sure; people, places, flora, and fauna. The unusual; two-degrees of separation, rowing, cancer, the Goodyear blimp hovering over Progressive Field at this very moment (I can see it from my office window), and driving home past that damned deer carcass on 77 in Brecksville….the same deer that committed suicide by trying to jump over my car (it didn’t quite make it)  as I drove home one dark November night going 60 MPH. Did you know they don’t clean that stuff up?

Stay tuned.