pictures

so saturday i took a lot of very nice pictures, mostly textures, in le jardin du luxembourg, and tried to put some of them up in a slideshow here, but blogger is not cooperating. however, you can see some of them here, on my flickr page. i'll likely put them on my deviantART, too (at least some), because i love that site, but that may take a while. my image workflow is much slower than my text one; sorry. it should get faster and more efficient as i figure these things out.

here's one to tide you over:

some real collectanæ

i hate the academie française because they are linguistic fascists.

a businessman riding a velib down the center of rue St. Germain wearing lime green alligator skin shoes

eye-flirting is an art which cannot be successfully described in words, except maybe by a very talented poet. james blunt tried half-successfully, but it's hard to get the nuances of the electric rush right.



babylon road

a man with a briefcase jaywalking across the three lanes to the center of place de la madeleine, empty save one car coming at him in the middle lane. he holds his hand up in between a nazi/union solidarity salute and a force push to ward off the car as he continues to walk at exactly the same speed as the car slows for him.

we are the dreams of god

philosophy is the flailings of the human mind

people who think that nature is ordered or ideal have obviously never slept naked in the woods.

people suck at conceiving the form of god due to our inability to think outside a logical framework



english words i miss
awkward
nevermind
whatever
should
the "a" in aesthetic
irksome

the globalization of bread as a time-dependent good

please don't steal; add. i want to make a student publication (potential title: POMARIUM, or maybe just COLLECTANÆ—i've got an obvious weakness for that word) of such truck, probably starting next semester, if anyone is interested in helping or contributing.

my own efforts

weekends, i've taken up cooking for myself, as it makes me happy, and a lot cheaper than eating at comparable restaurants. some of my efforts from recent weeks:

linguini with fresh mozzarella, basil, garlic, tomato, olive oil, and aeoli sauce (like an italian mayonnaise with lots of garlic). simple, but delicious—and pretty too. freshness makes it work.

i've found that linguini is the ideal pasta, because its elliptical cross section maintains a nice al dente texture in the middle, without any sogginess on the outside. this brand had a nice flour finish on the outside, which helps it hold sauces nicely.




my first ever efforts at chicken korma. i bought sauce, which turned out to be too mild, so i added a few cayenne peppers, which put things right. chicken, carrots, tomatoes, and shallots with lentils and chick peas over rice and served with yogurt. for a first attempt, it wasn't bad, though i cooked the chicken a little long, so it was a little dry, and my dry lentils produced a little bit of a paste when cooked that messed up the texture a bit. not bad, but i might leave them out next time.



my favorite, of which i don't have a picture, is pépé, a little bead-like pasta (imagine 1/4 inch spaghetti chopped into little cylinders), with Chevroux, a commercial goat cheese, a little butter, and pepper. it's deliciously irresistible.

most recently, i made clear rice noodles in chicken bouillon broth, plus a simple teriyaki sauce i made with sugar dissolved in soy sauce with a few spices. it was very simple (all the stores were closed, so i couldn't get any vegetables or meat), but very good. kind of like a less chemically composited and generally better ramen.

i also discovered that it is incredibly easy to make a great white sauce to turn into fettuccini al fredo with french milk, which has a lot more fat than american milk. unfortunately no hard italian cheese (or really any cookable cheese) was available when i did that, so i ended up with a kind of mildly sad and very garlicky white sauce on my pasta, which was still palatable.

the one food i cannot find a quality instance of in France is bagels (sad). if anyone has a good recipe, let me know, and maybe i'll try it.

Fauchon and Hédiard

my, i haven't put anything up here for a while. which is sad, because there is no dearth of substance. i'll see what i can do to put things right.

a few pictures...first, a babas au rhum from Fauchon. it is gorgeous (note the two little pipette/eyedropper thingys full of rum), but sadly lacking in quality of taste, which was covered by an artificial bubblegum flavor–absolutely terrible. too bad; as it looked so good. because of that, i haven't been back to Fauchon since–everything there looks beautiful (gilded éclairs), but i now doubt the quality. even their bags (see the background) are very classy.

my apologies that this photo is sideways despite my best efforts. if you know an html tag to rotate it, leave it in the comments, and i'll fix it.

across place de la madeleine is Hédiard, which started as a tea and coffee importer, and went on to become a full-on luxury épicerie. it's a wonderful store to wander around. the staff are very nice, as is the atmosphere. they sell nice coffee, tea, chocolate, wine, spirits, jams, honeys, biscuits (tea, not buttermilk), spices, and produce. of course there's other places that specialize in such things, but Hédiard provides a nice aggregation of things guaranteed to be good. i have yet to be let down by their products. it's a happy place.


for easter they had all sorts of huge chocolate roosters all over that were quite impressive. (the french don't have the easter bunny; instead they have the church bells that ring for the first time in a while on easter morning, and throw eggs in the process, supposedly. thus, lots of chickens and roosters, and fish, as a symbol of christianity, all in chocolate, of course.) here they are on a table usually covered with sacks of different varieties of coffee–note the roaster on the right.

i have lots more pictures and stories and little notes and thoughts from my little cahier for recording such things, some of them quite interesting. i shall try to get them up here soon.