Yesterday, I ate the best chocolate éclair in Paris.
I mean–not the best. God knows that individual éclairs may vary, and it’s not as if there’s any real way to compare one to the next, because they would all get stale, which would skew the results in favor of the newest ones, and besides, how could one compare them without eating them? And under that plan, the only person who gets to actually taste the best éclair is whoever is judging them, and how do we know that that person’s taste in pastry is even any good?
I’ll back up.
Yesterday morning, as I huddled against the side of our building for warmth while begging Jolie to just go already, Wheelchair Woman waved imperiously at me through her bedroom window. I spend most of our time out front pretending that I can’t see in her windows, so she had to send her cleaning lady over to open it. “I saved this for Mademoiselle,” she declared to the teeny-tiny Filipino woman. “Pass it to her through the window.”
What was passed to me was a wrinkled receipt for a bunch of pastries at a bakery whose several locations tend to stop me cold to drool on a regular basis. “Do you know this one?” Wheelchair Woman asked, possibly still cranky from the time that she decided to let me in on the big secret that there is a giant open-air market 100 yards from my front door twice a week…after I had lived here for over a month. I was certainly appreciative, but I could tell that she didn’t like that I knew. Fortunately, while I had certainly seen this bakery, I had never gone in.
“They won the prize for Best Éclair in Paris in 2006.”
“Oh! Well that is serious!” I didn’t mean to sound snarky; my vocabulary is limited.
“In France it is,” she huffed, and I hastily assured her that it genuinely was to me, too.
“And in 2005, or maybe 2006, they won third-best baguette.” I tried arrange my face in the appropriate expression, but what could it possibly have been? She went on to say that the bakery that makes the best baguette spends the next year supplying the President’s residence with bread. Which is awesome. “But third place is nothing to sneeze at, either,” she shrugged.
Well…no.
So. Of course then I just had to stop by the place, where I had a Bermuda-Triangle moment when a French woman declined to place her order, instead indicating to the baker that I had arrived first. Seriously.
The éclair was quite good, but frankly, it felt like they had phoned it in, just a tiny bit. My project for when I get back will be to try every éclair I can get my hands on, in hopes of accidentally eating the next year’s winner before they get cocky.
I did eventually make it to the grocery store, skulking along as I imagined the streaks of chocolate that were most likely all over my face (the French do not tend to eat on the go, and their food reflects this). And after I (eventually) got over my outrage at their lack of loose leeks (you could only buy large packages, and I seriously needed, like, a leek), I found myself in a much worse predicament.
These people are weird about eggs. I mean: think about when you buy eggs. You think of them when you’re getting your dairy products, right? Because they tend to be right around there. But I have bought eggs a total of once in three months, because they are never where I am when I am thinking about them. The French tend to give them their very own little cabinet, usually hidden against a random wall, often nowhere near the refrigerated aisles. So I trudged all over this store, scanning every nook, before eventually finding them in a little alcove upstairs–where frozen foods and dry goods were. There was literally not one single other refrigerated item on that entire floor. Come to think of it, I’m not 100% that the eggs themselves were in a refrigerated case; it didn’t feel all that cold. Isn’t that bad, or something?
They’ll have to do, though, because tonight is quiche night. Last night was potage parmentier (hence the leek emergency), and I also slow-roasted a bunch of tomatoes for the quiche, setting into motion a snowball-type kitchen disaster that only ended after the sole of Nick’s shoe started to melt and I threw him out to go huddle, presumably twitching, in the living room with Jolie.
He should know better than to approach the kitchen in the days after I’ve been browsing through my cookbooks.
Meanwhile, Jolie has been having some massive insecurity attacks: yesterday she simply refused to let me out of her sight (I had to wrestle her into the kitchen to go get food for dinner), and she keeps starting and even growling at noises outside the apartment.
I think she knows that something is up.