Nights in pAris

Vegetables
After delicious affairs in French brasseries with delicious people, it is time to cleanse the system.

Wandering through picturesque streets, museums and galleries; still looking for an open air market close by. In haste I purchase a perfect Savoy cabbage and base a meal around it!

When I cut the core holding the leaves off this crimped beauty, it snaps like cables bearing the weight of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. It is stressfully fresh.We dine on a steaming bowls of braised celeriac ( the size of my head ) pear and cabbage. A salad of divine escarole and tangerine.

I must remember to buy a knife; the bread knife in the apartment is getting boring.

I found a market the next day. A small covered market with organic stalls. Garbed the radicchio, pears and herbs, bumbled into a fromagerie for some baby fig shaped goats cheese, a  puck of goaty creaminess. Next door for a forest dark bread, smelling of weet bix? Lunch was going to be easy. A light lunch to leave room for Restaurant dinning.

Salad of seared, caramelised, big thick slices of pear, cooked with thyme and seasoning, tossed with the radicchio. The dressing was a squash of tangerine with salt and oil. Bubbles of goats cheese floated atop the colour. The bread rustically drew attention to it-self. Raspberries my mother bought sat in their cute punet, perplexing me with their seasonal origins? All was good with the world.

The next evening I was privileged to be taken back to said lovely Brasserie with the rest of my little family, by a lovely man. As you can be assured fate did provide me with another creme brulee to finish. I actually ordered the cheese but the waiter, bless him, knew better.

A charming traditional dinner, with the girls ordering rémoulade with shave bayonne ham. I had tarragon cream coated eggs, that bled yellow into the green and white. A dish from the textbook!

The girls had duck breast; they swallowed  the fat. I was challenged as there where no vegetarian dishes and fish seemed to  non-ethical to have twice, but I did. Luie fish , big flaked moist white flesh with peppers and olives.