Paris, awaken me

We all arrive at a time in the course of our pursuits when we must look up in search of new horizons and new inspiration. And my mouth has been grousing lately (at least to me) about needing some new data inputs in the flavor department. It’s been saying, ‘hey, it’s been a long winter, and it’s time to wake up again.’

I am a relative late-comer to the pleasures of Vietnamese cuisine, but I find that its simple honesty and vibrancy remind me of other great cuisines that have been slowly born out of an ancient agrarian, peasant tradition. Like the Italian cuisine to which I devote my work, and also the foods of Mexico, the Near East, India, and of countless other places. And since we are here in a great city, I want to take advantage of some of the ethnic food to be found. A brief conference with our friend Denise (who lives in Normandy, but makes regular forays into the city) convinces us that Chinatown is a must, for both a meal and some grocery shopping.

The lunch is a delight at Le Bambou on Rue Beaudricourt, right in among plenty of other worthy establishments. (‘Chinatown, Ave. d’Ivry, the 13^th, Paris.’ Write that down.) Light, clean flavors and the kind of exciting spice that makes my mouth insist, ‘do that again.’ I want to keep building up the level of heat and flavor in the mouth. My soul demands it. It feels like I am trying to open up a heavy wooden chest encrusted in layers of weariness and numbness. The chopsticks must serve as my hammer and the spice as my chisel, and I must keep at it until... something is revealed inside me, or I arrive somewhere else.

The shopping is just a short walk from the restaurant, up Ivry. The mission is a Thai-style soup with Coconut and Shrimp, and everything is there at Tang Freres, including chicken bones for fresh soup stock. (It was .65 euro for a single carcass, which was perfect for my purposes. I didn’t want to use a cube and I didn’t really have time to deal with a whole chicken.) There was even a small package of spices specifically for Pho-style soup. Ginger, Galanga, Lemongrass, Lime leaves, chilis, mint, basil, sprouts… I could barely wait to get back to the apartment.

PS. Here’s a thought: I believe that boredom is an invention of the modern world, and that its sufferers are largely the perpetrators of their own condition.

--Caleb

the last of the last

The restaurant is on sabbatical for the next month or so. The final copy edits on the manuscript are finished and turned in. The sunny, warm weather has turned gloomy and wet. The long-awaited-for arugula in the hoop house has just shot up and is ready for the picking right as we are ready to leave. The cultivated wild dandelion greens are looking healthy. We, however, have come down with the last of winter colds. Our eyes are tired and our faces look well-used. Little sleep has haunted us as we put our house in order to be away for April. Feeling lower than the low barometric pressure that blankets fog all along the horizon, we huddle in our scarves and coats on the bus shuttle from Vermont to the airport in Boston. Tonight, we are leaving for Paris.

--Deirdre

the fifth season

Spring teases at the trees and the melting snow. Our mountain road is rutted and inconsistent. Mist rises from the snow as the air is warmer than the ground wrapping the house in a blanket of fog. Caleb points out the window. A fat-breasted robin sits beneath an apple tree in the orchard making a feast of wintered fruit. Despite the gray weather, we are buoyed by this harbinger of a new season.

At the restaurant, I seat a couple and we talk of today’s fairer weather: the warm sun, the heat in our green house, the song of the chickadee. I mentioned our robin in the apple tree, and my guest suggests that this is a Canadian robin with his broad orange chest. Canadian robins are with us always, he says. They fool us, he says. He is an ornithologist and I realize, with a sinking feeling, he must know. Our fifth season, this mud season, tricks the eye and skin making us believe that winter is almost over, that the long thaw has begun and the sap runs in the maple trees. The truth is that we must weather another six weeks before we can say spring has arrived. Rain will come; snow will come. The old wives’ tales tell us that the torch cannot be passed from this world of mud and mist to one of flowering fruit trees and early green until four snows in April—the lasting joke of the fool’s month for us willingly fooled northerners.

--Deirdre

dying art

Need we say more? At Le Continentale. Quebec City. 2009.

--Deirdre

grand-mere's cure

The Vieux Port is quiet as the snow falls. We arrive easily to the hotel: Hotel Dominion 1912 where we are offered a beautiful corner penthouse room secured by a friend who has a friend at the hotel. After checking in what was once a bank building down here in the port of Quebec City, we reconvene in front of the roaring fire on the couch in the cozy, intimate lobby with aperitifs and a handful of menus for recommended restaurants all within a block of where we are staying.

With reservations at L'Echaude secured (the name alone could have sold us on this bitter wintery night suggesting the notion of warmth in French), the menu pulled us in equally. We dress for dinner and walk huddled in our coats against the wind to the warm interior of the bistrot.

Caleb has been fighting a cold, so when the maitre d’ asks what we would like to drink, Caleb thinks to pass on wine with dinner while I order a hearty glass from the Languedoc. Maybe he will have a beer? I suggest a cocktail. The Maitre suggests his grandmother’s recipe, if Monsieur will try? Without knowing what his grandmother might have been up to, Caleb agrees and within minutes the Maitre arrives with a tall steaming glass wrapped elegantly in a white linen napkin. Inside is hot water, honey, a sprig of very fragrant fresh thyme, and gin. With a wink, he tells us the proportions should be how you like, to taste, but that sometimes it is important that the gin be, well, primary. That Grand-mere…….

--Deirdre

excursion no. 1/09: quebec topography

The drive to Quebec is quiet. It’s a long drive, at least five hours from our house to the Vieux Port, but it takes us that long to go to New York City. The weather has held, the predicted ice storm bypassing us, the roads clear. By the time we are in the wide flat plain above Magog and Sherbrooke, on the last leg of the journey, the sky turns violet and blue, the setting sun over our western shoulder washing the atmosphere in dusk. A large herd of deer graze in a snow-covered field. Sugar shacks hide in maple sugar bushes, dormant and boarded up until the March thaws. Roadside truckstops and casse-croute herald two hundred kinds of poutine, those gravy-laced fries. Highway traveler hotels are built like castles on the Loire in France. Neat-as-a pin farms show glowing barn windows suggesting evening milking and warm cow bodies huddled together. The sky darkens to blue, a half-moon lighting the snow fields, and on the radio the talk is of the just-opened Ice Hotel where you can sleep on an icebed in a down sleeping bag for $300/per person per night. The lights of the city yellow the horizon ahead.

--Deirdre