January 23, 2011 in Recipes · No comments

This month, instead of posting a recipe, I’m going to tell you about some of our most memorable food experiences during our recent trip to Europe. Always good to change things up a bit, right?

Paris

• Crepe with cheese and mushrooms, purchased from a little stand near our first hotel on boulevard de Rochechouart. This was the first thing I ate in Paris. We started chatting with the guy who was making the crepe and it turned out that he was from Algeria, where he used to teach at a technical college and worked for a while with some visiting Russian engineers. We communicated in a mixture of French, English, and Russian…
• Roasted chestnuts and gluhwein at the Champs Elysees Christmas market on our first night in Paris
• An incredibly fresh and delicious pain au chocolat from a cafe on rue Saint Antoine
• Falafel at Chez Hanna – we were lucky enough to grab the one available table and therefore got our falafel on a platter instead of wrapped in a pita, which meant that we got to enjoy all the yummy sides and toppings that come with the falafel (I doubt that all of them would have fit into the pita)
• Roquefort cheese and yogurt from a tiny little fromagerie, consumed in our hotel room (this was our second hotel, housed in a 400-year-old building near Bastille) with a baguette from the bakery next door
• A very simple and very tasty salad at the Lafayette Gourmet cafe – a layer of pink lentils, a layer of rice, and a topping of carrots, raisins, and dried apricots cooked in a sweet and slightly tangy sauce spiced with cinnamon
• Dinner at a restaurant on rue Saint Severin – the place was admittedly touristy, but the food was really, really good. My husband normally hates cooked onions, but he was curious to try French onion soup because he’d heard so much about it – and he loved it! He also had boef Bourgignon and apple tart. I got salad with warm goat cheese medallions, a vegetarian platter (pasta and assorted vegetables), and creme brulee.

Bordeaux

• Fresh bread, delicious butter, and Camembert cheese for breakfast at our friends Katia and Stephane’s house
• Gateau Basque – a dense, not-too-sweet cake filled with almond paste
• Our first introduction to raclette – we loved it and plan to buy our own raclette grill as soon as we can afford it (good ones tend to be pricey)
• Apple sharlotka cake, which I baked in Katia and Stephane’s toaster oven and which we ate topped with creme fraiche
• Rainforest Alliance certified chocolate – I used to work at the Rainforest Alliance and I still get excited when I see their products on store shelves, especially because they are not very widespread in the US (they are much more common in Europe)

Amsterdam

• Indonesian food – our first meal in Amsterdam was actually not Dutch but Indonesian, or, rather, Indonesian/Surinamese/Indian (that’s how the restaurant billed itself). I’d only had Indonesian food once before, many years ago in New York, and my husband had never tried it. I got a vegetarian rice dish and he got a noodle dish with lamb, and we also shared a samosa appetizer. It was so nice to stretch out our legs and enjoy a hot and tasty meal in a comfortable restaurant after the 20-hour bus ride from Bordeaux to Amsterdam.
• Traditional, home-style Dutch food at Hap-Hmm restaurant – vegetable soup (a lot like the soup my grandma used to make) and fried meat cutlets (I had the veggie version), with sides of baked and boiled potatoes, peas and carrots, and greens cooked until melting-soft in a soupy sauce, all served on stainless steel dishes in a cozy restaurant tucked away on a residential street. Surprisingly, we were the only non-Dutch people there, even though the restaurant is listed in the Lonely Planet Amsterdam guidebook.
• Falafel (again!) at Maoz, a chain that started in Amsterdam in the 1990′s and now has a presence in three other European countries as well as in the US. We also got Belgian fries – my husband ordered his with mayonnaise, as is the custom in the Netherlands and Belgium, and I got mine with curry sauce. The sauce was fruity and sweet, very different from the Indian or Thai-style curry sauce that I was expecting. I liked it so much that we picked up a bottle of it at a grocery store and brought it home with us.
• Stroopwafels and oliebollen, sweet treats that we bought at the Leidseplein Christmas market – despite their relatively small size, they contained enough calories to keep us going for several hours in the freezing weather!

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