WTF Lundi

Noisy Butter?

Autumn Comes To Norfolk

500 Words XIV - This Week's Sentence

Yikes! It's Friday already.
I suppose now that I'm recovering from my vacation I'd better get back to the discipline of writing a 500 Words piece.

After yesterday's visit to Stohrer, we'll stay in Paris for this one and take our sentence from Dickens' 'A Tale Of Two Cities'.

The sentence is:
"Through the rusted bars, tastes, rather than glimpses, were caught of the jumbled neighbourhood; and nothing within range, nearer or lower than the summits of the two-great towers of Notre-Dame, had any promise on it of healthy life or wholesome aspirations."

If anyone out there is still remotely interesting in taking part, I'll collect up your stories for next Thursday.

Have fun

Cake Break

Rue Montorgueil in Paris is a wonderful place; a market street awash with cafés, artisan patisseries, fruit shops, veggie shops, fishmongers, butchers, poulterers and awesome cheese emporia.

But the jewel in the crown is Stohrer.

Established in 1730 by the former pastry chef at Versailles, it has survived the Revolution, the Republic, Napoleon (twice), yet more revolution and two World Wars and is still going strong as the most venerable and revered bakery in France.

It was there when Valjean and Cossette wandered the streets of Paris; there when Sidney Carton went to the guillotine for love; there when the Russians entered the city, and when the Nazis came and went a century and a half later; and it was there a couple of weeks ago when Katie introduced me to its wonders.
It's there still.
Go visit.

In the window sits the Eiffel Tower accurately recreated with macarons.
What's not to love?

Let's go inside, shall we?
Beautiful mosaic floor, glorious painted ceiling and flamboyant chandelier.
Not your usual local bakery then.

As you enter, the left hand side is sweet stuff and the right is savoury.
Indeed spicy, if you count the pretty, semi-naked girl armed with an olive branch and ready to spank you if you don't spend all your money in there.

The things in the foreground were labelled as "prawns in negligées".
I want them!
Now.

Ah, the infamous "Hazelnut Thingie", aka Feuillete Noisettes.
Boy howdy, those are good!

That prune tart looked tempting, but then so did everything else.

Porn.
No other word for it.
Let your greedy eyes linger, people.

Yes, we ate these.

And this lovely little snackette of wild mushroom tart, quiche, bread and a terrine that was almost as good as the terrine of pig's trotter with pickled wild mushrooms and mustard jus that I had for a starter at l'Epigramme (awesome) on Friday evening with Katie and Eric.

You have my permission to squeal.

That cherry had so much kirsch in it Katie almost fell off her chair.

The English simply cannot make proper chocolate éclairs.

After all that lot I need a coffee to wash it down.
Yum.

Now I just need to get back to Paris …

On The Wall

I do like the variety of things people in Paris tend to put on their walls.

Here are a few:

Lots of lovely signage and lamps.

Napoleon (inevitably).

Light.

Exhibition posters.
The Tiffany exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg was totally awesome.

Er … a giant seahorse with a swim bladder problem.

Sensible advice on what to do with capitalist vermin.

Colonial racism.

A weirdo religious woman unfeasibly happy about her Catholic guilt.
And a nice old iron grille.

Lifesized photos of people (in the basement of the Louvre).
When Katie posted this one we were somewhat bemused by the amount of people who thought the girl in the poster was Katie herself. Hee hee.

WTF Monday

Raisin d'être

I just love typos.

Not 500 Words

If anyone's over here looking for a 500 Words assignment for next week I'm afraid my mind is still recovering from my vacation and is a total blank where writing is concerned.
I'll restart the 500 Words thing next Friday, but in the meantime …

I've been seriously neglecting my series on eating the weirdest, ickiest and most dangerous things I can find and now, thanks to Katie smuggling the things into the country I have the opportunity of ingesting probably the most disgusting and soul-destroying alleged foodstuff the planet has ever known.

This is not an experiment I feel safe conducting on my own so I've invited Phil over to join me.

Laydees and gentlemen, I give you - all the way from the USA …
That most awesomely destructive Weapon of Mass Obesity:
The Hostess Twinkie!

Ewwwwww!

If anyone feels like making one at home, here are the ingredients:
ENRICHED BLEACHED WHEAT FLOUR [ FLOUR, REDUCED IRON (what the fuck is "reduced iron"? Rust?), 'B' VITAMINS (NIACIN, THIAMINE MONONITRATE (B1), RIBOFLAVIN (B2), FOLIC ACID], SUGAR, WATER, CORN SYRUP, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED VEGETABLE AND/OR ANIMAL SHORTENING (Animal Shortening? Is that when they cut the legs off?) (SOYBEAN, COTTONSEED AND/OR CANOLA OIL, BEEF FAT … Mmmmmmm … Beef Fat! Just what you're looking for in a dessert; slap it over your lemon sorbet. Yum), WHOLE EGGS, DEXTROSE, CONTAINS 2% OR LESS OF: MODIFIED CORN STARCH, GLUCOSE, LEAVENINGS (SODIUM ACID PYROPHOSPHATE (isn't that an explosive?), BAKING SODA, MONOCALCIUM PHOSPHATE), SWEET DAIRY WHEY, SOY PROTEIN ISOLATE, CALCIUM AND SODIUM CASEINATE, SOY FLOUR, SALT, MONO AND DIGLYCERIDES, POLYSORBATE 60, SOY LECITHIN, CORNSTARCH, CELLULOSE GUM, SODIUM STEAROYL LACTYLATE, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVOURS, SORBIC ACID (TO RETAIN FRESHNESS), YELLOW 5, RED 40.

Holy fucking crap! That's wholly fucking crap!

Combine all that stuff together in a big factory and you get these: sticky little sausagey cylinders of corn syrup and chemicals.

Well … Here goes nothing!

Katie well and truly threw down the gauntlet earlier this summer by eating a (brace yourselves) deep-fried Twinkie on a stick (GACK), so, as we big brave boys cannot let the girls have all the glory, open wide and let's eat Twinkie!

Gimme an "I"
Gimme a "C"
Gimme a "K"
Gimme a "Y"

Phil's actual verdict was "Ooh! They're quite nice!"

Sheesh! The sugar rush is going to kill me!

Gah! And pthah!

The awful, sickly-sweet taste of factory syrup and nasty chemicals. These things are truly gross!

They're kinda like chewing the foam rubber padding out of a cheap sofa that's been marinaded in corn syrup for a few years and then left to rot in a chemical dump.
Plus there's enough preservatives in there to ensure my corpse won't rot for decades after I'm dead. Though it may spontaneously combust from all the chemicals.

I'm writing this an hour or so after eating my Twinkie, having since flushed my tastebuds clean with green tea and then had a vigorous minty tooth-brushing session, but STILL all I can taste is sticky sickly sweetness.
EUGH!
Plus I now have a kind of chemical burn at the back of my throat.
ACK!

So far in this series we've eaten such things as whalemeat, wasabi chocolate, soy sauce flavoured Kit-Kat and tamarind poo, but Twinkies are easily the worst culinary experience I've endured to date.

Of course if anyone knows anything grosser I can put in my mouth, please send along a sample.

Parisien People

WTF Lundi

We spotted this charming fellow in a shop selling … er … cake decorations just off Quai de Valmy. Little wonder Minne Mouse looks so happy.

Click on him to make him bigger. Go on … you know you want to.