Day 5 : A stomach for Andouillette!

I had been wanting to try this very special and very French sausage since I read about it in various food, travel and recipe books. Made with the various segments of the pig's intestines and stomach and blended with herbs and spices, andouillette has its origins in France's Champagne region.
Purveyors of good quality andouillette are awarded "grades" from A to AAAAA, the supreme proof of a sausage's quality.
Today, I finally had my chance.
We were going "junk" shopping in the Marches aux Puces St-Ouen de Clignancort, the grand dame of all French flea markets but decided to have lunch first.
It's dangerous to shop on an empty stomach, as my Mastercard can attest to.
There was a small brasserie on the corner, near the Metro exit of Porte de Clignancort. The menu listed the usual brasserie items -- omelets, salades, roast chicken or confit of canard with pommes frites, flank steak. Sandwiches.
And then I saw it, right there in the "plats" section ... andouillette sausage with pommes frites.
It was well fried when it arrived, glistening with oil, slightly charred -- a sausage bursting at the ends, hiding all the good things inside.
I sliced it open and the intestine parts, sliced lengthwise in strips, spilled out. It smelled good, faintly intestine-ly but good nonetheless. Even the casing is made with the lining of the pig's bowels -- don't even say it or think it but that's what the sausage is wrapped in.
I took my first bite -- very tasty, very distinctive flavor and I mean that in a totally good way. For the faint hearted, onions and herbs help neutralize the intestine taste but then again, I like all those bits and pieces of the pig that other people won't even look at.
Andouillette with its pig intestines, pig bowel lining is part of the principle of nose to tail eating. Nothing goes to waste when the animal gives up its life, everything is used, everything is made into something good for someone like me to eat!
Ad astra per alia porci!

Day 4: Christmas Day

Last year, when we traveled to Europe, I discovered the joys of staying in an apartment versus staying in a hotel.
For one, the space is so much bigger (hotel rooms are tiny in Europe - specially if you have 4 star tastes but only a 2 star budget).
Also, if you stay in an apartment, for a split nano-second, you can actually fantasize that you are a resident of the place and not just a tourist.
And what do residents do? Well the mundane everyday things -- they do laundry, they make their own beds, clean their own place, shop for food.
And they cook.
Today being Christmas Day, I thought I'd cook something for breakfast. Cold cuts and cheese are wonderful but Christmas calls for a little more effort.
So, I made an omelette using the fresh mushrooms bought from Rue Mouffe, some of the good thinly sliced ham from the Boucherie St. Medard, three organic eggs -- all cooked in butter and good cloudy and very green olive oil. Plus a few fried baby potatoes on the side.
Joyeux Noel everyone!

Day 3: December 24

Why does everything taste so good in Paris?
Perhaps because the French are so serious about their food and make sure that everything, whether artisanal or commercially produced, is of the best quality.
Today, after a visit to the Chapel of the Miraculous Medal along Rue de Bac, we chanced upon another proof of the French passion for the best quality food.
We saw this huge food store aptly called Grande Epicerie Paris where we spent a good hour an a half among the throng of Parisians rushing to buy provisions for their reveillon or noche buena.
It was delightful to just walk through the many shelves and counters selling all kinds of condiments (I never realized how many salts one could buy), sauces, pates, pastries, dressings, desserts, cooked food (from sushi to dimsum to falafel to beef wellington), organic produce, fresh produce (lobsters for 99 euros a kilo!!!) confectionaries, cheeses, chocolates, you name it, this place had it.
I felt like I was in Food Wonderland.
Too bad that taking photos was strictly prohibited, to separate the mere onlookers from the serious food shoppers, I suppose. But I did manage a photo taken outside the main door.
This is one place I must go back to before we leave Paris.

Day 2: Tarte Tatin from Rue Mouffetarde

There is a small bakery and patisserie that I discovered when we went to Paris last year, at the corner of Rue Mouffetarde and Rue Arbalite. It became my regular boulangerie and I walked there every morning for a crisp baguette that we would have for breakfast.
Aside from different kinds of bread, they made terrific pastries - the best of which to my mind was their tarte tatin. Topped with thinly sliced apples, with a creamy delicious custard and a really flaky yet crisp crust -- it's to die for and the first
place I went to, after we finally landed in Paris, just 12 hours behind schedule, was to hie off to this bakery and buy a couple of tarte tatins and my second favorite, an apricot tarte.
The lady packed my pastries in a pretty and festive box which added to the pleasure of that very first bite of the best tarte tatin -- my very first taste of Paris.

What I Ate This Christmas ... in Paris: Day 1

Well technically I was not in Paris yet -- flew out of Manila on KLM 804 to connect to a cancelled flight to Paris. Thankfully the people at KLM Manila anticipated the monstrous chaos happening all over Europe and booked me on another flight -- that would leave the next day. But never mind, I was determined to make the most of this once in a lifetime Christmas vacation and if that included a few missed connections, as long as I got to Paris before Christmas, I knew I would be all right.
So the very first thing I ate was a hot meal on board KLM. Nice packaging hid a not so nice lunch, served soon after take off. Beef and noodles and a salad with feta cheese.
This being KLM, they didn't feed us much -- a small cold sandwich six hours later and another hot meal of shrimp noodles and a really sour mango salad a couple of hours before we landed.
If I had known that the next meal I would have would be a bottle of Coke Zero in the hotel where they put us up for the night, well, I would have eaten that salad, sour mangoes and all.

Guess Who Took Me to Lunch?

No it wasn't John Malkovich.
Or Willem Dafoe.
Or even Sting.
(Now you know who my heart beats for)
It was Tatsuyoshi Takashima.
And who is Tatsuyoshi Takashima?
He's the President of Dentsu -- THE president of the entire worldwide global Dentsu, where I am just a small cog in a huge wheel.
Now I don't know about you, if you regularly have lunches or dinners or even Starbucks coffee with your global worldwide CEO so maybe this is all ho-hum, been-there-done-that to you.
But this was a pretty big deal to me -- to be singled out for this one special honor.
This happy event took place in Tokyo, last month when I was there for my annual budget meeting.
I had met Mr. Takashima, actually did a presentation to him when he visited our regional office in Singapore last July. All of of us Asian country heads were there and during the official dinner, I got my 15 minutes of face time with him and we got to talking about Japanese food.
He seemed like a genuinely warm and engaged person and wanted to know what I liked about Japanese food.
So I said my all time favorite was tonkatsu or fried pork cutlet (think weiner schnitzel on steroids). He said that was his favorite too and promised that he would take me to this place that served the best tonkatsu in Tokyo.
After he moved on to talk to other people, I thought this was just part of the usual small talk so I was surprised to receive an e-mail from his executive assistant a few weeks later inviting me to a tonkatsu lunch in Tokyo, with a specific date and time.
To cut to the chase, I showed up at the appointed time, we walked to his favorite tonkatsu restaurant, 15 minutes away from the office.
And we had lunch together. It was an hour of personal time, with no talk about the office or work, but just good conversation about food, family, ideas -- it was lunch between two kindred human beings who just happened to both enjoy tonkatsu.
And yes, it was the best, the most delicious tonkatsu that I had ever had.

Shin Ton Yon ... OD'ing on Chinese Food in Greenhills

Aside from Le Ching, Won Ton, Beijing Hand Pulled Noodles -- which are all cheap AND great places to eat Chinese food, there is another one that I particularly like in the Greenhills shopping center area and that's SHIN TON YON Foods just outside the chapel.
A self service canteen style place, Shin Ton Yon sells and serves up mami, roast meats, freshly rolled amoy style lumpia and a medley of Pinoy and Chinese dishes sitting cheek-by-jowl beside each other in a stainless food counter.
So you can opt to have your adobo, pinoy or chinese style (with a hard boiled egg) or have adobong pusit, kikiam, or pork barbecue, mustard greens or stewed tofu, paksiw na pata or pata tim, kilawin tenga or lechon macau or pata hamon. A little confusing but it's all good. Round off the orders with yang chow rice or kiampong rice or have some machang.
For dessert, there's a chewy mango bar, black gulaman, soy drinks, sometimes a really good iced saging na saba.
And after your meal, browse among the shelves and what's on the counter and take home 3-in-one coffee from Malaysia, mulberry and acai berry drinks, peanuts, candies, hopia, pork floss, achara -- there's a veritable sari sari store right in front of you!
For a more authentic feel, drop by Shin Ton Yon in Binondo where they do take out orders of cooked food and roast meats.