The Last Popincourt Marché Haul

On Tuesdays and Fridays, from sometime before we wake up until about 2:00pm, Boulevard Richard Lenoir between Oberkampf and J-P Timbaud turns into an open-air market. It's amazing, and it's not even considered one of the bigger or better of the 60-some marchés volants that open and close twice a week all over the city. A short walk to the south is the Bastille market. Open Thursdays and Sundays, it is the biggest in the city. It attracts hordes of shoppers- locals and lots of tourists. We go on most Sundays, but the crush of people can be tough to bear. Popincourt is a mellower affair. It has most of the same vendors I like from the Bastille market, plus a few extras. It has none of the photo-taking crowds, just sharp elbowed, line-cutting little old women. These photos show our final haul from our favorite market. It's a pretty normal collection. Usually there would also be a chicken, maybe some potatoes. We are not going to be cooking much more so we splurged on things like nice mushrooms, extra cheese and a good fish. We felt a little sad making the final rounds, but we hit all of our favorites. 

Here are the details, for those interested: 

The bag in back was a give-away from the marché organization. Look for it this summer as we show it off at the Farmers Markets back home. Moving forward, the brown, dirt covered mushrooms are champignons de Paris. Like cremini, but much firmer, they are the basic mushroom around here. The light colored mushrooms to the right are pleurotes jaunes (yellow oyster mushrooms), and the golden mushrooms toward the front are girolles (chanterelles). The big ugly thing on the right is a turbot- a lovely and expensive flat fish from the North Atlantic. To the left, the green things with the red band are wild asparagus. They have thin stalks and wheat-like tips. Above them are simple cherry tomatoes. A lemon is in the middle, next to the bunch of spring onions. Above the onions are chives and parsley. Moving on to dairy, we've got six eggs and three cheeses. Oh, the cheese. The herb-covered mass is a Corsican brebis, the small one is half a Tommette de Brebis and the large slice is Abondance. 

Parc de Bagatelle and a lunch

Parc de Bagatelle is located within the Bois de Boulogne on the western edge of Paris. It was built by the Count of Artois in 64 days in 1775, on a bet by Marie Antoinette that he could not turn the land into a park in such short time. It is well known for its spring tulips, rose gardens and peacocks. We were a little late for the tulips, but the roses were beautiful and the peacocks were screeching.

The rose gardens were built in 1907. There are about 1100 roses on display, roughly 20% of them pre-1920 varieties.

 

goslings and ducklings

 Enough beauty. The next day we hit the Popincourt market and checked another food item off the to-do list. Cuttlefish is somewhere between an octopus and a squid. It has a strange bone in its back, the cuttlebone, which is the calcium-rich thing you put in birdcages for them to peck at.  It wasn't pretty but it was fun and educational to turn it from the first photo into the last. We ate it with salad and some raw milk soft-ripened cheese, which we are consuming in heroic quantities before our return to the land of ruined food.

Le Crépuscule, Parc de Belleville

Eiffel Tower with spotlight

Parc de Belleville is set on a hill in the 20th arrondissement, just south of the larger and more well known Parc des Buttes Chaumont. It is a densely planted series of switchback walkways that work their way up the hill. At the top is le Maison de l'Air, a hands-on museum for kids that focuses on meteorology, pollution and other air-related things. Most importantly, the roof of the museum serves as an excellent viewing deck. It's a popular place all day long, but is an especially nice place to congregate, have a drink and watch the sunset. If you direct your gaze downward, it also serves as a great place to watch the stray cats emerge when the park is closed to humans at dusk.

We stopped by Parc de Belleville last night before our dinner at Le Chapeau Melon(no website, as is the French custom), a wine shop/restaurant that serves an always-changing, market-based three course fixed menu. They'll open any bottle of their entirely small producer, vin nature stock on the shelf for a modest corkage fee. Here is a recent review (in English!) featuring a photo of a mackerel dish we had, plus a bunch of other things we didn't have, because the menu changes so frequently. Dinner was to celebrate the beginning of spring break. On Wednesday we head to Lyon for a four night test of our eating endurance. 

Last Weekend

We had a pretty spectacular weekend. 

On Saturday, while pursuing nice, reasonably priced shoes on Rue du Faubourg St-Antoine, we stopped by Le Lieu du Design, which is hosting a food-related design show. There were a lot of fun, quirky and sometimes even useful entries.

Chocolat Chaud-on-a-Stick and Pot-au-Feu Animals

 edible finger puppets and extra-virginal white chocolate Marys

the exhibition space, with Lia and wall of Alessi

tattooed and spiked crabs and clams

 a different view to highlight the Wu Tang detail

savory aperitif cakes to be cooked and served in shells

compound butter gems

chocolate record

As you can tell by the photos below, Saturday night we partied. A couple of Lia's coworkers hosted a cocktail party, fueled by gracious donations of Canadian rye, Italian meatballs, guacamole and champagne, among other things. 

Sunday we attended a performance by Paris native Eliane Radigue at Centquatre (104), a remarkable arts space housed in what was once the municipal funerary services complex. Eliane Radigue is an electronic music artist whose very austere, minimal works use long, slowly transforming, overlapping, modulating waves of sound, sometimes embellished with samples of voice or instruments. It's an exercise in intense listening or intense boredom, depending on your taste. In this interview she explains her creative process and technique: http://vimeo.com/8983993

 Most of her career was spent in front of one of these:

That's not a switchboard operator, it's an avant garde musician.

Unfortunately, she no longer performs on the giant ARP, just a large mixing board.

Here she is after the performance.

art faces

Centquatre is currently home to La Manège Carré Sénart, an amazing carousel made up of mechanical bugs and animals. Some parts can be operated by levers and hand-cranks. It's really cool.

in action:

 We found this gem of a room divider just down the block from Centquatre.

We walked home along Canal St-Martin, which on Sundays is closed to car traffic, making it a lovely spot for a waterside stroll.

Noël, Noël

 Last night we went out to see some of the holiday lights that have been put up around the city. There are decorations on a lot of the streets - Oberkampf, for example, has some lit up stars hung across it that remind me of the ones they hang up on the main street in Virginia, MN. But some areas are particularly known for having light displays. One of them is the Place Vendome, below.

Another is, of course, the Champs Élysées. From the Place de la Concorde to Place FDR, there is a big Marché de Noël with a tons of stands selling cheap jewelry, jars of foie gras, chocolates, and piles of useless trinkets, mixed in with others selling mulled wine and hot chocolate and other snacks. We didn't buy anything, but it was fun to see.

Père Noël, the big man himself, was hovering above the Marché in his sleigh (with a crane to er, supplement the reindeer power) and giving a rousing speech, describing his Christmas routine. It was much as you might expect : "Je mets tous les cadeaux dans mon gros sac noir, et puis je l'installe dans mon traîneau..." etc. (I put all the presents in my big black bag, and then I put it in my sleigh...)

Here's the Champs Élysées with the trees all lit up, and us standing on the pedestrian island between lanes of traffic.

After this we went to the Relais de l'Entrecôte to complete our tourist adventure with steak frites. For those unfamiliar, this is a restaurant that serves nothing but steak with fries. The first thing the waitress asks you is "quelle cuisson?" (how do you want it?) to which you reply, "bleu" or "saignant" (rare or medium rare). The sauce is supposed to be some kind of secret recipe, light yellow-green and definitely containing some tarragon and a little mustard, but we weren't sure what else. Internet searches later suggested chicken liver and cream as well. In any case, we heartily enjoyed it and went home stuffed.

Even if we weren't going anywhere, there wouldn't have been space for a Christmas tree in the apartment. However, we did pick up one little bit of festiveness. Here is our new, official Champignon de Noël.

(it is actually a Finnish mushroom, but I guess that's appropriate)

 Tomorrow, however, we are packing up our Christmas Mushroom and going to Spain (although there is a snowstorm threatening to mess up our plans, so I'm knocking on wood as I type this). We plan to walk around on the beach and maybe visit the Sagrada Familia cathedral. We will be in Barcelona until the 25th, then in San Sebastien for a couple of days, then Bayonne, then back to Paris for New Year's Eve. While Christmas in Spain sounds sort of glamorous and lovely, I'm quite certain it won't be as wonderful as rushing around around Minneapolis and St. Paul and having the very great privilege of seeing all our family and friends.

Tous ensemble! Tous ensemble! Grève générale!

Boulevard Voltaire today. That's the door to our building.

There are just as many people two blocks away on Boulevard Beaumarchais.
The groups will meet at Place de la Bastille and then head to Place de la Nation as one giant mass.


Around the corner from our place:
"General Strike"


Earlier today we tried to visit the new Basquiat exhibit at the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art. The line was down the block so we detoured to Musée des Beaux-Arts at Le Petit Palais. We checked out the 19th century paintings. The building is super cool. Here's the central courtyard:


On our way to find lunch we were passed on Avenue Champs Élysées by a very old, very dirty car that had a "Peking to Paris" sign on it. Twenty minutes later as we walked through Place Vendome, we found where it was headed. We had stumbled on the finish line of the 4th Peking to Paris Motor Challenge. It has been run in 1907, 1997, 2007 and 2010.

After lunch we bought expensive cookies from Pierre Hermé. Next time we'll hit Ladurée so we can weigh in on the eternal Pierre Hermé vs Ladurée Macarons Debate.
We got six flavors: rose, peach & saffron, salted caramel, green tea, creme brulée and hazelnut.