Orange Mocha Frappuccino!

A friend of mine, a fashionista, a design student who also happens to be the purveyor of the city’s longest legs kept me regularly envious for the duration of Paris Fashion Week with her deliberately public profile updates:  “[Insert subject of envious lifestyle] is back from the givenchy show. leopard, zippers and a hint of s&m, i've fallen in love. sipping champagne only made it go down better.”

Student budget forces me to muster enthusiasm for the new range of faux leopard at H&M so you can imagine my fragile state of mind come Day Three of Fashion Week when a call came from Ingrid Pankonin of Miel Cooking asking if I was free to cater an event with her.

My initial reaction was to query the necessity of catering for The Fashion Set at all. They eat? Crostini is the new sushi? Raw is the new cooked?  Binge is the new purge? Pay cheque is the new unemployment?  I was in before I even heard Olsen Twins, Anna Wintour, Karl Largerfeld and Pierre Herme. No calories for guessing which of these characters I most hoped to meet.

Ingrid runs her catering and private chef business out of the Bay Area in California.  On what was meant to be a relaxed holiday before attending the Salone del Gusto slow food festival in Turin, Italy next week she instead found herself designing a crafty menu tasty enough to trick even the most ardent black-attired-smoked-out-design-queen to at least consider delicious consumption.

 

We prepped and assembled and juiced and toasted for hours as 6-foot mannequins peered occasionally through our kitchen door with confused lust.  I studied the languished drift with which models saunter the earth.  They don't appear to labour with steps and movement like the rest of us, but glide with a vague disinterest in the rest of the imperfect world (as advertised by me...in effect carrying a watermelon...though the dressing rooms to the kitchen because Karl doesn't like his house to smell of food therefore keeping his refrigerator in the bathroom.  Fact)   We pureed and diced in complete denial to the possibility that water, no ice, salad no dressing might be the preferred order of the day. 

In summary, Anna Wintour never touched her macaron platter.  The Starbucks-mad Olsen Twins are more goth-elfin and uber-directionally-over-robed than I ever imagined and in a perfectly French mess of fashion mayhem the show went off with only a few blazered man tantrums and little cerebral utilisation by the pretty-boy ‘waiters’.

As for me, Pierre only showed up in macaron form (his olive oil and vanilla macaron is arguably life altering depending on the level of drama in your life), but Ingrid introduced me to a perfect and oddly surprising canapé combination I will definitely borrow (with credit) next time I cook for people who actually eat. She takes a halved and standing baby radish beneath a baton of ripe avocado, a slither of preserved lemon (home preserved in San Francisco) and a cross of chives.  The flavours tickled every part of my mouth by surprise one after the other. Ingenious.

Her crostini combinations of Confit fennel with espelette and Guerande salt; Fresh pea puree with crumbled feta and shredded mint and roasted artichoke with Parmesan and black pepper were simple but delicious….and so small they were basically carb free? 

After my brush with Fashion Week glamour, I took a moment to reflect and more importantly eat a meal portioned to 100% adult size.  We ended up on the bank of St Martin’s Canal in the 10^eme, with a bio Jamon Iberico, fig and Gorgonzola pizza from Pink Flamingo (67 rue Bichat, 75010, Paris, 01 42 02 31 70) on it’s way.  While we waited for our crisp and toasty pizzas, beers in hands, balloon cast to the sky (the high tech apparatus which ensures the pizzas find their way from the hot ovens to patrons lazing a few blocks away in the dusk sun) I wondered what Anna Wintour was having for dinner…I’m sure she’s having pizza too I smiled.

“[Insert subject of envious lifestyle] is back from The Row show. radish, artichoke and fennel and a hint of s&p, i've fallen in love. sipping champagne only made it go down better.”

Bretagne: Anthony's Prophecy and A Craving

My name is Miss Devour (so to blog speak). I am a food network TV junkie, a cookbook glutton and a long time food tourist. 

I like to think this statement cannot simply be replaced with the phrase “clichéd representative of Gen Y”.  Sometimes thinking something and knowing something are not the same.  When I look around my favourite restaurants or the “Culinary Interest” section of a bookstore, there tends to mingle various versions of my demographic.  In order to maintain the untruth that I am the only the food obsessive in the bookstore I baselessly allege these minglers are just masking a copy of “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff” behind that copy of “Larousse Gastronomique” and propose they should step two feet left to properly identify themselves as tenants of the “Self Help and Modern Psychology” section instead.  It’s usually at this point I realize the ‘emotionally unstable’ mingler is my classmate at Le Cordon Bleu and we go for a cheese plate or two.

And so…it was one quiet afternoon last month when Anthony Bourdain (No Reservations) came to me by television and foresaw I would venture the regions with my kindred and come upon the culinary Mecca of Cancale, Brittany.  This was 'a calling' of kinds, around these parts we call it A Craving. 

A Craving cannot be denied so we three culinary students and one food loving lawyer (a necessary addition when an Australian drives manual on the right side of the road in regional France) packed our stripes and headed to the sea side.

After significant and accidental ancillary research into the current relationship status of Brittany Spears, the post-humus controversies of Brittany Murphy and popular baby names in the southern states in 1988, the internet led us to Cancale, Brittany, France.  Olivier Roellinger is the man who owns this town.  Or the taste buds and tummies of this town at least.  After closing shop on his three star restaurant in November 2008, what he calls his ‘new life’ began here. 

Les Entrepots Epices-Roellinger

 Roellinger and his wife own shops, a cooking school and restaurants throughout the town (Maisons de Bricourt)…really just a three-block radius of the port…and we ate our way through every calorie and flavour in them (and the shops and stalls of any other vendor of anything edible).  We were possessed.

Street Fighter: Mille Feuille, Grain de Vanille

The special blend spices and salts at Les Entrepots Epices-Roellinger provided a brief and intense sensory ad break from consumption while we waited for our made-to-order Mille Feuille to be constructed at Le Grain de Vanille.  Worth the wait, or weight, the pastry was flaked and butter glossed our fingers, the pastry cream was smooth and light, maybe a little creamy, and the all-important pastry-to-filling ratio spot on.

Kouign Aman as a child

 We thought it necessary to cross evaluate our mille feuille against the locale specialty, Kouign Aman.  Amazingly, Kouign Aman is a salt caramel laminated pastry specialty of the region and not the once dictator of a former far-east communist state.  After considerable debate, the jury remained hung on whether small and rolled Kouign Aman, or large flat and buttery Kouigin Aman would win in a culinary street fight with or against Mille Feuille.  We were acutely aware that the mostly senior age locals and tourists found our debate somewhat inane or marginally insane. 

Kouign Aman as an adult, ready for battle

Fortunately the consumption of over 72 Belon and other local oysters sold for nothing from vendors fresh from the oyster beds provided us with ample distraction from our patisserie debate.  Each oyster was a mouthful of the most perfect and fresh ocean you can imagine.  I don’t think any other mollusk will ever be as worthy of my love.

Breakfast anyone?

 That said, we were not exactly faithful to those little creatures we loved on the seashore.  The seafood tower at La Mere Champlain was a feat of modern engineering.  Every seafood worth its shell was invited.  We were forced to acknowledge that conversation must cease for at least the first half (a half time break is sometimes required if this sort of dining situation) until more than the tops of our heads were visible over the orgy of meaty crab, plump prawns, razor shell clams, cockles, shrimps, mussels and ever frustrating and disproportionately time-consuming langoustines.

Leaving Cancale with bags of Guerande sea salt, a lifetime of butter, a bottle of crisp local Muscadet and a heavy disappointment that our friendly Avis car hire professionals advise against cross-regional oyster exportation in their vehicles, the bistros of Paris were, well, the bistros of Paris again (spoilt, I know).  Alas, we’ll always have oysters, striped shirts and fictitious salt-caramel-cream street fights.