So, my grandmother passed away on June 7. I didn’t mention it earlier because I was trying to think of a good food-related tribute to her. The problem is, although she liked to cook when I was younger and I always looked forward to special treats like roast beef when we visited (yes, I liked meat when I was little; I liked everything), it’s been really hot here and I just haven’t been in the mood to make some spectacular seitan roast.

But then I realized that seitan roast wasn’t really the right thing anyway. The one food that always makes me think of Grandmother is butternut squash. I lived with Grandmother for my first two years of college because her house was much closer to campus than the parental homestead. Honestly, it wasn’t a great arrangement: I was too wild for her and she was too restrictive for me. I think everyone was a lot happier when I moved into an apartment with a friend. But there were some high points in there. For example, although she’d never really had to cook regularly for a vegetarian before that time, she never once hassled me about my diet and instead went out of her way to buy me fresh vegetables and when she found things she hadn’t used before, she learned how to cook them, just for me. In particular I recall that the first time I ever had butternut squash was when she cut one in half, roasted it, and topped it with butter and a little brown sugar. I loved it! I remember, for some reason – it’s a weird thing to remember, once looking at my fingernails and noticing they looked really good and thinking to myself, “wow, I look and feel so healthy; it must be all the fresh food Grandmother is making me.” I don’t know how true that is, considering I just as often stuffed my face with pizza, french fries, and beer like any other college student, but now that I think back on it, the time I spent living with her was probably the first time I started thinking about vegetarianism from a health standpoint, and the first time I felt healthy effects from it. I never buy a butternut squash without thinking of Grandmother, and I almost always make it the same way she made it for me.

Unfortunately, butternut squash is not in season and there are none to be had. But I made something for dinner the other night that I thought was in the same spirit of things and probably similar to a dish Grandmother made for me when I lived with her. It might not be a recipe I got from her (and once she discovered the internet, she did email me tons of vegan recipes she found online), but I think it’s something she’d be happy enough to be remembered by.

Stuffed Globe Zucchini
Globe zucchini are a farmers market favorite and are ideal for stuffing with stuff.

2 globe zucchini
1/2 cup cooked brown rice
1/4 cup onion, chopped
1/3 cup vegan sausage, crumbled
1-2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
spaghetti sauce (or use tomato sauce and add some seasonings of your choice)

Another reason this meal had a grandmotherly feel to it was it was very frugal, and having lived through the Depression, Grandmother was a fairly frugal person. It took me no time at all to assemble because the rice and sausage were left over from the night before and the spaghetti sauce was part of a small bit I found in my freezer, which I removed to make room for a large May Wah shipment I ordered on a whim when they sent me an email about a sale. So to make the filling all I did was mix everything together with the chopped insides of the zucchini. But I’ll describe the steps as if I were making it from scratch.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Heat a small bit of oil in a skillet and brown the sausage and onion. Add the garlic and cook another minute or two, then stir in the rice and cook another minute or so. Finally, stir in the spaghetti sauce. Set aside.

Slice the top off each zucchini, then use a knife or a serrated grapefruit spoon to scoop out the insides, leaving a medium-thick wall all around. Chop up the “guts” you removed and add about half of it to the rice mixture. (You can save the other half for another use.) Spoon some of the rice mixture into each zucchini, trying to compact it a little bit. You can mound it up a bit as well.

Bake for about 45 minutes, then remove and let sit for 5 minutes before serving. I baked mine in the toaster oven, which was a perfect fit and didn’t heat up the kitchen. Since the tops of the zucchinis were so close to the top of the toaster oven, though, I covered them lightly with aluminum foil to prevent scorching.

I served it with a couple of vegan “drumsticks”, just because the May Wah shipment had arrived and I figured I’d better get started on eating it.

I asked my mother to send me some pictures of me and Grandmother together. She sent me a bunch but I liked this one because Grandmother has a cat on her lap. My love of cats was directly inherited from my mother, who inherited it from her mother. That side of the family has always grown up with cats, and in particular, Siamese cats. (Which I think Jes will like.) The handsome man is my grandfather, whom I called Bobby in imitation of my Grandmother (toddler Renae liked the sound of the word “Bobby”), and who died way too young.

I was struck that almost half of the pictures Mom sent were pictures of Grandmother reading to a little Renae.

I’m pretty sure I’m wearing a totally awesome kitten shirt in this picture.

No wonder I’m a bookworm!

Another thing that stands out about my grandmother is she was always on the forefront of new technology. She was the first person I knew to get cable television and we’d all crowd around her set and watch MTV when it was in its infancy. I’m not old enough that electric typewriters were a “new technology”, but I had a weird typing obsession as a kid so she taught me how to touch type and bought me an electric typewriter. Because I was the type of child who asked for a typewriter. While we had a standard Atari game console, Grandmother had an Atari computer. I was online before just about everyone I knew, but my grandmother’s was probably the second or third email address I ever sent email to. One thing she didn’t seem to believe in was a paperless society, because she has binders full of printouts of every single web page I’ve ever had, most of which are just embarrassing. I was flipping through one such binder one of the last times I was at her house and she had printed out a review I wrote of Aleister Crowley’s Diary of a Drug Fiend. It was a very negative review – more of a rant, really – but still I was wondering why in the world she’d want to read, let alone print out and preserve for posterity, such a thing. The reason is, her granddaughter wrote it; that’s the only reason she needed. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is she was a very progressive lady in her way. Definitely not a technophobe like some members of generations older than mine (I’m looking at you, Dad!).

Rest in peace, Grandmother. Thanks for reading to me, teaching me to type, letting me play your video games, watching MTV with me, taking me on trips to look at tiny ponies, tolerating (to some extent) me living with you, feeding me, introducing me to butternut squash and a myriad of fresh vegetables, reading my websites, sending me email, and the very Grandmother-like binder I have full of vegan recipes you found online and emailed me after I told you I’d gone vegan and what that meant. Many of those recipes were the very first vegan dishes I ever cooked, in fact, the first real cooking I did. So there’s a little of you in I Eat Food.

In other news, Mark and I were unluckily caught in the derecho Friday night. I was driving on I95 South, coming home from Baltimore and watching what we thought was just heat lightning constantly light up the sky, when without a shred of warning, a sudden hurricane-force wind pushed our Jeep over into another lane. Fortunately no one else was there, but it was scary. So I pulled off into a parking lot away from trees and we sat it out and watched it. I’m kicking myself for not taking pictures. News radio warned us of complete and utter mayhem, with millions of power outages, thousands of downed trees, accidents, and other travel nightmares, but although it was very, very, very dark, once we got back on the highway, our drive was relatively easy. Luck wasn’t with those on the inner loop of the Capital Beltway, but for us on the outer loop there were only a couple minor disturbances. And although it looked very much like we would be coming home to a dark house with no A/C during this record-breaking heatwave, we were again extremely lucky to have power once we finally made it home. So we are feeling very fortunate. Most of our neighbors are not as lucky. In fact, there is no power or water at the raccoon sanctuary, so let me tell you: today was fun. I’m actually heading back there now to take the raccoons more bottled water from our house, as well as some laundry I did for them. These are some wild raccoons that were restless in the heat around high noon today:

Raccoons usually come out at night, but they will make appearances during the day: it does NOT mean they are rabid. (That’s today’s Raccoon Fun Fact!)

Renae here with an other weather-inappropriate recipe. Actually, that’s not true. Although a nice hot bowl of soup is probably not the most tempting-sounding dish when it’s 100-freaking-degrees out, based on its ingredients – garlic scapes, fresh garlic, new potatoes – this soup is kind of late-spring-to-the-max. One year it’s impossible to find garlic scapes anywhere but the Korean grocery store (where they go by the name “garlic stems”), the next, all the farmers have them at the market, for week after week!

Garlic Scape Soup

1 medium onion, chopped
3-4 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1 bunch garlic scapes, chopped
1 lb new potatoes, chopped
6 cups vegan broth or water + bouillon
1 Tbsp soy sauce
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
optional toppings: drizzle of a flavored oil you like, thinly sliced scallions, vegan cheese shreds, vegan bacon bits, croutons, fried onions or scallions, fresh herbs

My farmers market had fresh garlic – normal cloves of garlic that hadn’t yet been dried – which is what I used. It doesn’t keep as long as your standard dried head of garlic, but it’s an interesting change of pace. I can’t decide if it tastes more or less pungent than the freshest dried garlic, although it’s definitely more flavorful than garlic that has been around too long. It really just seems to taste “fresher” (some help I am, right?). The big difference is just that instead of peeling off thin, dry, papery layers to get to each clove, you peel off thicker, wetter layers until you get to the point you can squeeze each bulb out. You can use whatever kind of garlic strikes your fancy, however.

Heat some oil in a Dutch oven over medium heat. Add the onion and cook until soft, then add the minced or pressed garlic and the garlic scapes and cook for another minute or two. If necessary and desired, you can deglaze the pot with a bit of white wine. Then add the potatoes, broth, and soy sauce. Bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat, and simmer for 30 minutes or until the potatoes are soft. Puree with an immersion blender. (Or let it cool a bit and puree in small batches in a regular blender. I, however, don’t trust hot liquids in blenders.) Adjust seasonings with salt and pepper. If desired, top with some stuff. Pictured are Daiya cheddar “cheese” shreds, scallions, and vegan bacon bits.

Most of you probably can’t tell because I’ve never put nearly the amount of effort I should be into taking my food pictures, but today’s food pictures are even lower quality than usual. That’s because I took them at work with my phone. I devoured the soup too quickly when I made it for dinner Tuesday night to take a picture, so I took a picture of the leftovers when I had them for lunch at work today. The sad thing is I had my real camera with me – it generally goes wherever I go – but when I went to take the picture, I realized I’d left the battery in the charger at home. AND I’d left all the spare batteries in my other camera bag.

I’ll use this as an opportunity to proselytize about taking time out for lunch at work, though. I know you aren’t supposed to eat at your desk because it’s good to get up, get out, and enjoy a change of scenery somewhere you can’t be tempted to do work while you eat, but we’re a fairly small business without a cafeteria or other appropriate eating place. I could have gone outside, but did I mention it’s 100 degrees outside? Lugging a bowl of hot soup down 8 flights of stairs to eat it under the blazing sun just didn’t seem practical. There is a small table in the kitchen, but eating there just invites everyone who uses the kitchen to talk to you and I don’t like talking to people during my lunch. I like eating my lunch during my lunch. And reading books. So I do eat at my desk, but I log out of the computer, stick my nose in a book, and glare at anyone that happens to drop by to ask me something until they back off and agree to come back later. And I’m a huge fan of making my lunches as nice as I can as a little treat for myself. I usually eat leftovers, so sometimes my lunch is just not that pretty, but I try to dress them up when I can. Today right after lunch I had to do a demo for an application I wrote and I hate, hate, hate, hate, HATE public speaking. However, having a pleasant lunch with a nicely-topped bowl of soup (and, importantly, reading a book instead of freaking out) right before the demo chilled me out and guess what? I didn’t even have one of my usual public-speaking dry-throat choking spells!

In photography news, the other week I went to Red Rock Wilderness Overlook for the first time. I knew it was a small park but I was thinking maybe because it isn’t very popular, I’d run into more wildlife. I also thought it would have nice views of the Potomac. Unfortunately, I’ve been spoiled by the Potomac view at Great Falls so my expectations were set way too high. It was an easy fraction of a mile to the overlook, but all it overlooked was a very still, very brown, rather boring Potomac, partially obscured by a tall fence with lots of “NO ENTRY BEYOND THIS POINT” signs. No rushing falls, no rapids, no interesting rocks, no hawks flying overhead. No crowds of people, sure (mine was the only car in the parking lot), but also no signs of wildlife other than a squirrel or two.

It was kind of boring. What there were, however, were a few agreeable damselflies, who make much better photography sitters than dragonflies. The full size versions of these are much better so I’ve made these two pictures clickable if you are interested.

A slightly different variety. Their face are like robots! They’re fascinating. In real life, this damselfly was about an inch and a half from end to end. They are very tiny; these macro shots exaggerate their size. I think that’s why their little robot faces are so amazing to me – they are little bigger than the head of a pin.

Other than friendly damselflies, the one interesting thing about Red Rock is the ruins that surround the parking lot. They were part of the farm that used to be there 150 years ago. What I assume is the original farmhouse is also still there but it’s not in ruins and in fact is inhabited and private property. So you sort of have to walk through these people’s back yard to get to the trails.

This, I think, was the well house.

One room of the two-room granary:

Outside of the two-room granary:

The ice house is located away from the other ruins and is instead behind the farmhouse.

There was a man working in his garden behind the farmhouse while I was there, which made me feel a little tresspass-y, even though I wasn’t, but I didn’t feel so weird I was unable to grab a picture of his house because I love old houses.

Okay, I bet some of you are hoping I never go on vacation again. Good news: I have a recipe and a mere four pictures today! (Bad news: we have a week-long mountain escape planned in a few weeks, but I can’t imagine that will overtake my blog for a month afterwards.)

First of all, Happy Bloomsday! It’s mid June and although so far weather on the East Coast has been cycling from unbearably hot (Memorial Day weekend) and super-nice (this week), I decided the other night that I was making a stew for dinner. Honestly, it was a pretty wintry dish, but I eat soup year-round and I won’t apologize for it! Also, I had some sauerkraut that needed to be eaten. And I missed the farmers market last weekend so I didn’t have many vegetables and was totally lacking in inspiration. I suppose you could say my lack of inspiration inspired this stew.

Sauerkraut Stew

12 oz vegan “beef” (I used Gardein Beefless Tips, but TVP chunks or any seitan would work, and I think Soy Curls would have been excellent.)
1 medium onion, chopped (instead of this, I used pearl onions)
2 large carrots, chunked
2 stalks celery, chopped large on the bias
1 large or 2 small/medium potatoes, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
4 cups vegan “beef” broth
1 14.5 oz can diced tomatoes
2-3 cups sauerkraut
1 tsp dried thyme
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Heat some oil in a Dutch oven over medium high heat. If you are using regular onions cook them for a few minutes. (If you are using pearl onions, skip this step and just add them with the other vegetables.) Add whatever “beef” you are using and brown it, then add the garlic and fry for a minute or so. Then add the rest of the vegetables and fry for a minute or two. Add the tomatoes and use their juices to deglaze the pot if necessary. Add the “beef” broth, sauerkraut, and thyme. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, cover, and simmer for about half an hour or until the carrots and potatoes are soft. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Mark and I top almost all our meals with some form of hot sauce, and I naturally assumed I’d add some to this stew, however, it was so delightfully perfectly sour, with a small kick of heat from the pepper, that I didn’t want to ruin it with hot sauce, especially a vinegar-based one. You’ll want to add the sauerkraut in accordance to your tastes, depending both on how sour your sauerkraut is and how sour you like your stew. Mark took one bite of his and said simply, “I approve.”

Guess what we haven’t had in a while? A raccoon update! We have, I think, 27 babies right now, and most of them are very healthy; several have overcome great hardships like being burned in a chimney and being chomped by some unknown predator. What we need is help! We really don’t have enough volunteers. Anyone in Northern Virginia interested in cleaning (or building) raccoon cages….and feeding little faces like this?!

Meet Tobias. He’s a real sweetie and one of my favorites.

This is not Ulysses; I believe it’s Unity, however we do have a Ulysses and I’m not telling whether or not I put Guinness in his formula today for Bloomsday! (Alright, I’ll tell: obviously I didn’t.)

Remember Emmy, the awesome surrogate mother who is raising five of our babies for us? Here she is during Memorial Day weekend trying to beat the heat by hiding under a deck. You never know where you might find a raccoon at the sanctuary! She was probably a lot cooler than me.

I actually have a couple of food posts lined up – I swear. In fact, I was going to do one tonight and combine it with my final vacation post, but the problem is I really loved Nice and therefore have a lot of pictures. The prospective food post will give me something to do this weekend – when I’m not celebrating Bloomsday!

So, Nice.

Nice.

I planned nothing for Nice. I figured we’d just see what happened once we arrived. Of course, I also assumed we’d have internet access in our hotel which would help in that regard, but that turned out to be a lie. So the first day or two, we just did a lot of walking around and taking in the sights. I liked this plaza.

It inexplicably contains a statue that from the back, from far away, looks like a giant sea monkey.

Up close its a naked man wearing a crown of horses, which I think is actually more bizarre than the sea monkey theory I first put forth. There are also these tall poles with more naked – but horse-crownless – men kneeling on them. I was entranced by them.

At night they lit up different, cycling colors!

One night as we were wandering we came across this street artist who does these pretty amazing works with spray paint and the occasional blow torch. It takes him about 10-15 minutes to complete one. They mostly depict ethereal forest scenes or other worlds. He’s like the Bob Ross (aka God) of spray paint. Mark had in fact seen videos of his work before and thought it was cool, so it’s pretty awesome we just ran into him – Mark hadn’t even known he was French. It was fascinating to watch and I’m sorry we didn’t buy one of the paintings.

Not only are there bizarrely wonderful statues and crazy-cool street artists, but there’s also a little something called the Mediterranean Sea, which I had never seen before!

So blue, so painfully gorgeous. So different than the opaque greenish-brown Atlantic Ocean.

Mark managed to connect to the internet long enough to learn about Le Château, which is not a castle (any longer) but is a park atop a hill, accessible via many stairs or, for cheaters, a secret free elevator. There was apparently a huge Jewish mafia wedding reception going on in the park when we were there. Although a large part of the open space was roped off and patrolled by slightly menacing men in black, it was a charming park with beautiful views. The park is quite large but somehow we managed to run into Brad and April while we were there, completely unplanned.

Did I mention the views?

One day we found ourselves in Monaco, which was preparing for the Grand Prix, which was to take place that weekend. That’s a Ferrari going under the Grand Prix sign. My father is a Formula One enthusiast and I therefore tried to work up some vicarious excitement, but I have to report that Monaco wasn’t all that interesting. I mean, outside of being located in what is my new favorite part of the world, the Mediterranean.

The best day of the entire trip was the result of Brad’s planning. (If you’ve actually read any of these vacation posts, by now you’ll know I’m not a big planner.) Brad had learned about the nearby village of Èze, and that we could take a 20-minute bus ride to the top of its renowned hill, explore the medieval ruins, then hike down the Chemin de Nietzsche (Nietzsche’s path): crumbling, rocky steps that wind through woods down the hill, depositing you at the stop for a different bus back to Nice. Èze was magical. After stepping off the bus near the tourism bureau, you begin walking up lazy sets of stairs that meander through the remains of the old village, now filled with artists’ galleries, boutiques, cafes, and a couple of what-must-be-totally-fabulous hotels.

It’s completely charming.

There’s a very old church …

… near these stairs …

… that lead to what must be the greatest location in the world to be dead, a small cemetery of crypts overlooking this:

After eating lunch and falling in love with the village, it was time to begin our journey down the hill. Nietzsche’s path is so called because Nietzsche walked it several times when staying in Nice and found inspiration in it while writing Ecce Homo. At the top of the path, you can sidestep to admire Èze on the hilltop. It’s nearly impossible to see in the small version of this photo, but the large garden of one of the hotels contains numerous animal sculptures (as well as a human-sized chess set), which dot the terrain.

Brad had read that it should take about 45 minutes to walk down the path. It took us about two hours. I will admit up front that I was at least 95% responsible for the extra time. I’m afraid I amble more than hike and I photograph EVERYTHING. But surely you’ll understand why; it was probably the most breathtaking place I’d ever been.

Seriously – I want to move to the French Riviera. I felt right there. I liked Paris, I really did, loved it even. But the Cote d’Azur? I can picture myself living there until the end of my life (something I’ve never said about any location), the long days (boy, the days are long there) mingling into each other sun-drenched day after sea-dazzling day. Yes. Yes I will Yes.

I know this is even way more off-topic than I usually am, but I’m so excited I was able to get these pictures I can’t help but share. This kind of makes up for the fact I missed the space shuttle being flown over us a couple of months ago. Everything was working against me today and I thought I’d miss the transit of Venus: I was on-call for transporting wildlife tonight and I often get home after dark when I’m on-call; the forecast for our area was cloudy and rainy; and I don’t have any of the proper equipment for directly viewing the sun. But I got the easiest possible transportation assignment and traffic was so minimal (which around here is nothing short of amazing) that I was home by 6:30. After I lugged my stuff into the house and stepped back out to survey the situation, the sun shone down directly upon me – there were clouds, but they weren’t obscuring the sun and there was no threat of rain. And I remembered the infrared filter I was using before I bought the infrared-converted camera – I had a hunch I could safely look at the sun through it. It worked beautifully! I snapped a couple of pictures with the 18-200mm lens that the filter was purchased to fit, then switched to the 400mm lens that it does not fit. But I was able to rig it to work anyway (so I feel like a genius :)). And here’s what I got:

I kept most of them exactly as they looked through the infrared filter because it seemed so appropriate, but I did convert one to B&W:

After shooting these images, I rushed inside to grab my tripod and set it up in case I wasn’t holding the big lens steady enough, but by the time I got the camera on the tripod, the clouds had rolled in and I never saw the sun again. Fortunately, the pictures I got turned out!

Was anyone else able to watch the transit?

Just so you don’t think there will never be anything but vacation and animal pictures on this blog, first a couple sort-of recipes. Last weekend at the farmers market, in addition to my normal basket full of stuff, I scored both a beautiful purple cauliflower …

… and some garlic scapes. This is the first time I’ve ever found garlic scapes at the market! (I have bought them in Asian grocery stores, however.)

There aren’t any new farmers this year but the market seems better than last year; the farmers seem to have a wider variety of vegetables. Which is so very welcome, because believe me, after attending the farmers market in Nice, I was bracing for a big letdown once I got home and went to my own market, even if I had been missing it dearly all winter.

The cauliflower, I just cut up into florets, drizzled some olive oil and fresh lemon juice over them, and sprinkled them with some sel de provence I got in Nice (by the way, I’m going to say “Nice” about a million times in this post; I LOVED Nice) …

… then I roasted it at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for a while – maybe half an hour? Until it was done. The magenta coloring on some stalks is from the lemon juice.

The garlic scapes I roughly chopped …

… then I put them in the VitaMix (a food processor would work, of course) with about 1/3 cup cashews (the only nuts I had in the house; I’d have used pine nuts or walnuts if I’d had them), 1/4 cup nutritional yeast, a little salt, a bit of lemon juice, and 1/2 cup olive oil …

… and processed until smooth.

I took some whole baby potatoes (also from the farmers market) and boiled them for about 5 minutes, then drained the water and banged them around in the pan a bit (a tip I read in another blog somewhere but I don’t remember where), then put them in a baker and drizzled with a bit of olive oil and baked at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for about 15 minutes.

Then I took them out and stirred in some of the pesto, then returned them to the oven and baked another 10 minutes or so.

I served both with a rice and lentil pilaf, into which I stirred leftover pizza toppings from the night before, which included spinach, caramelized onions, and garlicky sun-dried tomatoes (which I’d made as a take on some amazing sun-dried tomatoes we bought in Nice.

I got more garlic scapes at the market this weekend – not one but two vendors were selling them! What are your favorite ways of using them? I’d love to hear. I’m thinking about pickling some.

Now, Nice Nice Nice. Nice is soooo nice. After a week in Paris, we hopped on a train to Nice, on which we met up with Brad and April, who you’ll recognize as our fabulous hosts in Amsterdam from prior posts and who had come to join us in splendid Nice. Situated in the French Riviera and very close to Italy, Nice has a huge Italian influence. As it’s right on the Mediterranean Sea, many of the restaurants predominately feature seafood. Neither seafood restaurants nor traditional French restaurants cater very well to vegans, but the good news is the heavy Italian influence means pasta abounds, and every Nicean restaurant we visited had a vegan pasta-and-tomato-sauce dish. Mark and I ate a lot of pasta in Nice, to the point of getting a little tired of it, although somehow we managed to go to various restaurants in such an order that the pasta-and-tomato-sauce dish in each one was better than the last, which helped.

Our first night we unloaded our bags in our terrible hotel, then walked to the boardwalk and wandered until we found a reasonably priced beachfront restaurant with outdoor seating and a pasta alla pomodoro on the menu. This was easy to find. After a long day of travel, with a bottle of wine, this simple meal was just right.

I’m a terrible food blogger and didn’t manage to record the names of any of the restaurants we visited in Nice…although you’ll find similar dishes anywhere you stop. Another dinner was in old town Nice (Vieux Nice), in one of the restaurants that turns the tents for the daily market into outdoor seating in the evening. Mark got the linguine with vegetables, which was really good.

And I got the risotto, which was made with olive oil and no cheese, to my surprise! It had mushrooms in it, which I hate, but they were easy enough to eat around and I was just so happy to be able to order risotto that I didn’t care. In fact, on very rare occasions, I am able to eat mushrooms without gagging, and I believe this risotto may have been one of those exceptions.

We found ourselves in Monaco one day (it’s strange how these things happen over there; you wander off and suddenly you’re in another country), where food seemed to be a bit limited, but soon another Italianesque restaurant saved the day and Mark and I got penne all’arribiata, which was surprisingly delicious. Well, I always think penne all’arribiata is delicious, but I was surprised by how delicious I found it after eating Italian food for several days in a row. Love the huge branch of rosemary it came with!

Brad and April had pizza in Monaco (you can see a bit of April’s in the picture above, and in fact, if you look really hard, you can see a bit of Carrie the poodle as well!) and I’ll be honest, I was quite jealous. It’s rare I’ll look enviously at someone’s non-vegan meal because meat and – it’s true – cheese gross me out. But pizza done right (I’m not talking about Dominos pizza, but GOOD pizza) is something I will covet. So the next day in Eze (oh, beautiful, beautiful Eze), when we stopped for lunch in a lovely outdoor cafe at the top of the hill, amongst the medieval ruins, I worked up the nerve to ask the waiter if it was at all possible to get the roasted vegetable pizza without the cheese, and guess what! He didn’t think it was a crazy request at all! He just said “certainly!” I would have preferred a “real” pizza crust (this was one kinda crunchy like toast), but IT WAS PIZZA AND IT WAS GLORIOUS.

I accompanied my pizza with a panache, which is apparently the French version of what I would call a shandy: lemonade + beer, where lemonade = Sprite-like beverage, as in British-English, not American lemonade. Refreshing!

If you are vegan and thinking by now that the French Riviera must be really boring to eat in – pasta, pasta, and more pasta, unless you work up the nerve to ask for cheeseless pizza – well, rest assured that like any other city, Nice has ethnic restaurants that will often have vegetarian options. For example, we found a Chinese restaurant that had several vegetarian dishes, including this Tofu Piquante …

… and sauteed noodles with legumes.

We also went to an Indian restaurant, which was quite good, but the pictures I took were blurry, probably because I was exhausted and starving at the time. But just know you’ll do fine as a vegan in Nice. You might have to pass more restaurants by than you would in, say, L.A., but there are plenty of options. It might be harder to be vegan AND gluten-free as a lot of those options are pasta-related, but I think gluten-free in general is probably harder in much of Europe than it is here in the States.

Nice and Eze were so incredibly beautiful I am going to have to do a final vacation post with a few breath-taking photos later this week, but I’ll finish up this food-related post with a bit about the market, and a traditional Nice snack that is – believe it or not! – vegan. The views were enough to make me want to move to Nice, but attending the market was what really put me over the edge. The open air market operates all morning six days a week (on Monday it is replaced with a flea market), in the old section of the city. At one end, there are many stalls with flowers, although their perfumes were a bit overwhelming and drove poor Mark out. Then you come to several stalls selling dried lavender in just about any form you can imagine, soaps, and some touristy-type things. Then there are a couple of stalls with an amazing array of bulk spices. This is a stall full of dried peppers and other chile-related products.

Finally you get to the produce. It’s all gorgeous. We bought some cherries and wandered around the market eating them and I’m pretty sure they were the best cherries I’ve ever had.

Nestled amongst the produce stalls is a socca station, where a socca-making lady is kept extremely busy. Socca is a Nice specialty made from chickpea flour and it’s generally vegan. I had to stand in line for quite some time to get some at the market (though the market is not the only place to get it). From my place in line, I watched a couple of batches being made. The final portion of this batch was sold before it was my turn.

Fortunately, she whisked up another batch and poured it onto the large cooking tray (under which there is a fire), then drizzled it with olive oil.

When it was finally my turn, I ordered the last three pieces from the batch above, to share with Mark, Brad, and April. Before being cut up, it was sprinkled with ground black pepper, which, combined with the texture, led me to think of the white part of fried eggs when I was eating it; I suppose my mother used to put ground pepper on our sunny side-up eggs when I was a kid. Socca was really good. I think Mark would like me to make it at home, but although I probably will try David Lebowitz’s recipe (linked to above) I think it’s one of those things that you’ve really got to get on location. If you go to Nice, it’s a must-try.

Oh, Nice. I miss you so. Here’s a teaser for what will be my final vacation post. One day I would like this to be home, not a vacation!

At the end of my last post I said my next one would be about Nice, but I’ve decided to do the animal post next. I’m indecisive like that. There are a lot of pictures, so there will be little gabbing!

A sparrow outside the Paris catacombs.

While walking along the Seine, I spied these three adorable ducklings curling up to take a nap.

Nearby, their mother had her back to them and watched the river. It’s interesting she was more concerned about trouble coming from the water than from pedestrians; she must be pretty trustful of humans. Or maybe she was just admiring the big mud puddle called the Seine. She had no problem with me getting within six feet of her babies.

I realized I take a LOT of pictures of ducks. My first word was “duck” and I probably still sound like a 2-year-old when I shriek, “oooooh, duck!” whenever I see one, grabbing for my camera. This one was at the Rodin Museum. He was lined up with two other ducks and a group of Americans spent 10 minutes laughing about “getting their ducks in a row”, which they found to be a jolly good joke. Despite their repeated urging, I failed to get a picture of the ducks in a row.

One thing we noticed is there aren’t many bugs – at least flying insects – in France. I saw nary a screened window and you can bet I kept those gorgeous floor-to-ceiling windows open at all times, yet there were no bugs in either of our hotel rooms. This is reason alone to move to France. I currently sport about 30 mosquito bites on my legs following about an hour of yardwork. Anyway, there ARE, of course, bees in France, pollinating all the beautiful flowers we saw. (Spring is a lovely time to travel!)

One of our favorite parts of the trip had nothing to do with where we were. The first time we approached Notre Dame, I was snapping pictures wildly when I noticed a figure ahead of us covered in pigeons. It was peculiar; I couldn’t imagine why this person had pigeons all over herself. I even wondered briefly if she needed help as at one point we saw her waving her arm as if to shoo them away. As we approached and passed her, though, we saw she had dried rice that she was feeding them, and Mark and I simultaneously said, “Ohhhh!”. She overheard us and motioned for us to come over. She didn’t utter a single word for the entire 10 minutes or so we spent with her, but she gestured for me to come forward and Mark to take my camera, then she plopped some rice on my head. And soon I was covered in pigeons myself! WHICH WAS AWESOME.

Then it was Mark’s turn and he loved it even more than I did.

This made a huge impression on Mark.

So then Mark decided he wanted to become a crazy pigeon person himself and bought a bag of rice. (By the way, eating dried rice does NOT cause birds to explode; I know someone is going to ask me.) After that we had to stop in every park and other pigeon-gathering area. (After that we also had a lot of rice all over our hotel room floors.)

So we saw a lot of this:

And this:

This little guy was hoping for his share of rice as well.

Now, this is not a good picture by any means, but I’m including it for the variety because it’s the only picture of a European lizard I have. It’s also another example of me stealing lighting from another photographer. We were making the long trek back to our hotel in Nice after an exhausting (but amazing) day; we were fatigued, poor Brad had just hiked a million rocky miles with a bad knee, and we’d just killed a few bottles of wine at dinner, so we were slowly but surely trudging back to the hotel to crash before heading back to Amsterdam the next day, when I saw another photographer examining a stone wall very closely. So I walked up next to him to examine it as well and found this lizard. The lighting in this picture came from his flash….I barely know how to turn my flash on. Also, I must be the most annoying person to go on vacation and/or hikes with. I stop every six seconds to take a picture; I’m sure it is very irritating, although I constantly tell people not to stop for me as I will catch up. I don’t think anyone bothered stopping this time!

This is another picture taken walking back to the hotel after dinner in Nice, on a different night. This gull suddenly swooped down and started fussing a bit at this window. I could hear him impatiently thinking, “KNOCK KNOCK! Anyone home?”

Back in Amsterdam, Brad and April set themselves up for another “walk” that would more properly be termed a “wait for Renae”. Although they live just a block from a metro and tram station in the suburb of Amstelveen and are close enough to bike into the city proper, they also live just a couple of blocks from a cow and sheep pasture, with a creek to boot. The best of both worlds! Because I see a heron every time I’m out, of course that’s the first thing I saw, and although this looks a lot like a great blue heron (which is what we have at home), Brad informed me it is actually a grey heron. They also have purple herons, but I didn’t see one. April said she sometimes sees grey herons sitting on cars. That must be a strange sight.

The promised cows.

Just before “charging” April’s toy poodle…

Sheep!

Why is it I always feel like sheep want to steal my soul? I don’t trust these two.

Brad and April are so lucky. Gorgeous apartment, a stone’s throw from Amsterdam, and THIS is their backyard:

Oooooh, ducks!!!!

Baby ducks!

I really wanted to steal this one.

So many ducks.

This isn’t the greatest picture, but I think it’s funny because I think they are gossiping. Silly gossiping ducks. One headless duck.

I learned that this is a coot.

Look how so-ugly-it’s-cute their babies are!

Awww!

White swan.

Black swan!

The next day, Brad rustled up four bikes and I tried to remember how to ride a bike with pedal brakes (and promptly fell off the bike onto the handlebar, crushed beneath the weight of my backpack full of camera equipment, and bruised a rib – which I’m still dealing with…Brad thought it better after that incident if he carried my camera stuff while we biked), and we biked to Amstelpark, which boasts among other attractions a petting zoo. I’m opposed to zoos for ethical reasons, but I have to say, I was completely baffled by the petting zoo in the otherwise beautiful Amstelpark. It seemed to consist of three animals: a white peafowl, a wooly mammoth (or some other very wooly beast) standing in a bucket, and an albino kangaroo. Does that strike anyone else as completely bizarre? I think the albino kangaroo is praying, “please send me home to Australia!” in this picture.

A male peacock was perched on a nearby roof, looking into the petting zoo area, feeling “cocky”, no doubt, that he is able to fly and thus escape the fenced-in area containing the wooly beast in a bucket and the incongruous albino kangaroo.

I admit I stood and stared at the spectacle of the albino kangaroo for quite a while, dumbfounded, but finally the others were able to draw me away. We wandered along a path with Brad in the lead, when he suddenly stopped and whispered for me – I was, as usual, bringing up the rear – to quietly come up to where he was standing because there was a peahen sunbathing around the corner. She was magnificent, I tell you!

Then we arrived at a pond where I was completely overwhelmed by waterfowl, including the black swan above. I think I felt something akin to what an infant feels when they get sensory overload. I don’t even know what this is. (Do you? Let me know!)

And…

Not all the animals I encountered were wildlife. This picture was taken in Nice and is titled “I miss Gomez”.

After Amstelpark we biked into the city. The restaurant we wanted to eat in (Ethiopian, yay!!!) wasn’t open yet so we stopped in a bar for a snack and some beers. I was super happy because the bar was playing nothing but the Rolling Stones and there was a very sleepy cat next to our table!

I missed Torticia too!

My favorite animal of the trip, though, was our faithful companion Carrie, who went everywhere with us in Nice and Amsterdam. Here she’s smoking a Cuban. (Mark insisted on buying a Cuban cigar “because he could” and ended up smoking it for about 30 seconds before deciding it was disgusting. Mark doesn’t like cigars. He just doesn’t like the government telling him he can’t BUY cigars. Carrie didn’t think much more of the Cuban than Mark did.)

Whew! Okay that is ENOUGH pictures for one post. There won’t be nearly as many next time, and there will even be FOOD. I even took pictures of dinner tonight – which involves purple cauliflower and garlic scapes – so I’m not lying about that.

Today I’m going to show you some of the pictures I took in Paris that I felt were kind of artistic. But first a quick story. Of the two of us, Mark is far and away the more creative and artistic. I would never label myself an artist of any sort, whereas Mark actually considered a career in art before becoming an internet hacker. He goes through phases; sometimes he’ll draw for hours a day and sometimes he doesn’t pick up a pencil or brush for weeks or months. He seems to be especially inspired by travel, though, because whenever we go on a trip he draws with every second of downtime he has. He was especially prolific on this trip. I have a picture of him in Nice literally sketching while crossing a street. He never plans ahead well enough to pack drawing supplies, though, so whenever we are in a new city, we have to find an art supply store so he can buy a sketchpad and other supplies. So when we were walking along the Quai Voltaire in Paris and he saw an art store, we had to go in. Although it had two stories, it was small and crammed with stuff and the employees were running back and forth locating items for customers, and I felt completely in the way with my backpack and camera, but I refused to wait outside because I was charmed by how old the place seemed to be and how completely different it was from any place in the States. Finally Mark purchased everything he needed (EXCEPT AN ERASER, which was to haunt us later), we went on our way, and I kind of forgot about it. Until today when I was reading Anna Gavalda’s Hunting and Gathering (at the recommendation of a commenter!) and some of the characters went to an art store on Quai Voltaire called Sennelier. I figured it was the same shop we’d been in because I didn’t recall seeing any other art supply stores, so I googled it and apparently it’s famous for serving Cezanne, Degas, and even inventing products for Picasso. Which is what I love about Paris. You can’t AVOID history or art there. You’re trotting along and hey, there’s Notre Dame. You walk into a store and ask for a bottle of India ink and the great-grandson of the guy who mixed paints for Degas and Picasso retrieves it for you.

Moving on to my sorry excuses for art…. This isn’t a particularly great photo, but something about it reminds me of very early photographs. I think it’s the guy in the middle – his coat looks like he could be from almost any time period, and something about his pose just makes it look old-fashioned. Taken with my infrared camera, as were all the B&W pictures in this post.

As I mentioned, Notre Dame crept up on me.

It’s an enormous building. It’s hiding in this picture.

Another very famous church, Sacre Coeur. This one I had specifically gone looking for.

Sacre Coeur is worth climbing the stairs of Montmartre for just in its own right, but being located on the highest ground in Paris, it’s also a great vantage point from which to see the city.

If you don’t want to climb the stairs you can apparently cheat.

But the stairs really aren’t bad at all and you can stop as many times as you’d like to take in views like this one:

Another place we visited was the Rodin Museum. We only saw the gardens, which are open late on Wednesday nights during the spring and summer, only cost a euro, and contain many of his statues.

The flowers were all very pretty as well.

As were the flowers at the Jardin du Luxembourg.

The Seine was super muddy during our trip; I don’t know why. Brad and April reported it hadn’t been very muddy when they were there a few weeks before us.

It was so muddy I almost prefer it in false color, even though I don’t usually like false color.

At sunset, though, the muddiness was downplayed quite a bit.

No post about art in Paris would be complete without a pseudo-artistic picture of the Eiffel Tower, right?

I am ready to move on to Nice now. (I am also ready to move TO Nice now; it was splendid.) I have a lot of animal pictures I wanted to share, but maybe I can cram all of the animals from the entire trip into a single post. I’m not sure – there ARE two weeks worth of animals… We’ll see. It looks like tomorrow we’ll be spending the third day in a row sitting in a hot house waiting for the air conditioning repair people to make an appearance, so if I don’t die of heat stroke before then, I may post again then. If not, Happy Memorial Day to those of you in America….tomorrow Mark and I will have managed to celebrate (or in the case of France, endure) three different national holidays in three different countries over the course of three weeks!

My original plan for organizing my Paris posts is getting harder to implement now that the easily-categorized food post is done. Which are “artistic” shots (I pompously decided I’d devote an entire post to photos I thought were artistic) and which are depictions of things we did? Some of the animal pictures (how did I even amass so many pictures of wildlife in a city?) even overlap with “activities”. Basically the problem is I just want to gush about everything all at once. But I think that’s an indicator that I had a really wonderful time, so I suppose it’s a good problem to have. I hate to tell you, though, that there’s a whole other leg to this journey AFTER Paris and if anything there are even more pictures from Nice, so this dilemma is going to repeat itself and you guys are going to be looking at my vacation pictures for weeks!

Right, so, I’ll try to pull my thoughts together and today talk about some of the important – to me – places we went and things we did. In my last post I mentioned I went to Paris with dreams of doing three things:

1) Order and drink grapefruit juice.
2) See the catacombs.
3) Visit Shakespeare & Company bookstore.

I’ll start with #3 because it happened first. So, I was an English major and one of my favorite books is Ulysses, which Shakespeare & Company is tangentially related to because it was named after the Shakespeare & Company that was owned by Sylvia Beach, who first published Ulysses. (That’s not confusing at all, right?) Both stores were (and the current one remains) hangouts for hordes of important writers. It follows therefore that I needed to go there even more badly than I needed to go to City Lights before I’d ever been to City Lights (which I’ve now been to many times).

I arrive on the scene.

I go in.

I browse. (I know Lisa G/K is going to ask me what I bought, so I’ll beat her to the punch: Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island, which I liked, but not as much as the two books I bought in Amsterdam’s American Book Center.)

I go upstairs and take pictures I’m not supposed to be taking (because Sylvia Beach Whitman, the daughter of the original store owner, who was named after Sylvia Beach (not confusing, right?) still allows writers to live upstairs in the “library” section of the store, photography is not allowed up there). BUT I COULDN’T STOP MYSELF. I AM A TERRIBLE PERSON.

There are several painfully adorable little writer alcoves.

Finally I dragged myself back out of the store, where Mark was waiting for me and drawing. (Mark had a sketchpad permanently attached to his hand in France.)

If I ever move to Paris, I’ll be spending many a rainy afternoon in Shakespeare & Company…it’s just my kind of place.

Moving on to #2 on my list above, Mark and I returned to the catacombs, which had been closed for VE Day the first time we went, and after standing in line for over an hour in some drizzle, we finally got in. Some things you might want to know about the catacombs before visiting:

• They are not open on public holidays (see my prior post).
• They are not handicapped accessible. This attraction would never be allowed in the United States. The only way down is 130 stairs, and the only way up is 83 stairs in a very tight, very small spiral staircase.
• The tunnel is over a mile long, extremely darkly lit, slippery in some spots, and ends in some random location nowhere near where you began. Basically, you’ll be lost when you emerge.
• There are lots and lots and lots of bones. The bones of 6 million people. Many, many bones. Really, more bones than I imagined. Lots of bones.

The first part of the tunnel is an old quarry, which is where this picture was taken. I’ve been puzzling over this picture for the last couple of days, though. At first I didn’t think anything of it; it was clearly a picture of my shadow taking a picture of Mark’s shadow. Mark’s making the animal shape with his hand and you can see the shadow of me taking the picture. Except I’m NOT taking his picture. The picture was taken with my Canon 60D and I always use the viewfinder to take pictures, that is, I always hold it up to my eye. Even if I HAD used the LCD to take the picture and had held it away from my face (which I didn’t), it’s a dSLR – you’d be able to see the shadow of it in my hands because it is very much larger than my hands. And my arms don’t even seem to be properly attached to my body. It’s not the shadow of someone else because I know that Mark and I were alone in the room because we wouldn’t have been acting goofy or disrespectful if anyone else had been there, and besides, that’s the outline of my hair and I specifically recall lining up the shot so both of our shadows were in the picture. So I had no idea why I’m dismembered and don’t seem to have a camera…which seems impossible considering I HAVE A PICTURE.

If you go to the catacombs and you are interested in taking pictures, take a camera that is very good in low light levels. I had to use ISO 6400 and switch to my 50mm f/1.8 lens just for the extra sensitivity. Neither flash nor tripods are allowed. After getting through the quarry part, one of the first sets of skulls you come to are three skulls lined up to the right of a fairly bright light. Take a picture of these skulls because that’s the best light you’re going to get in the whole tunnel.

These are two of the same three:

Same location, further back:

I didn’t see anyone disrespect the “no flash” rule, but what people were doing was illuminating the bones with flashlights in order to be able to take pictures. Mark, who was sketching the whole time we were there, was annoyed by this because it kept messing with his lighting, and he thought it was the same as using a flash and therefore not allowed. However, I think possibly the “no flash” rule is more for the sake of ambiance than the typical museum reason of being damaging to artwork (and certainly not the typical theatre reason of being distracting to the performers!) and that therefore flashlights may be allowed. And what I did was wait for someone to come through and shine a flashlight on a location for their own photo and I’d steal their illumination for my own. Just go prepared for the far-from-ideal situation as far as photography is concerned, if it matters to you.

I’ve been rambling on about practical concerns, but what did I think of the catacombs? They were even better than I’d hoped, actually. I’d become a little worried when I realized they were more popular than I’d thought they were (before arriving, I didn’t realize the lines were always an hour or longer to get in) that they might be too touristy or commercialized. They are emphatically not. They were actually much closer to what a younger, more naive Renae thought they were be like than the older, jaded Renae, who was going to kick something if she saw one more goddamn McDonalds or Starbucks in Paris or Amsterdam. They are very real. You don’t get much more real than walking through a dark tunnel lined with the bones of 6 million people. You’re not supposed to touch them, and you don’t want to touch them, out of respect, but if you are like me, you’ll be backing up trying to line up a shot and you’ll back right into the other side of the tunnel and you’ll realize, “oh, I’m casually leaning against A WALL OF HUMAN BONES”. It’s a moving experience, even if at the end of the two kilometers you’re a little tired of looking at bones. And I like bones.

So we’ve gone through two of my three goals, right? What about le jus de pamplemousse? D’accord, d’accord. I don’t WANT to show you this picture because no one looks very attractive drinking a beverage while photographed from below. One day I’m going to show Mark how to compose a portrait photograph. This is what NOT to do, but it’s also moi, bois du jus de pamplemousse! And DAMN did it taste good!

I’d said that other than my three goals, all I wanted to do was just be in Paris. What else did we do? Most of it I’ll save for a later entry with my artsy pictures, but here are a few other things we did, almost all of them discovered just by walking around.

Walked by the Moulin Rouge…that red moulin being the first windmill seen on my trip despite having come straight from Holland!

Climbed the stairs of Montmartre.

Walked around aimlessly and turned around to find myself in the shadow of one of the most famous pieces of architecture in the world. (Quelle surprise!)

Walked around aimlessly and found the “love locks” I’d first read about on David Lebovitz’s blog, then saw on Jes’s blog a few weeks ago. (I think Jes and I managed to have practically the same Paris vacation. 🙂 )

Went to the garden of the Rodin Museum.

I love this picture of Mark sketching the Thinker.

I told you he was permanently attached to his sketchpad on this trip, like all trips. In fact, some of our best memories are just sitting outside a cafe, sipping wine, me watching Mark sketch or ink.

Or walking along the Seine at night, holding hands.

Whew, okay, that’s enough for one post! More Paris to come, like it or not.

After a weekend in Amsterdam, we left Brad and April and boarded a train for Paris.

Man, the Seine was muddy while we were there!

For most of my life, there have been three things I’ve wanted to do in Paris:

1) Order and drink grapefruit juice.
2) See the catacombs.
3) Visit Shakespeare & Company bookstore.

If #1 seems odd, consider the translation of “grapefruit juice” and tell me it’s not the greatest phrase in the world, in any language: le jus de pamplemousse. Don’t think that my rather unassuming list means I haven’t been yearning to visit Paris; in fact, I took several years of French in high school and college and have always been fascinated by the Parisian art and literary scenes from the turn of the 20th century. I didn’t have a huge list of things I wanted to do because I’m not into most traditionally touristy things and what I’ve always wanted to do was simply be in Paris.

Well, I took hundreds of pictures while being in Paris, far too many for a single post. I’ve been trying to decide how to divide them up and I think I’m going to do three posts on Paris: 1) food + attractions, 2) animals, 3) art/photography. They will each probably be ridiculously long. The first may well be the longest, so let’s get on with it.

My very first impression of Paris was highly favorable – despite getting lost trying to get from the metro to our hotel. In fact, although I think Mark wanted to murder me if I walked up and down the block one more time, that was part of my good impression, because not one but two different people stopped to ask me if I needed directions. And people say the French are rude! They are not; they are kind! The second individual didn’t speak English and I have to email my French tutor to tell her our lesson on directions helped because I was able to follow her French well enough to finally find the hotel!

We were starving once we settled in, so I consulted the Vegan in Paris e-book I had purchased before the trip for a vegan-friendly restaurant in our arrondissement and found that Tien Hiang (14, rue Bichat; 10th arrondissement; Goncourt or République metro) was a mere 3 blocks away.

I ordered the “chicken” in spicy sauce:

Mark ordered the sweet & sour “fish”:

Both were soooo good! If we lived in Paris, we’d be at this place all the time! In fact, we returned later for our last lunch in the city and I ordered the caramelized “chicken” clay pot:

… and Mark ordered the stuffed tofu clay pot:

Again, absolutely delicious! It can get a little loud in the restaurant when it’s crowded, but I can’t tell you how happy I was despite the din at 10:30 on Monday night when we strolled in for dinner…especially when the food was scrumptious.

Malheursement, my SECOND impression of Paris was NOT favorable. In fact, there were tears and an “I hate Paris!”. How can that be? Who in the hell hates Paris? Well, here is the best foreign travel advice I can give you: check for any public/national/bank holidays in your destination country BEFORE your trip – ideally when planning it. ESPECIALLY if you are a) vegan, b) prone to headaches and illness when your blood sugar drops, and/or c) not staying in an apartment with a kitchen.

Tuesday, May 8 was our first full day in Paris and little did I know it was VE (Victory in Europe) Day, a public holiday celebrating Europe’s exit from WWII. The first bad surprise was arriving at the Catacombs to find a handwritten note on the door stating they were closed for the day. Lord I wish they had explained further! Had I only known what was going on, we could have avoided a breakdown. Instead, we walked around looking for other things to do and eventually got hungry, which led to a very long and terrible succession of walking into restaurants and finding them closed. The weird thing is many of them were unlocked and occupied by the proprietor, but fermé nonetheless. The ones that were open had no vegan food. The hungrier I got, the more personally I began taking these rejections. You might think I am stupid for not suspecting earlier that there was some other explanation than “Paris hates me”, but you must understand that I’ve heard that it is not all that unusual for French businesses to randomly close for the day. I had just never thought the trend was that widespread. And also, once my blood sugar dips to a certain level, I can’t think straight and it’s a horrible downward spiral. Finally we gave up on dinner and I found a literally life-saving baguette (I was ready to throw myself under an autobus) and began to feel a bit better…until Mark discovered thon (tuna) in the packaged salads we’d bought in the 8 à Huit…which was listed in the ingredients, which I’d read at least 10 times and managed to miss (again, I can’t think, at least in French, when hungry). Breakdown ensued. It wasn’t until the next day when properly fed that I started wondering if the prior day had been a holiday. LEARN FROM MY MISTAKE. (Interestingly, we managed to hit a different public holiday – Ascension Day – our first full day back in the Netherlands, but it was far less traumatic as we knew about it in advance AND were staying in an apartment with a kitchen.)

After the miracle baguette had worked to calm me down a bit, I was determined to salvage something from the day and decided there was no way Paris would be able to prevent me from looking at the Eiffel Tower. So that’s what we did, and I felt a million times better afterwards. Je t’aime, la Tour Eiffel.

After that horrible day and once I figured out the explanation for my sorrows, my opinion of Paris again swung way back to the favorable side. We were very well-fed for the rest of our stay there and had a great time.

I don’t know the name of the Moroccan place we found in the Latin Quarter one lunchtime, which is a shame because the service was great. They gave us free kir, and even gave us a third one when we spilled one. But the BEST part was when we saw a cat stroll by the door and I did my customary shrieking of “kitty!” and the waiter went and retrieved the cat and handed him to us to cuddle while we waited for our food. Now THAT is the kind of service I like! Possibly not the type of service some people appreciate, but we thought it was the greatest thing ever. The veggie couscous we ordered was tasty too!

I didn’t have enough hands to take a picture of my WAY overloaded falafel – I couldn’t put it down once I loaded it up – but another meal near the Latin Quarter was at Maoz, and it was awesome. I put sauerkraut on my falafel! And beets! It was fantastic. I also put so much other stuff on it I had a hard time finding the falafels when I went to eat it!

You may think we never left the Latin Quarter by now, which is not true, although it did become our go-to location for finding safe food. While wandering around one day we found Le Grenier de Notre Dame, Paris’ “oldest vegetarian restaurant”, but it was before their opening time. We decided to return for our last night in Paris, though, for a romantic dinner. We were seated upstairs and the ambiance was nice:

I’d read somewhere the service was spotty in this place, but we didn’t have a problem at all. We were there quite early, though, before they got busy. I thought it was charming and enjoyed being there. The food was good, although I’m not sure I would say it was great. I felt like both of our dishes were things I could have made at home, which is what prevents me from saying it was great. (Or maybe I’m just a great cook!) I did enjoy the meal and would return. Vegan items were clearly marked on the menu.

Mark had the “assiette berbere” (assiette is plate), which from the name I thought would be a bit spicier, but it was pretty tasty if not exactly what I was expecting.

I had the cassoulet – probably the closest I got to traditional French cuisine at any point. It was served extremely hot and of course I loved the dish it came in. It was pretty tasty, although again, I think I could have made it at home pretty easily. Now you are probably going to think I’m crazy, but my favorite part about it was how the edges, where the tomato sauce had dried out a bit from baking, tasted like the edges in some frozen meals. I eat frozen meals fairly rarely these days, but my mom used to buy me a lot of them when I was in college and the best part was always the edges where the tomato sauce (if involved) got all dark and chewy. I don’t mean to insult Le Grenier by saying the best part of my meal was it tasted like a frozen meal…other than that tiny characteristic it had nothing in common with a frozen meal, I swear! The cassoulet included veggies, beans, tofu, and seitan. I also particularly liked the seitan.

This is getting very long. I think I’m going to break it up into four parts instead of three. I’ll write up a post on my #2 and #3 above, as well as a small pictorial musing on just “being” in Paris, in the next day or two, and for now just conclude with another reason you’ll think I’m crazy. (Yes, I did #1 as well and there is even a picture, but it’s not very attractive.) The catacombs and Shakespeare & Company and the Eiffel Tower were all they were cracked up to be and more (though that Seine was awfully muddy), but do you know what was thing that surprised me by being what made me fall hard for Paris? The métro. Not travelling on it, really, which was generally very crowded, but the idea of it. I have a slight obsession with underground tunnels (hence the catacomb obsession, see #2 above), and I LOVE that very unlike the DC metro system, EVERYTHING in Paris is near one, two, or three metro stops. But what I really, really, really love about the Paris métro – the surprising bit – are the signs. If I could marry a métro sign it would be this one (St Michel):

Or its twin (Blanche):

Anvers even has a marvelous map outside!

They don’t all have the art deco flowers, but the variety just makes me love them all the more. The industrial-looking Pigalle:

I forgot to record which one this is (if you know, please leave a comment!).

Goncourt has an extra-special place in my heart for being the one right by our hotel.

Seriously, when I think of Paris now, I think of those metro signs and I know that I love Paris because Paris loves beauty. Look at the typical DC metro sign (and they ALL look like this):

Now, which city do you think I belong in? Well, most of you don’t know me outside the blog, but I assure you, it’s the city with the metro signs that are works of art.

Oh, Paris. We had a rocky start but a beautiful finish. I love you and your lights and your metro signs.