Fabulous French Food From France

This month, the January issue of the Philippine Tatler comes out and inside is a feature of the beautiful wedding of Martin Argosino and Leica Carpo. It was a wedding dreams are made of: getting lost in the Luberon, gettting drenched in Avignon, losing a glove, finding flowers, interesting boutiques, complimentary L'Occitane toiletries, a church as cold as a tomb (but beautiful), new friends and old, a DJ who looked like Ving Rhames...

Just looking at it made me reminisce of all things French, especially the food. Ohhhh, the glorious food. Butter, foie gras, truffle oil, you name it. Food so good, even my grazing friend Amanda halfed a duck with me.

So dear readers, as a special treat as well as an agony of sorts, I am giving you a very special series of postings on "What I Ate When I Was There."

Enjoy and please don't drool on your keyboard ala Electric Dreams. That's soooo 1980's!

First, our charming hotel on the Rive Gauche in the Saint Germain de Pres district, Hotel Clement. We walked all the way here from our Luxembourg RER train stop because frankly, there are no taxis at 6AM. Good thing it was close by- my poor luggage looked kawawa compared to Manda's shiny, upright, polycarbon German-made Rimowa.

 What transportation strike?

We totally maxed out first day out, getting a feel of our new neighborhood which culminated in a touristy lunch that I am too embarrassed to post here even though I took a picture of it. Instead, enjoy the wintry colors of the Lauduree window display in the St Germain de Pres district. It's a new one and they didn't let me take a photo inside, phooey.

 So we bought a box of the assorted instead. And this little box of macarons saved our lives that night.

"How?" you may wonder. Can a box of macarons really stop a thief from stealing your wallet as he holds a knife to your throat? "Oooh lala! Laduree! Okay, I'll let you go this time..."

No. Actually we were exhausted by 6PM and decided to take a nap, saying "We'll wake up for dinner!" Biiigggg mistake. We woke up at 2AM and everything was closed! So we Facebooked and Manda Skyped until about 4AM then we fell asleep. We were the first ones down at the breakfast buffet, it was still so dark outside and only 6AM. Talk about heaven...

boil your own eggs

 bread basket of pastries

 the most delicious processed cheese in a little packet ever

 all the Nutella you can eat and jam flavors such as boysenberry

 fresh fruit and yogurt.....

We learned our lesson this morning- to respect the coffee. We both drank two cups each and the rest of the day we were super hyper. Manda freaked out a little (read: a lot) about getting a document faxed as she Skyped her Manila office. 

Promise, i'll show you real food tomorrow. Au revoir!