Paris Vous Aime

Paris Loves you - Culinary Passport Dinner #2

I think I enjoyed putting together this second pop-up dinner more than the first. It’s not that I liked the food any better (I loved both menus equally), I really just felt a wave of confidence going into the meal, and into the evening.

We had a few repeat guests (THANK YOU) and a few new guests (THANK YOU), and we all remembered to take lots of pictures this time! A special thank you to Daisy for taking so many photos for me with my own phone! She also took some fab shots with her Digital camera :).

Creating Culinary Passports

So let’s jump right into it. When I started planning the menu I thought a lot about the things we ate on our quick jaunt to Paris earlier this year, but also about previous times that I had visited Paris. To me, Paris is always a tangle of the old with the new. It’s a modern city that has every other heartbeat living in the past. In thinking about this, I wanted to make classic recipes but with modern flair.

First Course

1. Oeufs Mayonnaise - Eggs Mayonnaise is a CLASSIC French dish. Hardboiled eggs smothered in creamy mayonnaise. Sounds strange, sure, but it’s basically the same concept as a Deviled Egg, only you don’t have to scoop out those pesky yolks to achieve the end result. I knew I had to make the mayonnaise from scratch - there was no other choice! We didn’t eat Oeufs Mayonnaise on our trip, but it was on the menu at Minim’s Bistrot where a lot of this menu gathered inspiration.

   

   

2. Radis au Beurre avec Sel - Radishes with butter & salt - this, too, is a classic French dish. I actually “tested” it right when we came back from our trip in January with some nice butter we had at home. When we ate at Minim’s Bistrot - they just popped a plate of radishes and a slab of butter on the table like it were a basket of bread. If you’ve never had a radish with butter, you’re missing out. I mean, you know you just want to eat that fancy French Salted butter, but the Radish is at least a vegetable, so snack away! Radishes with butter and salt is one of my dad’s favorite snacks, so I’ve been making it for many many years.

   

   

3. Poireaux aux Vinaigrette - Leeks with Vinaigrette - So, if you’re at all like me you’ve watched Emily in Paris. Having come from the food industry and now being in the travel industry, it’s a fun show to watch (they stay at and film at a lot of the hotels we work with). If you remember the episode where Emily is assigned to do marketing for Leeks, Gabriel shows her how beautiful leeks can be. The scene is so epically silly, but the leek dish he makes is beautiful.

   

   Gabriel’s Fancy Leeks - IMAGE FROM NETFLIX - Not a Sponsor or promoter.

   I wanted to try and re-create it, but didn’t do so well. I created a base sauce with leeks & tarragon, but the sauce wasn’t the right color or the right consistency. Then I cooked the leeks same as he did, but they were uncooperative! I cannot tell if I undercooked them, overcooked them! Then I made a vinaigrette to balance the earthy flavors in the dish. Although I didn’t feel the dish was what I wanted, many of the guests said it was one of their favorite bites. My mom who almost never eats onion anything ate three pieces! Guess I need Gabriel to teach me how to prepare leeks properly next time (Jk).

   

We had the first course with a beautiful Sparkling Wine - NV Vloserie des Lys Crémant de Limoux Brut. All wines for this dinner were purchased from Stanley’s Wet Goods in Culver City. If you’re local in Los Angeles, it’s a wine shop I would highly recommend. I am not a bubbles gal, but really enjoyed this one from first sip.

Soup Course

4. Soupe A L’Oignon Gratinée - French Onion Soup (of course) - this is one of my favorite soups of all soups. I would order it off any menu anywhere in the world just for the melty cheese-y bread topping! And who doesn’t love a bowl of caramelized onions?¹ The recipe I used is Ina Garten’s recipe for French Onion Soup. I like Ina’s recipe because it relies on the flavor profiles of three separate alcohols added to the soup, so you aren’t just tasting onions & veal stock. I was lucky enough to be gifted bay leaves from my friend Karen, so I used them in the soup, they smelled immaculate - and you could still taste them in the end product. I made the version for this dinner with vegetable stock (so it would be vegetarian) because I knew the Sherry, Brandy, and White Wine would carry an incredible flavor without needing the depth of a Veal or Beef stock to support the onions.

   

   Soup in Paris / Soup in Los Angeles / Bay leaves from Karen

   We came across a fun problem about a week before the dinner and realized our lovely little Ikea soup bowls are not oven-safe. If you know French Onion Soup with a Gratinée topping, you know that it is finished in the oven so the cheese can get a nice broil on it. I thought to myself - I can just slice the bread and put cheese on it on a cookie sheet and put THAT under the broiler, then spatula it on top of each bowl. A colleague of mine said, “you better test that out!” but I didn’t need to - I knew it would work, and it did work!

We served the soup with this white wine: Eric Texier VDF Blanc Adèle - the wine is a blend of Clairette and Marsanne Grapes. If you know wine you’re probably sitting here thinking this light, dry, fruity white wine was drowned by the heaviness of the soup, but because this was a vegetarian French Onion Soup (no beef involved), and the soup base is alcohol, the pairing worked very well together. The wine was also a great pairing with the cheese - a surprisingly even balance. [Wine label is inspired by Adèle Blanc Sec Comic]

Main Course

5. Chou Farci - Stuffed Cabbage - So, you’ve been reading my Substack for a while and you know I cannot pass up a stuffed cabbage recipe… when I saw it on a menu in Paris, I was curious. It was nothing like any stuffed cabbage I’d had before. Our friends in Paris said they make it at home from time to time, and their recipe is different too. Then, the algorithm being what it is, or maybe the stars aligned, I was fed a “reel” of a chef making Chou Farci in a cake pan and serving it like a cake - when I saw that I knew it was my chance to make it for this dinner. We made a meat version for the carnivores, and a lentil version for the vegetarians. Both recipes beyond the main “protein” are completely identical. I did pre-test this recipe and learned a lot in the process. The best thing I learned by testing it ahead of time was that it gave me the confidence to make it for this dinner (And to make it ahead!).

   

   

6. Pommes de Terre aux Echalotes - Potatoes with Shallots - I just love a roasted potato - this dish actually brought up a really fun conversation at the table - one of our guests said an icebreaker she’s done with teams in the past is everyone goes around and shares their favorite potato dish and their least favorite potato dish. We played the game at our table, and loved it! I think everyone had different potatoes that they liked and disliked! This recipe was inspired by our trip to the Marche D’Aligre in Paris (Farmer’s Market).

   

   

7. Haricots Verts, Beurre, Herbes de Provence - To round out our main course I made a variation of Green Beans that we’ve been loving recently. I love a simple green vegetable with butter and a little herb of one kind or another. We used our fancy French butter for this dish as well as French salt and Herbes de Provence. The recipe is simple - I blanched the Green Beans until they were just tender and then tossed them in melted butter mixed with the herbes and salt. 1,2,3 Done!

   

The wine we served with the main course was a fun one with a great label (no, I don’t just buy wines based on the labels). Causse Marines ‘Peyrouzelles’ Gaillac Rouge is an epic blend of Braucol, Duras, Loin de l’œil, Mauzac, Prunelart, & Syrah grapes, it is a biodynamic and natural wine - even with a little sediment in the bottle. We served it with a slight chill (as recommended), it was perhaps a little heavier than I anticipated (even with the chill), but the wine was good and enjoyed by the group.

Dessert

5. Tarte Tatin w/ Crème d’Isigny - not a direct copy of the version we had in Paris, but we are lucky enough to be able to buy Crème d’Isigny at Surfas here in Los Angeles. If you haven’t had it, it’s truly the best whipped cream ever (put it on a strawberry and you’ll just go to heaven). I used Claire Saffitz recipe for Tarte Tatin from Dessert Person. I gave myself permission to BUY the puff pastry instead of making it from scratch. I bought Dufour which is the best puff pastry on the market - it’s not that I cannot make puff pastry, it’s that the time it takes and skill it takes were not things I had at this exact moment. The Tarte came out lovely, we used a pear brandy for the apples which was a nice complement.

   

   

For dessert we had a very special beverage - Marco Polo Tea from Mariage Frères. This is, without a doubt, my favorite tea that I’ve ever had. When I was researching our trip for Paris, I knew a trip to the Mariage Frères tea counter was in order - what I didn’t realize was they now have a tea room where you can enjoy a whole meal! We certainly took advantage while in Paris, and bought more tea than we could fit in our suitcase (so we bought another suitcase…). If you didn’t know, they also make jellies from their teas which are truly special. We purchased a box of Chocolates infused with Marco Polo tea and I wish we still had it to serve at this dinner because those were incredible chocolates… I guess a trip back to Paris is in order - we’ll come back with a suitcase full of chocolates, surely.

Lastly I want to talk about the flowers. All around Paris, on small walkable streets and large avenues, there are flower shops blooming around you. Originally I wanted to create a little faux flower shop in our living room, but with a tiny budget I decided I couldn’t do that. I talked to my florist friends at Cranky’s and asked them if they could make a bunch of little pre-sorted bouquets, but put them in one arrangement, and then at the end of the dinner I would separate them all and everyone would go home with a bouquet.

Of course they are floral magicians and they made it happen magically! I bought some lavender from one of our favorite farms - Sweet Mountaintop - and that determined that I wanted the bouquets to contain flowers that would dry easily - so not only did each guest walk away with their own bunch of flowers, but they may last a very long time if they took them home and dried them!

A Continuation from Before…

The end of the pop-up dinner brings me right back to where I left off in my last post telling you about our quick time in Paris. After the BnF Oval Room we headed to Mariage Frères for tea and treats, and bought a lot of tea.

Then we met up with our friends again and headed to the Maison Européenne de la Photographie - there was a special exhibition featuring the works of Tyler Mitchell which was breathtaking. I don’t think this is a museum on the traditional circuit of museums in Paris, but if you’re very into photography it is a worthwhile visit.

This evening we also visited Slow Galerie - a small gallery space that features prints made by many different artists. There are a few galleries like this in Oaxaca that we really loved (Burro Press being one of them), and I hope to find more like this all over the world (A great place to buy art for people who like to collect a little art on each trip like we do). We also visited OFR Bookshop which is an independent bookstore that focuses primarily on art books. The other stop we made was to Ressource Boutique - yes, a paint store. For those of you who know, my husband works as a contract painter. When we were planning this trip he told me he wanted to check out a few paint stores in Paris and London just to see what they had. Thankfully this paint store was just around the corner from our hotel, and he only bought the tiny sample jars to bring home!

So, for now, it’s Au Revoir to Paris and on to the next destination for our Culinary Passports - announcing soon, but I bet you can guess where we’re going if you follow me on instagram…

Love & Happy Spatulas,

Alyssa

P.S. The next dinner will be July 18th - so mark your calendars!

1. If you don’t love caramelized onions, I feel for you. Caramelized onions are one of the most magical things you can have added to a dish - not just because they taste incredible, but also because there is so much love involved in making them.