a short list of food

Here is a short list of things I have eaten since I got here. I am pretty sure I would feel way too awkward to be one of those people who takes pictures of my food before I eat it, so for now you're going to have to imagine these for yourself.

A Short List of Things I Have Eaten in Paris, All of Which were Ridiculously Good in a Way That Does Not Make Any Sense:

1. pain au chocolat (less than a euro!)

2. pain au chocolat with candied orange peel (exactly the same price as the regular kind, but with extra stuff in it? There seem to be economic principles that just don't apply here.)

3. Chevre sandwiches from three different bakeries. I went on a mission to figure out which one was the best. The answer: two of them are equal but not identical (cheaper but without tomatoes, more expensive but with herbs and purple cabbage and good tomatoes), one is far inferior (too much mayonnaise - they've got a thing about mayonnaise here, but I'll get into that later - and rather unfortunate tomatoes).

4. Some kind of pastry filled with coffee-and-hazelnut flavored cream. I despise coffee, and this was still amazing.

5. Salmon and spinach quiche. This was actually a mistake, I asked for a cheese and broccoli one, but the girl behind the counter appeared to be at her first day of work and clearly didn't really understand what was going on. I watched as one of the other people showed her how to magically turn a piece of paper into a little pastry holder and she stared in complete confusion with one of those expressions that says "Oh no I am totally not absorbing any of this," which I recognized easily because this is what I spend much of my life thinking. When she took my order there was all kinds of confusion, because I have a funky accent and probably pretty bad pronunciation, and those glass food-cases block sound like nothing else. So I didn't feel like complaining, and it was pretty good anyway. Once again, I have never had a quiche that I liked in America. This confirmed my suspicions that we're just doing it wrong.

6. A Canele Bordelais. I actually had no idea what this was, and got it because it was the least expensive of the desserts at the above bakery, and it turned out to be one of the best baked goods I have ever eaten. The idea is a small cake (Wikipedia tells me they are flavored with rum and vanilla; the one I got mainly tasted like all the best qualities of an angel food cake) baked in a little fluted mold, with a very dense, moist interior part and the outside caramelized into a dark, chewy crust.

7. Mirabelles, aka tiny yellow plums. According to my host family it's been a good year for plums because there's been a lot of sun, and while I have not been here long enough to confirm this, the plums were definitely incredible.

8. Figs! A kind of shameful fact about me: before this trip, I had never actually had a fig. To be honest, I'm not sure I'd ever seen one. But they're everywhere here. So, in a move that required a lot of mental and temporal preparation (tip: check the store hours, they are not intuitive), I went to the nearest produce store and bought two figs, opened them with my pocket knife because I am a ten-year-old boy, and ate them sitting on my windowsill. Guess what - I like figs. I like them a lot.

And, of course,
9. cheese, and
10. bread. I actually did my required oral report on bread and why it is important in France, and can now spout off a few random facts if anyone starts to seem interested. Did you know that a baguette is approximately 250 grams? That the average French person eats 58 kg of bread in a year? That there are over 30,000 artisan bakers in the country, and they produce 70% of the bread, and the price of basic bread is fixed so that everyone can afford it and people from Algeria bake their bread differently from French people and France is the fourth producer of wheat in the world and and and bread riots! The French revolution! tHE BREAD DECREE OF 1993!

Bread, guys. It's serious business.