Salade Niçoise reminds me of our honeymoon in Paris. This one’s after the cafe-style ones we lunched on there: composed, with canned tuna, not tuna steaks or anchovies. A great summer dinner but not a low-effort one. We used this vinaigrette (uh, citronette?).

Last time we went shopping at the Westboro Superstore, though, we found something new: microwaveable bento boxes, in salmon teriyaki and chicken yakitori varieties:

I tried the salmon teriyaki one yesterday. It included two pieces of teriyaki salmon, a vegetable gyoza, furikake rice, and edamame and “mixed vegetables” (read: carrots). The actual food looked like so:

While it appears a bit rice-heavy, the proportions were about right. The salmon was tasty if a bit too cloyingly teriyaki-sweet; the gyoza was a little soggy but good; the rice texture was perfect for (included) chopsticks. The edamame was just okay, a bit too salty — and indeed, the nutritional information shows that this contains 880mg of sodium! (The chicken bento contains 1.2g.)

It’s a change from single-bowl Lean Cuisine-style microwave meals, but the packaging makes the whole thing inconveniently large, and the food is pretty unremarkable. And the more I think about it, the more a reheatable, frozen prepackaged bento box seems familar somehow:

So I don’t think I’ll bother with the PC bento boxes much after I finish the chicken one in the freezer at home.

That said, I would like to get a Laptop Lunch or Mr. Bento for school next year. (Especially after seeing the lunches of a friend of Candice’s!)

French wine and spirit naming is subject to a whole pile of regulations. You’ve probably heard how only wine made from grapes from the Champagne region can be called “Champagne”, for instance, but similar rules apply to all of the controlled-origin (Appellation d’origine contrôlée, AOC) regional wine names.

This is good, inasmuch as you know that that Bordeaux is actually from Bordeaux, or that Mâcon-villages is actually from Mâcon. And the protected status of those names is one of the reasons that French wines still use their regional naming while the rest of the world has moved towards naming the varieties (a Gamay Noir instead of a Beaujolais, or a Chardonnay instead of a Chablis).

But what happens when your out-of-region winery wants to produce a wine to compete against the French AOC wines? Well, this, for instance:

(Goats Do Roam is a Shiraz-Pinotage which reminds one of a certain French coastal region. Candice and I tried a bottle a while ago. It was a good big, juicy wine, full of berries and spice. We’re usually not big drinkers of big reds, partly because neither of us eat much meat (or any red meat) and thus rarely have anything around to put a wine like this with.)

Or you can do this, which I find even more interesting because it was made in France:

which, while clearly depicting a chat-sur-oeuf might remind one of another particular region. This one comes from Cotes-du-Ventoux, though! We haven’t opened this one yet, but it’s a Grenache-Syrah, so it’s not just the name that’s familiar (although it’s said to be quite a bit lighter than your typical Chateauneuf).

And yes, I regularly buy wine based on the label. And it’s worked out well so far! (By the way, the wine in the title is quite nice also — and yes, it’s “pee” everywhere in the world except the USA, which gets “phee”.)

Tonight’s new (for us) ingredient: Quinoa! KEEN-wah! Quinoa is a whole grain which Wikipedia describes as “mild and nutty”, which is also how Wikipedia would describe me were I not, as they say, “non-notable”.

Quinoa, on the other hand, is notable — so notable, in fact, that this month’s Men’s Health magazine has a feature on it. And one of the recipes in that feature is quinoa-stuffed peppers, filled with tomato, onion, black beans, garlic, shrimp, cilantro and cumin. And quinoa! (And topped with parmigiano, which isn’t part of the recipe, but it’s part of my recipe.)

The results were very good, although were I to do it again I’d do it in a red pepper. However, we took the article’s advice and cooked up a big batch of quinoa to refrigerate and use later, and there’s now about three quarts of quinoa in a pot on the stove for which we’ll need to find a use. (Later on EO: “So sick of quinoa!”). It’ll be interesting to see how it fares next week substituting directly for rice and pasta (as well as in some of the other ideas in that article).

KEEN-wah!

We did, at least, bring back some wine: a Coudoulet de Beaucastel Côtes-du-Rhone 2002 and a Demessey Pouilly-Fuissé 2000, plus a bottle of Hine VSOP Cognac. (We nearly came back with an XO when the shop seemed to only have the display bottle of VSOP left, but it was a bit out of our budget.) We’re saving the Pouilly-Fuissé to celebrate one month married, and the Côtes-du-Rhone to celebrate one year. I’ve already started in on the Hine but it’s not really the season, so it’s keeping my Scotch collection company for now.

We threw the wine merchant for a bit of a loop: at first he was treating us like what must be typical tourists — showing us uninteresting sweet wines at low prices. It was only after I explained that I wanted a dry wine and gave a suitable price range that he got excited about finding us something and started talking about taste, vintage and terroir. I can’t imagine what the average tourists must leave with if that’s what he’s come to expect! (Actually, I can imagine, because I think I had it on the plane.)

For the most part we ate in cafés. There was too much going on in the month or two before the wedding to try to get reservations at a good restaurant, and the café food was so good anyhow! I wish places around here had the same sort of meal-sized salad selection that they did there. And meals not in cafés were usually crepes. I had no idea what a love affair Paris has with its Nutella! I haven’t yet tried making crepes at home but I will soon.

But what truly spoiled us was breakfasts: almost every day, we got up, showered, and walked from our hotel over to a café in front of the Centre Pompidou, or if we were heading somewhere specific first thing, to a café partway to wherever that was, for this:

The standard café breakfast comprises a croissant, a half-baguette (“tartine“) with butter and jam, an espresso or café creme (what we’d call a latte, sort of), and fresh-squeezed orange juice (usually with a pitcher of water to water it down a bit, which hadn’t arrived when this picture was taken).

The simplicity means that for the breakfast to be good at all every element has to be very good on its own: the coffee must be excellent, the croissants perfectly flaky, the tartine needs to be narrow, airy and crusty. It sounds like a lot of food but it doesn’t seem that way when you’re eating it.

That breakfast is what spoiled me. I can’t reproduce it here, at home or out. The orange juice wasn’t a big deal to me, but the rest I can’t seem to find, let alone a place that serves them all together.

The coffee: There is no drip coffee in Paris. Un café is an espresso shot to sip. I’ve never been a big straight-espresso fan, but I am now! What was most striking was the consistency: every place, from the fancy café to the counter at the airport, served an excellent shot. Mostly I attribute the consistency to automation; they all have one-touch espresso machines from Lavazza or Illy, and Lavazza and Illy have an incentive to make the machines serve their coffee right.

Regardless of what makes it so good, I’m having an awful time finding a good shot here now. The best yet have been at Bridgehead (but not always, and the standard shot is quite long) and at the new Cafe M, by the Metropolitain Brasserie at Sussex and Rideau. Cafe M has a Lavazza one-touch machine which explains a lot. Other places (including my beloved Planet Coffee, sigh, and Moulin de Provence) end up too weak with a crema that disappears right away and none of the expected richness. Good for espresso drinks but not alone! I’ve still got lots of places to try, but recommendations are welcome. At least I can get by with a latte for now.
(Also, I am surprised at how many local baristas don’t know that “short” and “long” are both alternatives to “normal”. “Short or long?” “No.” “What?”)

The baguette: I haven’t had much of a chance to shop for baguettes, but I haven’t seen that particular kind yet. The baguettes from Boulangerie Française on Murray, and from Ace Bakery, are good (although the former was surprisingly spongy), but they’re a lot less crusty and more bready; no-one seems to have the very narrow (about an inch wide!) airy ones that appeared in our café breakfasts. Definitely needs more research.

The croissants: Don’t even start me. Every place in the city bakes croissants for about 2/3 of the time they deserve to be baked. I think people are afraid of crumbs. The couple of croissants I’ve had that weren’t undercooked have been way too bready or thick-crusted. I’m not sure where to look here.

Hopefully I will be able to recreate my Parisian café breakfasts, but it’s not promising.

There’s two big food-related aspects to the whole deal that I want to share here, though, below the cut.

First, instead of an awkward dance floor or couple games, we decided that the highlight of our wedding reception (aside from the beautiful bride and that other guy that keeps hanging out with her) should be the meal. Thus the reception was had at the Courtyard Restaurant in the Byward Market. It happens to also be a beautiful space, so we held the ceremony there as well. The full details are in those links up top there, but I’ll share the menu here with you:

Cocktail Reception

Tomato, bocconcini and basil canapés
Artichoke and chevre bruschetta
Balsamic marinated vegetables on parmesan toules

Punch: Blackberry liqueur, pomegranate liqueur and
sparkling wine with fruit juices
Orange, pineapple and mango juices with grenadine, lime,
Perrier and fresh fruit slices

Dinner

Cream of broccoli and old cheddar soup

Mixed baby greens saladwith lemon-honey-sunflower emulsion,
dried cherries, and toasted sunflower seeds
or
Warm almond-crusted chevre over baby spinach with prosciutto,
red onion, and citrus vinaigrette

Strawberry-basil sorbet

Cajun-spiced beef tenderloin tips with lavender honey and
red wine sauce
or
Pan-seared tilapia filet with panko-crumb crust
and fennel-onion concassé
or
Polenta layered with tomato-onion confit and
chevre over ratatouille

Caramelized lemon custard tart with red currant coulis
or
Crème Caramel
or
Basil and verjus marinated berries with cinnamon-yogurt mousse

.

We also offered our guests a sparkling wine toast (Seaview brut) and wine with dinner (the Courtyard’s house wines, Mommessin St.-Pierre white and red), and instead of a wedding cake we had chocolate cupcakes with pink and orange buttercream from Cucina Dolce, which were a hit — while Candice and I were serving them a lot of people claimed to be full but changed their mind after we insisted they at least taste the icing! Cucina Dolce also did our wedding favours, daisy-shaped cookies in pink and orange, and went to some trouble to find the right cookie cutter and ribbon for us. Thanks, Jayne!

The food was all delicious (I had the baby greens, tilapia and custard tart; Candice had the baby greens, polenta — which was surprisingly smooth and dense — and the marinated berries) and the service was immaculate, and that night and since then many guests commented on how much they enjoyed the food and the change from the typical wedding dance. A real success, if I should say so myself (and I got a cute wife out of the deal).

This post went on a lot longer than I expected, so I’ll save the second food-related detail for a separate post. Here’s a teaser, though: our honeymoon was in Paris, and a week in Paris spoils you a bit.

They had renovated a bit since the last time we were in — replacing brown paint and copper with cream and birch, which took away some of the coziness and contemporary feel — and had rotated out about half of their menu, which meant no marinated tofu for me. (The menu on their website, which framesets frustrate my attempts to link, is nearly up-to-date but not entirely.) I had made reservations but they weren’t necessary last night, although I imagine the cold, rainy weather had some effect there.

The Village Cafe’s menu promises “global fusion”, which is a little misleading, since there isn’t much fusion within dishes; it’s more of an eclectic menu than fusion cuisine. Candice and I started with cocktails, but my attempts to stave off our appetizers until they were done met with failure. My shrimp spring rolls were crisp, refreshing, and just shrimpy enough, and came with an addictive soy-sesame-ginger dip and unusually spicy pickled ginger, but didn’t really complement a Manhattan, and Candice’s smoked salmon, cream cheese and cucumber rolls were probably not intended to be accompanied with a Kir Royale. Nevertheless both appetizers were more than good enough to interrupt our drinks instead of joining them.

The timing problem on the appetizers was one element of a general service confusion that continued all night. For some reason servers at The Village Cafe share tables; we had two servers all night who clearly weren’t keeping track of what the other was doing, which led to us being asked by one for our food order less than a minute after ordering drinks from the other, and the other bringing our main courses without knowing who ordered what. Both servers seemed unfamiliar with the restaurant’s cocktail and wine offerings, the sort of scenario where you give up asking and just point.

(The wine list, incidentally, has some of the silliest tasting notes I’ve ever read, and is yet another local wine list which omits vintages. How can you go to the trouble of putting together a wine list that reaches the $60 range without providing vintages? To their credit about half of the wine list is available by the glass.)

Our main courses were excellent. I’ve never been disappointed with anything from the kitchen here at brunch or at dinner, and my pork tenderloin accompanied by fieldberries and pears was done perfectly and the fruits well-chosen to complement, with some simple saffron rice and steamed broccoli to round things out. At first I wished for a bit more interest in the vegetable, but it’s rare that I order a meat-and-sides sort of dish like this, and too much variety would have competed with the fresh fruit on the pork. Candice’s walnut-pesto eggplant “cannelloni” was an interesting take, with thin-sliced rolled eggplant taking the pasta’s role.

Dessert was another story. I think they bring in their desserts, and while their refrigerated case full of cakes and pies looked good, something went seriously, seriously wrong. The cake part of my carrot cake was acceptable, a bit heavy on the coconut but coconut is one of those foods I don’t like to be surprised by, but the icing was not the cream-cheese based type you’d expect on carrot cake. I think it was supposed to be buttercream, but it was the sort of buttercream you’d make with shortening instead of with butter, and it tasted like shortening. I should have sent it back right away, but I was so surprised by it that I wasn’t entirely convinced it was the cake and not just my taste buds playing tricks on me.

The service and dessert problems were far from enough to completely take away our enjoyment of the rest of the meal, but they did manage to bring what could have been an excellent meal down to merely good. If you’re thinking of trying the Village Cafe — and you should, especially if you are already in the area — I would recommend insisting on a single server and sticking with liquid desserts.

(295 Richmond Rd, just east of Churchill; 613-728-2162. Dinner for two with wine, $100.)

It’s strong, but that’s not odd, because I don’t drink gin and tonic because I like tonic water. (I drink them to keep away malaria.) What’s a bit odd is that aside from its usual junipery goodness it smells like roses.

What’s very odd is that while smelling like roses it tastes vaguely like cucumber.

On purpose.

It’s Hendricks Gin, and it’s one of a few particularly peculiar gins that I’ve wanted to try lately. It’s around the same price as your favorite premium gin, provided that your favorite costs about $40 for a bottle, but it’s very much unlike any other gin I’ve tried. The base flavor reminds me of the stronger premium gins, like Tanqueray Ten (and not like Sapphire at all), with enough rose petal and cucumber to make you aware that it tastes different but not so much that it tastes like you are eating a cucumber — although they do recommend garnishing a Hendricks martini with a slice of cucumber rather than an olive.

According to their website, they also use an unusual distillation method, a Carter still, of which there are four in the world, none of which are Googleable. But I have no reason to doubt them. I couldn’t tell you what Carter-distilled gin tastes like, though. The cucumber and rose is enough to make it hard to pick out subtleties of distillation technique. As if this weren’t all strange enough, it’s a product of Scotland. It comes in a brown-glass bottle with a cork closure that wouldn’t look out of place on the shelves of an apothecary. The back label warns: It is not for everyone.

If you’re a fan of flavorful gin, I can’t think of a better fit with summer than a bit of cucumber. There’s no reason for it to be more refreshing, since it’s still just liquid gin, but it manages to trigger the refreshing-cucumber memory anyhow.

I suppose this all depends on whether or not you like cucumber. I might still toss in an olive occasionally for old time’s sake, though.

(On the subject of unusual gins: have any of you tried Old Raj? It’s a boutique gin like Hendricks, but with saffron in the botanicals. I’m intrigued but not convinced, and it’s not like you can find this stuff stocked in bars.)

Candice and I spend a lot of time thinking about food and even occasionally writing about it, but our Livejournals and the community we maintain there never really seemed like the right place to start writing in-depth about our foodie experiences and experiments.

Some time I registered the epicureanottawa.com domain name to use up a free domain registration I had, and recently we decided that we might as well use it to chronicle our food adventures around town. We’ll be posting a little of everything — restaurant reviews, cooking adventures at home, posts about wine and other drinks, recipes, local food shopping, and whatever else comes to mind. Who knows where we’ll end up?

Thanks for stopping by! Real food-related content will be showing up real soon. Let us know what you think!