The Obamariachis

Brothers and Sisters, the end is near, the planet is eco-crunching, a gazillion money has vanished, the country is going to the dogs, I have no job, my money is running out and I'm losing a family member. Also we haven't had a fun Britney Spears snippet in a while, and Madonna's divorce isn't entertaining whatsoever.
Unlike many people in this country, I think the idea of a Messiah is a bit overrated, and frankly hasn't brought back a return on investment worth Warren Buffet's pocket change. But I believe in hope, audacity, change kicking out of the White House, the Congress and the Senate the political party that spent the last 8 years not only bringing America to its knees, but wreaking havoc on fragile emergent economies abroad in the name of unspeakable greed* disguised as fake principle of "economic freedom".
I'm a bit bored by all the political propaganda right now, and a bit busy elsewhere, plus I have no right to vote in this country, so I'll try not too bore you too much with more politics. But the video above made me smile this morning, something I truly need these days. So have fun practicing your rudimentary Spanish while listening to the Mariachis For Obama. We have to find a name for them, and if I manage to find the "polls" widget I'll put up a new naming one, promised. UPDATE: the poll is at the bottom of this page. Vote for your favorite name!

And absolutely unrelated: I went to pick up my daily ficelle at La Maison du Pain this morning, and guess what? I got their inaugural first bag of chouquettes! Chouquettes are French choux pastry topped with pearl sugar, they don't have any filling, and we usually by them by the dozen to share at work or at school for mid-morning coffee breaks. The one at LMDP taste exactly as they should be, light and airy and slightly sweet. They cost $3,50 a dozen, and they are addictive. You cannot be Frenchier than that. So go get yourself a bag, and munch on chouquettes while watching the Obamariachis.



* these last two words are an amusing quote. If you find who uttered it, you will win $1 worth of subprime mortgage securities.

A Macaron-intensive week

I've been feeling a bit blue lately, largely because of a badass allergy that wouldn't be such a big deal if it didn't give me some horrible headaches, and also because France just lost to La Perfide Albion, a.k.a Les Rosbifs in the Rugby World Cup Semi-Finals. OK, in real life I don't care about rugby really, the guys are too mastodontically beefy for my taste, and I don't understand the rules of the game. The only thing I like about it is how it makes American Football look like a pastime for sissies.

Anyway, to fight the mild seasonal depression I went on an intensive macaron search with my friend Robin. Robin is a macaron convert and her standard so far are the macarons from Pain de Sucre, a great pastry store located on Rue Rambuteau in Paris (behind the Pompidou Center, en route to Yvon Lambert, Perrotin and Marian Goodman galleries). Robin has a very poetic way of describing her food which makes me think she would be a good restaurant critic, and she's very thorough and dedicated in her pastries quest. She has tried ALL of Los Angeles hotels afternoon teas, for example. She's also very thin, and confessed to me she didn't work out so I'd like to borrow her metabolism too.

So Robin and I had an appointment to go try Paulette Macarons in Beverly Hills, which recently opened. I've raved before about my one chocolate macaron from La Maison du Pain, so I wanted to see how Paulette would compare, and try Paulette's different flavors. Plus Paulette is a deliciously retro name, or ringard as we would unflatteringly say in France.
Robin and I previously agreed that Boule was not even in the competing league (dry, dry, dry, with a dusty feel and a bland filling and cloyingly sweet)*. We stopped for Robin to have a late lunch at this La Provence store (located in a BH mini-mall) where we spotted macarons. We chose 1 pistachio and 1 orange. Ewwwww. Bottom of the bottom drawer. They were: doughy, dry-ish, way too sweet and the fillings/flavorings were so artificial the orange one tasted like Tang, really. In passing, Robin said the sandwich and soup were very good, and I had a bite of their very decent baguette, so I guess if you go to La Provence, stick to their savory items and you should be fine.

Anyway, off to Paulette we go, on Charleville at the corner with Beverly Drive. The store looks very clinical, laboratory-like with perfectly round colorful macarons aligned in impeccable rows. The store is not particularly warm or inviting. Two French dudes were speaking loudly in a corner (deux mecs français taillaient une bavette super fort dans un coin). No visible seating, so it's really a to go place, but you don't really want to hang out in a white pill box anyway.
I chose a 8-macarons sampler with: Chocolate, Peach, New Orleans Praline, Dragée, Raspberry, Pistachio, Lemon, Vanilla, all pictured above in the IKEA oval plate.
I was deeply suspicious of two things: the flawlessly rotundity of the cookie, the obviously artificial colors, and the thickness of the macarons.
And I was right to be suspicious, as the cookie part for each and all macarons was too doughy, and above all infuriatingly too sweet. Way too much, as in donut-glazed-sweet, when your gums feel like bathing in a pool of sugar for hours afterward. As with any pastry, when there's too much sugar it tends to overwhelm and flatten any flavor, and I suppose it came out of necessity at Paulette since most flavors tasted either bland or strongly artificial. The chocolate filling was too cakey for example, on the dry side, very bourratif as we say (too filling, in a heartburn-inducing way). Lemon tasted very artificial too, in a strident, cringing loudness that was very disagreeable. The only two macarons that were OK were New Orleans Praline and Dragée, but they tasted almost identical, just plain almond.

I was really disappointed as I was looking forward to a regular macaron source, since my usual pastries purveyor La Maison du Pain don't make macarons on a daily basis, or so I thought. You see Carmen and Josephine are perfectionist and they refuse to sell anything until they consider they are good at baking said item. If I'm lucky I'll walk in on a day when they've been practicing on their macarons skills and I'll get a sample, like a fabulous lemon one recently: the filling was pure lemon curd, and the biscuit part (*biscuit* means cookie in French) was this perfectly fresh and tender slice of ground almond heaven.

This morning was such a lucky day, as a plate of a dozen macarons was eying me seductively on the counter! They had about 6 lemon ones, 1 chocolate (I snatched it! Yay!), a few raspberry and one blackberry which I egotistically snatched too. Carly was desolate they had already sold the last pistachio one as she knows it's my favorite flavor. I took my two little treasures home (pictured incomprehensibly upside-down on the retro, squarish plate above), feeling a bit sad Robin wasn't with me to sample them today. I was a bit apprehensive, in case the chocolate one wasn't going to live up to my memory of the one I had before. I shouldn't even have worried one second about it!
To use Robin's description of what an über-perfect, out of this world, heavenly macaron should be, my chocolate beauty from LMDP was an explosion of a creamy, fresh burst of strong yet smooth chocolate ganache hidden in between 2 layers of the most vulnerable,tender and fresh almond biscuit.
The blackberry one also lived up to my expectations, with a thick and fruity but not too sweet spread in the middle. The best part of the macaron is really that moment when you bite into the cookie and encounter the contrast between the delicate almond biscuit part which is only slightly crunchy and the moist, flavorful filling. Just think about them as you would think about real beauty: it's all inside! If the Paulette ones are flawlessly circular they are also spectacularly bland and boring, without ANY personality. You can look at them but consumption will ultimately prove deceiving, artificial and even disagreeable. Perfect packaging, phony character.
Beware of spectacular beauties gentlemen, and spend some time with us normal-looking ladies, there are huge rewards for you at the end!**

La Maison du Pain, hands down the best macarons of my entire little Frenchy life.
Merci, Carmen and Josephine.

*also, what annoys me about Boule is their desire to look French and use fake French words. You either sell ice cream, or you are a glacier, but not a *glacerie* which doesn't exist in French (or only as an old-fashioned way of designating a glazier shop).
**Plus, I don't want to sound disparaging but most of you on the male side of the species are also very ordinary-looking so why do you waste your time pining for vulgar and unattainable blonde sticks you won't ever get is a complete mystery to me...

In Praise Of Pure, Unadulterated Genius: Macarons at La Maison Du Pain

Oh Day of Glory! Gloria In Excelsis Deo! I didn't suspect when I got up this morning I was going to meet heavenly genius before even sunset!
I had just rung Daniel, a.k.a Canada Dry to see if my usual caffeine-addiction enabler was available today to partake in afternoon-ish espresso sipping. Alas, this was not to be. Feeling forlorn and sadly dejected (I like my superlatives and my redundant adjectives, see?) I decided to go instead indulge in my baguette addiction at La Maison du Pain, to have a suitable accompaniment to my French radishes. It always lift my spirit when I get there, as in addition to said baguette habit I also usually gratify myself with pistachio Financiers.

Still unsuspecting of my upcoming encounter with deity, a little bit like Paul Claudel getting a heavy load of God descending on his shoulders behind a pillar of Notre-Dame Cathedral, I spotted one of these great inventions that makes America the land of unbridled patent litigation, a Red Velvet cupcake!
Now I love, love cupcakes, probably more the idea of it than the real thing, since icing is usually a tad too sweet for me. Red Velvet is the most decadent of all cupcakes, what with that great, deep red color contrasting with white icing, like an El Lissiztky embodied in food. Yes, it is artificial and retro, nostalgic of a time of Better Living Through Chemistry. Anyway, I was more than decided to try it, and then right next to it sat a small platter of mini macarons. Blue mini macarons! More Better Living With Chemistry! In an Old World meets New World way. I had to try them - good thing I'm going swimming tonight!

I talked a bit with Carly, who is Carmen's daughter (and therefore Josephine's niece) about macarons, a very French thing if there is one. The macarons craze is a bit over in France right now, which is good in a way (mayo and algae macarons, anyone?) as we can concentrate again on what makes a truly great macaron.
These are very traditional pastries that used to be available only in 2 flavors when I was a kid: nature (just almonds and a very thin layer of some neutral apricot jelly in the middle) or chocolate.
FYI, there are several types of macarons, some of them not the sandwich cookie type, like the macarons de Saint Emilion for example. Other famous ones are from Nancy, where there is a street called "Rue Des Soeurs macarons" (it used to be the address of famous record label/independent music store Les Disques Du Soleil Et De L'Acier).
Anyway, Josephine made the macarons herself, and I a was suitably impressed because these are damn difficult to make. It's basically blanched almond meal very finely ground, sugar and egg whites (no flour for our wheat-adverse friends).
Not only the mixture of sugar and almonds have to be extremely consistent but the baking process itself is delicate, as you can easily screw up an entire batch with all your macarons totally cracked. You can recycle them by mixing them with vanilla ice cream for example, but they are difficult to sell otherwise.

In the present case, these were blue because they were made either for the Dodgers themselves or in honor of a Dodgers post-game party. Carly told me they were going to be available on a more ongoing basis in the future, but for the moment they are an occasional treat at La Maison du Pain.
So suitably equipped with my baguette, my Red Velvet Cupcake and my blue mini-macaron, I came back home determined to have both pastries with my daily stovetop espresso. I must say I totally expedited lunch (and also ditched the bunch of errands I was supposed to run) to taste them.

I made one excruciating bad, stupid mistake: I had the macaron first. Why stupid? because even though the cupcake was the best Red Velvet Cupcake I have ever eaten, light, airy, moist, cocoa-ty, and not over-cloyingly sweet it couldn't match the grandeur of the macaron.
Being French I have eaten more than my fair share of macarons, right? I had the ones from Bagnoles-de-l'Orne, the Saint-Emilion ones, the Ladurée ones, the Pierre Hermé ones, the ones from Pain de Sucre, and those from Sucrécacao (who, incidentally, sell my favorite cake on the planet, pistachio and raspberry).
None of them came even close to Josephine's masterpiece.
Aside from the fun blue color, what made her macaron oh so heaveny perfect was:

1. the size. It was small, and it was fun to try to get 4 bites out of it, which made me appreciate every aspect of the following.
2. texture. The cookie part was very fresh and airy, crunchy without being dry (that's the difficult part: if you let your macarons out for too long (just 2 hours)at room temperature, they turn dry. But if you leave them in the fridge you have to take them out at least 30 minutes before or they get too dense and tasteless.
3. taste of the cookie part (I have to deconstruct it, but it has nothing to do with my Derridean-background). The greatest thing about this macaron was that it wasn't too sweet. Au contraire, the almond taste was very present, with maybe a hint of cocoa, but wasn't drowned on sugar.
4. Finally, the ganache filling. One word. WOW. It was creamy, buttery and chocolaty without being heavy and too rich and once again not too sweet, perfectly complimenting the almond cookie part.

Any negative aspect? Nope, only that it was too good for me to stop eating and take a picture of one the macaron bites for you to see the ganache. I'm sorry because it had this most perfect light brown color, looking closer to butterscotch than he usual brown paste that too many US pastries would like to pass for ganache. But it was impossible to stop eating.

Anyway, hurry, hurry, because at this hour it is likely very few of those remain.
Oh, one last thing: traditional baguette, macaron, and Red Velvet cupcake= about $6,10 (I don't recall post-decimal cents, but that wasn't much).

La Maison du Pain, on Pico and Ridgeley, one block East of Hauser. Now my personal quandary is I need to find a job nearby as I can never, ever, move out of our common neighborhood.

Pause café

There's no reason for this post really, I'm just having a coffee break as the title indicates. A cup (stovetop-made) Illy, with a Valrhona chocolate stick and a pistachio financier from La Maison du Pain, and life is per-fect...
Post to you later, I'm going to spend some time with my kitten Pomme.

Thanksgiving in July!

In the name of diversification, a non art-related post.
I totally, like, dig Thanksgiving, the holiday that made me love America. First of all it is the only holiday no one was ever able to give me the signification of, except everyone is gorging on food. I subsequently forever nicknamed it The Day When America Cooks(conveniently forgetting Marie Callender. No one is perfect).

Then, not being from here I don't have to endure any family-related tensions and obligations. Note to my potential future husband, you who are lurking on this blog: yes, we will spend all Thanksgivings of our future married life with YOUR family. X-mas with mine (dear future husband: you should have black, brown or gray hair, be not too tall, have a good conversation to compete with my incessant output and I appreciate a wicked sense of humor. Must like orange color).

Also, the day I first saw a Thanksgiving turkey I finally understood America. Why stoves are so big. Why fridges are so humongous. Why Costco and Smart and Final were created. You could feed an entire French village (such as Saint Aubert sur Orne and its 126 inhabitants, for instance) on one of these!
Anyway, I like it so much I decided I was going to have monthly "Thanksgiving in [insert month here]" posts and praise whoever I think is deserving.

A tout seigneur tout honneur, in the name of Food I'd like to post my first thanks today and honor La Maison Du Pain.
It is located on Pico, one block East of Hauser. Of course I have a vested interest in this French-Filippino bakery to remain open and busy.
I think their bread is so-so. Charles, the former baker (hopefully he will get a new visa soon and will come back) told me it's because the flours are very different here, with a different gluten ration. They are great for pastries but for bread, nix. Which probably explain why I never found bread I liked in America, with the notable exception of NYC bagels.
But the pastries at LMDP are fabulous, most particularly their fruit tarts. Plus they make mini-pastries, more like petits fours really that you can buy individually and savor with your espresso without feeling [too] guilty.
Their croissant is the best I had outside of France and does compete with many I had back home. Their pistachio financiers are genius and I advise everybody to try the tarte au sucre, and if they have it their viennoise.

Last year I ordered my B-Day cake there, a Royal made especially by Charles himself. It has this crunchy base made with praline over a chocolate cake, and topped with chocolate mousse. I had told them it would be for 25 people, but ooopsy in fact 60 were expected. As I was about to buy a large fruit tart to make sure my guests would have desserts, Josephine said: "it's your birthday. This tart was made this morning, [it was about 2 PM] so we will make a new one from scratch". And so they did, on the spot, and shelled some fresh pistacchios to sprinkle on top.


Aside from their niceness and great pastries, I am also thankful for Carmen and Josephine because they dared realizing their dream, late in life, and ditch their former life to start a brand new business. It takes guts, and the result is truly worth all the energy they put in. So thank you La Maison du Pain, not only for your great pastries but for a great lesson in optimism.