European Adventure: French Food Tour

Or should that be Gastronomy – just to be fanciful and use big words :P I thought this one deserved its own post. While we didn’t try too much traditional food (like steak tartar or frogs legs), we did try macaroons, pastries and snails!

Pierre Herme's macaroons

Lets start with the sweets (cos life’s short, you know!). Firstly you can buy macaroons from McCafe – which is an entirely novel thing to us Aussies. The ones from McDonalds were very moist, and very sweet. We bought two boxes and couldn’t actually eat them all. On the way to Palais Garnier, Adam and I stopped by the Pierre Herme pastry shop. OMG, if I could buy this shop I would! The desserts looked A-MA-ZING!! Adam kindly bought some macaroons for us to share. WOW. They were only about a billion times better than the Macca’s Macaroons (see what I did there).

*Insert Homer Simpson impersonation here*

For some reason the two flavours I distinctly remember us getting (there was more then two) was the olive oil with mandarin, and milk chocolate and passionfruits. It’s probably because they were my least and most favourites. I don’t like mandarin, but I love passionfruit. And the thing with these macaroons is that they tasted exactly like what they were supposed to taste like. It’s like Pierre got the essence of fruits and intensified in into a small delicious biscuit (it is offensive calling macaroons biscuits?!) Check out the other amazing flavours by following this link. I’ve just found out that you can buy Pierre Hermes macaroons in London… I might need to take a visit!

Mum found Tim Tams!!

Another standout dessert we had was on our final day in Paris (I think it was after visiting the Pantheon). We found a little food stall that had a meal deal – baguette (also French :P), drink and a dessert, which we ate in a park, in the cold wind. Mum got some pastry thing, I had a lemon tart, and Adam chose a raspberry meringue pie. Oh they were yummy! Though I have to admit that I think Adam made the best dessert decision. That raspberry meringue was to die for!

Now onto the snails! We got a dozen to share between the three of us, so that meant four each. They came on a special snail plate, in their shells, with a garlic butter. We got some funky tools to eat with. They were okish. Kind of similar to mussels in taste and texture. I suppose I would eat them again if they were there, but wouldn’t go out of my way to order them (kind of like haggis, really).