Envision this: you’re sitting on the coach one night, surfing cheaptickets.com with your boyfriend, and find an unbelievable deal on flights to Paris. On a whim, you book a trip, with only 2 weeks to work out rest of the details. You spend most of those 2 weeks just daydreaming about being whisked around Paris, looking impossibly chic with the Eiffel tour looming in the background. You picture yourself drinking champagne and eating oysters twice daily because, well, the world is your oyster isn’t it?
And then you arrive. You realize your ticket was impossibly cheap because Paris in November is blustery and gray. And your bags were lost. Instead of feeling tres chic, you’re feeling tres hobo in your grimy, rumpled clothes. But you’re determined not to let any of this get you down. You’re in Paris after all!
Yes, this was me and Matt a couple of months back. Our first 24 hours in the city of lights were, uh, less than sparkly. We arrived tired, dirty, crabby, and without most of our luggage. And to make matters worse, my (brilliant) fiancé had decided to shove his coat in our checked bag (who would do that???). We found our way to our apartment and spent our first few hours of vacation napping and trying de-crabify. When we woke, I convinced Matt to take a jacket-less walk around our neighborhood to scope things out. It’ll be fine, I assured him, the wind has probably died down and once we get moving, it’ll be great.
Well, not exactly. But we made the most of it and walked around, ducking into shops to warm up, peeking in gallery windows, and checking out restaurant menus. We went out for dinner and practically sleepwalked back to our place, determined to start fresh the next day.
By the next afternoon, our luggage had arrived, we’d had a decent night’s sleep, and our not-so-great first day of the trip was a distant memory, except for this one image that kept popping into my head: I kept picturing a cozy creperie we had passed by on our walk. I remembered peering through steamed up windows into a tiny dining room with wood paneling. Everyone inside was eating these gorgeous savory crepes with sunny-side-up eggs. They were smiling and looked so warm, so happy. I had wanted to be in there so badly with all of them instead of outside, freezing my derrière off.
Over the next few days, every time a blast of wind cut through me, I’d imagine that restaurant. I knew it must be very close to where we were staying, but somehow we had not passed it again. I began to think it had been a hallucination, something my jet-lagged brain had cooked up to try to warm me that first day.
Finally, towards the end of our stay, we found our way back to this creperie and I realized it did indeed exist outside my head. We walked in, late afternoon, out of the chilly Paris drizzle and each had our very own galette complète. Thankfully, they were as delicious in reality as they had been in my imagination.
A galette (at least in this context) is a buckwheat crepe with a savory filling. Most of the galettes on this cafe’s menu were filled with ham, cheese, and maybe a few veggies, completed with a sunny-side-up egg. The fillings are loaded into the center of the crepe, then the edges are folded to create a square envelope, framing a brilliantly orange yolk. We had ours with hard cider served out of tiny ceramic bowls and I knew this would be a treat I’d be trying to recreate as soon as we got home.
Whenever I take a trip, I attempt to keep a journal. I want to remember all the little details, the activities, and, most importantly, what I ate.
As I was plodding home from where I abandoned my broken-down car, I was thinking about how I’d grade the past week. D, I’d give it a solid D.
Dinner conversation around my table usually follows a similar pattern: Matt’s office politics, my restaurant shenanigans, and what seemingly inedible item Sammy gulped down that day. But when dinner’s really good, we bypass all that and focus on what’s really important: the food.