Welcome dear IMK friends, sorry to say that April was a truly an Awful April... Longtime followers will know that in the last few years I moved from Australia to Canada to France, and it's all going pear shaped at the moment, mid life crisis I guess. Anyway, let's take a distracting moment in the kitchen..
For my monthversary baking project, I made a matcha cake which collapsed after I took it out of the oven but was nevertheless delicious. It fit in well with Awful April. You can also see that my selection of family photos also includes a castor that I drew, it says "life is short, eat cabbage"...
I continued my annual tradition of making sourdough hot cross buns, but these didn't work out so well, a bit dense and chewy to go along with my Awful April ..
We celebrated Easter with this magnificent dark chocolate easter egg from our local chocolatier Bernachon, stuffed full of goodies, that little chocolate chicken is filled with hazelnut ganache!
We also got a colomba, a traditional Easter bread that is eaten in the north of Italy. It's very much like a panettone in texture and composition but is covered with these little pellets of sugar.
This was probably the most ambitious thing I made in Awful April, the fish pie from Recipetineats which I spruced up with lots of leek and fennel. We had friends visiting from New York and for dessert we had some wonderful strawberries, a real treat in spring in Paris.
(There was a funny after episode too. I had bought an el cheapo bottle of wine to cook for the fish pie, and when Canadian friends dropped by a few days later we had finished all the nice wine at home so we offered them the el cheapo wine and they said wine in France is just delicious! didn't have the heart to tell them it was a 3 euro bottle from the supermarket...)
Off on a trip...
So I came up with this idea to take G on a big train trip because I adore trains (and I want to train him to love trains too), and since S was invited for academic reasons to Budapest we set out on our train adventure. It was badly timed, I had been struggling with eczema for weeks, I was terribly depressed, and had a bad head cold.. zero appetite, but anyway here are some photos of our trip.
We took the train from Paris to Zurich (4 hours) where we caught up with S' little brother and his new lovely girlfriend. She was very sweet and gave us a goodie bag with these beautiful cups (the Starbucks series), a couple of cute wooden spatulas and a little box of chocolates.
My dream in life is to have a make your own muesli bar like the one in our hotel breakfast..
We then took the overnight train from Zurich to Vienna (10 hours), and it was a real adventure squeezing into our tiny compartment, perfectly comfortable and we all slept well to the rumbling along of the train. We were astonished to see that they brought us breakfast in the morning (choose your own breakfast adventure) just before arriving in Vienna..
I was so sick from my cold that I literally had just 3 cups of tea in Vienna while lying on the couch all day at my friend's place. On the way back to the station I bought this topfengolatsche which is a typical Austrian pastry stuffed with curd, and we ate it on the train together (rather, G ate 90% of it), so this is literally the only food picture I have from Vienna!
The train from Vienna to Budapest was easy (3.5 hours) and the Hungarians on my train were so friendly, many old ladies besotted with G - must be unusual to see a mixed Chinese baby in the Hungarian countryside. We arrived in Budapest and went straight to a fancy dinner at Vakvarju, this was the dessert which was a tradition goat curd pudding with pearls and purées of strawberry and a tuile of basil. Very fancy.
What else did we eat in Budapest? I have no idea! but one night a restaurant owner gave G this as a dessert, it's a frozen treat of cottage cheese covered in chocolate..
Apero on the street anyone? This was leftover Prosecco from the night train!
This was a picnic dinner in our hotel room because I couldn't stand the idea of eating meat anymore.. so if you are curious how much food costs in Budapest, this dinner of a loaf of gluten free bread, crackers, small chunk of cheese, cherry tomatoes, maquerel, peas and carrots in a can, hummus, a bag of mixed nuts, 3 oranges and a couple of little desserts cost us 7800 forints (21 euros or 25 US dollars).. how does that compare to prices in your town?
I'm usually a big supermarket souvenir shopper but I was just too sick this time to do anything other than pick up some paprika (the bircher muesli was from Vienna) and this cookbook at the airport with the last of our Hungarian coins...
The curveball...
Here is my little monster curled up with his latest friend called Zuri. He usually hates stuffed toys but really took to this one, I think because S' brother's girlfriend gave it to him and she's very pretty (and he loves pretty ladies). He normally sleeps with a rabbit called Mr Rabbit so he has been inventing all sorts of stories about the two of them since we got home to Paris. He's at a gorgeous age where he is asking lots of what's that? why is that like that? kind of questions. It's also amusing to see him switch between languages or correcting our accents in French!
That's it for me this month, feel free to write me if you have been through a mid life crisis.. I need all the tips I can get. Sending this to Sherry who hosts the monthly IMK series, have a great month everyone!
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