A Caprese Kind of Day

What does 14.98€ (around $19 with the current exchange rate) get you at the corner market? Well, this for starters.

Clockwise from top left: 2L milk, 2.52€ - Sauvignon Blanc from Pays d'Oc, 3.95€ - fresh baguette, 0.90€ - fresh basil, 1.35€ - fresh mesclun salad greens, 0.70€ - fresh tomatoes, 0.51€ - fresh mozzarella cheese, 1.12€ - cucumber, 0.70 € - Reblochon cheese (OMG, love!), 1.95€ - tabbouleh salad, 2.04€ 

To be fair, the baguette did not come from the corner market. It came from the corner boulangerie where they have fresh, hot, crunchy-on-the-outside, chewy-on-the-inside baguettes twice a day Monday through Friday. They are kitty-corner from the corner market and even closer to my apartment. Dangerous - and delicious!

The Reblochon I am very excited about. It's a cheese I fell in love with when I was in France in 2009, staying in Haute-Savoie for work with Connectors R Us. As far as I can find out, Reblochon is not available in the US. At all. It's made from fresh, whole, unpasturized raw milk - which according to the USDA is a huge no-no. So no importing, and I'm not even sure that the right ingredients could be found to make it, nor the right storage conditions to cure it. I will just have to enjoy it while I am here.

The baguette, tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil combined to make four incredible caprese sandwiches. Two I wrapped up and took with me today for a picnic lunch. The other two became dinner, pictured below. I was too hungry to bother with picture-taking at lunchtime, but rest assured, it looked very similar! Just substitute a green bench and the gardens of a former royal hunting lodge for the table and nighttime Parisian backdrop.

Caprese dinner. With wine. Of course.

Those of you linked to me on the Book of Face may have noticed my earlier comment about hordes of unsupervised teenagers being annoying in any language. Today's trip to Fontainebleau was definitely a mix of good and bad, leaning more heavily towards the bad, so for now let's just savor the food and wine, and I'll revisit that story in a later post.