To market to market to buy fresh bread, fruit and cheese

A combination of late nights, flight related sleep-deprivation and the general tiredness that comes as you start to really relax on a holiday has us tired, very tired.  Today was grey, cold and wet and it would have been easy to spend it in bed, but we are in Paris, so we gathered ourselves and headed out.

Being a Sunday we headed to the Bastille metro station and out to the Boulevard Rechard-Lenoir market.  If you are ever in Paris on a Sunday I suggest you do the same.  It is a massively long market selling everything including fresh fruit, vegetables, seafood, meat, cheese, bread, smallgoods and cooked things, like the stalls with whole chickens on rotisseries and potatoes cooking in the fat below.  There are fresh flowers, a few souvenirs, even clothes.  All in all a gorgeous place to spend some time.

Yes for those of you who read French they are all strawberries!

 

We stocked up for lunch, fresh bread and camembert (now is apparently the best time for camembert as the milk is at its peak), white cherries and raspberries and a coffee eclair.  Eclairs come in two shapes in France, there are the long ones we are used to as well as round ones that look a little like a brioche.  They come in a range of flavours including vanilla and caramel, but the most common are chocolate and coffee.  We bought a coffee one.

By then the rain had started so we retreated to a cafe for coffee and hot chocolate.  We should have gone a street back, we paid tourist prices, but it was delicious and warming.

Fortified we headed back to our apartment for a delicious, market fresh lunch.  I highly recommend smushing raspberries onto your camembert on fresh sourdough - yum!

We considered options for the afternoon.  The rain was getting heavier, so inside activities called.  We considered something cultural, but with plenty more museum options on our trip, we opted for a foodie experience to end our time in Paris.  We headed to the macaron mecca - Laduree.

There was a queue to get into the cafe and despite the rain we joined it.  A reasonably short time later we were shown into the salon.  It is quite lovely, with painted ceilings and gilded pillars as well as the traditional Laduree pale green.  Still full from lunch, we decided to share a tart (don't worry, macarons do come into this story).  It was a crisp short biscuit base filled with a delicate passionfruit creme patissier and topped with fresh raspberries.  It was truly delicious.

S had another expresso, he has been enjoying them hugely.  I had tea "Josephine" with flavours of orange, lemon, grapefruit and jasmin it was delicate and delicious.  It was all fantastic, the only fault we could find it that the sugar cubes did not come with a serving device.

After we had finished we headed next door into the boutique and stocked up on macarons for our dessert.  We chose pistachio, coffee, lemon and basil, raspberry, rose, and salted caramel.  They were carefully transported back to the apartment in now driving rain.  Our favourite was the salted caramel but we agreed with our tour guide from the other day, the Pierre Herme ones were better.

While the rain was a bit disappointing on our last day in Paris, this week has been a wonderful start to our trip.