N and R have a Parisian picnic

As soon as i bragged on the blog about how great the weather has been....it started to get rainy. But two days ago, before the rain showed up, the weather was perfect for a picnic, so we headed out to the Tuilier gardens, which are the grounds of the Louvre. Picnicking is at its best here, because so many French specialties make for perfect picnic snacks, like olives, cheese, pates, and breads. All of these things came from my favorite Parisian grocery store, Le Grand Epicerie, which I wish we could afford to shop at regularly, but its too pricey for every day food. So we only go about once a week to pick out some things to treat ourselves with. Even though its so pricey, I could spend hours just walking around the store looking at all the different things they have there.

We had many delicious things. Our olives were from Provence, they were nice and spicey, and looked like this:

We also had a tartine de poireaux (egg and leek tart), chevre rocamadour (a cave aged goat cheese that is smelly but very flavorful), pate de campagne poivre verte (country pate with green peppercorns), Bordier butter (Bordier is a bretone man who makes the most amazing butter i've ever tasted....it is a waste to cook with this stuff, it is best enjoyed just spread liberally on bread), fresh baked cereal grain bread...and pringles and M&Ms.

Tartine poireaux looks like this:

Bordier butter spread liberally on cereal grain bread looks like this (mmmmm):

Chevre fromage on cereal grain bread looks like this:

The pringles were hard to resist, since they have so many strange flavors here like goat cheese and ham. Our pringles looked like this:

Finally, Paris recently outlawed public consumption of alcohol, which had been legal until then. But drinking is a big part of the way of life of parisians, and it turns out that this law was really only passed so that they could crack down on homeless drunks. This means they don't actually enforce the rules if you look like a decent person. A few years back we were picnicking in the lawn of the Eiffel tower, and a police came by to tell me i cannot drink (i had a beer), and when i asked if i should dump it out, the police replied in french that if it were him, he would just drink it quickly. So with our picnic, I had a nice belgian beer, triple karmeliet and R had a diet coke. Our drinks, in their coasters looked like this: