Couscousit

Yowzers! Check out those pastries!

Yes, failthful readers, this is a new post. I apologize for the delay, and appreciate your collective sighs of relief that you finally have something new to procrastinate with. Knowing how much there is to tell you about my weekend in NYC really killed me this past week; I mean, it is such a daunting task, writing about it all, so I waited to write not only to build excitement in your tummies, but also to hopefully forget some details (so as not to write a novel length post). Let's get to it, then, shall we?

We must begin at the beginning, of course.

Friday night, 11:30pm, 87th St. between Lex and Park: Maxine arrives at my apartment, and I whisk her away for a late nite snack, New York City style. We walk over to La Mia’s Pizzeria on 88th and 3rd and split one pepperoni and one mushroom slice between the two of us. Oh how I love a good NY style thin crust pizza!

I’m telling you, the combination of a crusty-bottomed, fresh from the oven, one topping Yankee pizza is just unbeatable. The cost to pleasure ratio is off the charts, and not even my favorite quattro stagioni can warm my heart the way La Mia’s - Ray’s – Totonno’s – Lombardi’s can. Damn, sometimes I miss home. (This is my mom’s cue to give me the Jewish-mom guilt trip she is so famous for: “Eh, Lali, you never tell me you mees me, sew haw can you say dat you mees de peetza? Are you crayzee? Haw darrrrrrre you!”)

Since Tasti-D was already closed (time check: 1am), we headed over to compare the sweets at Hot & Crusty to those at Old Fashioned Doughnuts (both on the corner of 86th and Lexington), two locations that are frequented by taxi drivers on their late night breaks. Maxine and I settled on the doughnuts, debated between custard, chocolate, honey glaze and marble for a good five minutes, then chose this one:

The graffiti in the background makes things seem so authentic, doesn’t it?

It took us a while to dig out the change from our slim fitting pants, so a doughnut-eating taxi driver standing nearby offered us two quarters he had handy. To his fiddy-cent contribution we added another dime, and went happily along our way, straight to bed.

Saturday morning we woke up and arrived to Payard right on schedule. It took us a moment to realize that in order to sit and eat, you must order from a waiter and not from the women behind the glass display cases. It was a good wait, however, since we had enough time to strategize and figure out what we were going to order.

We started with coffee and a café au lait, a sugar brioche ($2.50) and a cannele ($3.25) (the best thing I have tasted this year), and then ordered two Payard signature pastries:


Thats the “Sweet Relief,” made of mango mousse, pineapple parfait, roasted pineapple and Swiss meringue.

And this is the “Sevilla,” made of pain de genes with apple Tatin, caramel mousse and fleur de sel, each priced at $5.50.

Once you get over the wow factor, it’s interesting how you can really taste all the different components in each pastry. I just think that Maxine and I didn’t really like all the components, all together. For example, she wasn’t a fan of the roasted pineapple or the meringue, and I thought the caramel mousse was a little too caramelly. For my parents, I brought back the “Passion Fruit Tart” (passion fruit cream, raspberry coulis, white sacher biscuit, topped with an Italian meringue on a sable dough crust), the “Lemon Tart” (self-explanatory, for once), and a cannele, and they all went over very well. Especially that damned cannele! Why can’t I find a cannele in Atlanta? WHY?!

Well, we left the place with a snack in hand: a one pound box of petit fours, both soft (apricot financier, vanilla and almond financier, pistachio and chocolate financier) and hard (cinnamon cookies, vanilla and chocolate checkerboard, star cookies, chocolate pistachio cookies, palmier and shredded almond cookies), which we munched on during our numerous subway rides around town.

On our walk from the 59th street subway station to Fauchon, we passed the newly-opened Pierre Marcolini Chocolatier Bruxelles on 58th and Park for a taste.

At $3 a pop, we each chose two chocolates (I had a palets fin of honey filled dark chocolate and lemon-basil milk chocolate) and continued down Park Ave.

Our next stop on the itinerary was H&M, but on our way there we (unfortunately) noticed that the Hallo Berlin cart was not at its usual corner. Instead, we picked up a snack of roasted chestnuts from another street vendor in order to occupy our saddened hearts, and spent the next 2 hours shopping for clothes.

Since we were both full from all the sweets we had consumed this far, we thought that perhaps we skip the Lower East Side leg of our tour since Dean & Deluca (Rockefeller Center) typically stocks up with doughnuts from the Doughnut Plant. D&D only carried pumpkin flavored, which I wasn’t so partial towards, so we decided to continue on downtown.

Yeahhhh, but no. On our way to the subway, we spotted La Maison Du Chocolat, where we picked up two of the yummiest French macaroons EVER.

And there is so much more to tell you about what we ate next! But that is enough for one day. Keep a lookout for Part II coming up later this week!

# posted by Unknown @ 6:31 PM 2 comments