My fiancé and I have decamped to Paris for the week, with my birthday this coming Friday (the big 2-9) as our excuse for doing so. It is quite hot here, which is supposed to kill the appetite. I have seen no evidence that this theory holds any truth whatsoever.
Tonight, the first night of our trip, we wandered out to a neighbourhood pizzeria. We started by sharing some quite good charcuterie, and then moved on to pizzas. (I had at first ordered a salad, but when I was told that they couldn’t supply any balsamic vinegar, changed my order. No real arm twisting was involved, obviously.) I much prefer the American-style pizza with a buttery pan crust to the thin crusted European style; still, these were okay. It really is difficult to mess pizza up to the degree that it is inedible, after all. Not so when it comes to lasagne and osso bucco, which were the other two dishes I considered having.
I would not have had dessert if I hadn’t spotted banana split on the menu. They got this all wrong, too: The banana is to be, as the name indicates, split vertically, with one half lining each side of the dish. There should be three scoops of ice cream (of any flavour, at least one being vanilla, though I prefer three vanilla scoops), each topped with a different flavour sauce (chocolate, strawberry, and pineapple). The final layer is one of whipped cream, with perhaps some chopped nuts sprinkled over, and a cherry on top. The one I had tonight had the bananas sliced horizontally, as one would if adding them to cornflakes. There were three scoops of ice cream, but one was raspberry; very European, I guess. They also put the chocolate sauce on top of the whipped cream (quelle horreur!), and the nuts used were toasted, flaked almonds. Feh.
Still, as with pizza, even when ice cream is bad, it’s still pretty good. I’m in Paris, in good company, and well-fed. It would be churlish to complain…even though a rotten banana split really is a crime against gastronomy.
Jackie, you seem to be following the universal rules of dieting, which bring relief to the conscience. These include laws which tell us that snacks after midnight do not count in the day’s total, and that food taken from someone else’s plate does not add to your own quota. In this case the rule is that calories taken on holiday don’t count!