hermorrine who, owing to a somewhat shorter trip home than me, was able to post her summary hours ago. Since you can all go off and read that first, I'll restrict my self to the full gastronomic summary and other randomness.This time, I was flying with American rather than United and, as their slogan promised, there was indeed More Room, even enough for long-legged me to be borderline comfortable in that regard. Not that I didn't look jealously at the Business and First class seats, of course. The nifty touch-screen displays were somewhat nixed by the fact that the sound kept cutting out, so I decided not to bother with the movie and instead settled down to read my book and write some fanfic. As seems to be de rigeur these days, there was the flight information, maps etc on one of the TV channels - which managed to mislead me as to our exact landing time, so it came as something as a shock to bump onto the runway when I wasn't expecting it for another 5 minutes...
As regards the millefeuille, the normal incarnation would be similar to a vanilla slice, albeit usually with three layers of the pastry and two of crème pâtissier. The key part is the flaky pastry from which the name (literally translating as "thousand leaves") comes, so variations (e.g. a warm millefeuille with caramelised apples - yum!) are fine, but in this case, the pastry chef has missed the point by replacing part of the dish which gives it its name. Which isn't to say that it wasn't delicious.
Saturday lunch was very good indeed - once we got past the mixed up menus (
hermorrine had been mistakenly given the Dinner menu which had prices 2-3 times those of the lunch menu which I had declared 'pretty reasonable'. We discovered this only when I was referring to part of a dish that didn't appear in the other menu. Doh. Thankfully, the menus were dual-language French and American (not British) English, so I was able to pick the one I understood best (usually the former, being a veteran of many dozens of restaurants while on holiday in France), and apply the 'if in doubt, it's probably a fish' rule-of-thumb. Oh, and what's with Americans calling main courses entrées? The literal translation would be 'entrance', and fairly unambiguously refers to a starter. To avoid confusion, the menu never used the word at all, using hors d'œvres to refer to starters on the French side of the menu. The food itself: I started with layered tomatoes and mozzarella topped with Parma ham and served with a truffle vinaigrette, followed by the best steak sandwich ever (the steak itself done to perfection and with a compote of mushrooms and onions) with fantastic French fries (as in proper frites, not your McDonalds pap, and certainly in no way Freedom related). Finally, there were the cunning $1 mini-deserts, I went for the chocolate mousse (not m00se, but still pretty good).Somewhere along the line, we caught a documentary about the possibility of building a transatlantic tunnel. We both agreed that this was so never going to happen. Admittedly it sounds nifty - rather than being dug, it's prefabbed in sections and floats 100m (or was that feet?) beneath the surface, tethered to the bottom by thousands of cables. You go through in mag-lev trains that run in a vacuum - London to New York in about an hour. All very nice, but the price tag? In excess of $10,000,000,000,000 (ten trillion dollars - 100 million passengers a year paying $100 a time would take 1000 years to pay of construction costs alone - who on earth would fund it). Plus the construction time would be many decades and would consume the entire output of all the steel mills in the world for a year. And what about accidents - the "worst case scenario" depicted had the out-of-control submarine regain power at the last minute and only strike a glancing blow. And surely such a project would be an incredibly tempting target for terrorists - security might be good enough to stop the trains being bombed, but surely there would be no way to protect all 3,500 miles of the undersea tunnel from a boat with divers planting a bomb on the outside...
Saturday night was Italian at the Pescatore Palace which was again excellent. After the bruschetta, I avoided the whole salad dressing issue by going for the minestrone soup instead. For the main course, I had Pasta Romantica, which involved chicken, mountain ham and other good things. Yum! Plus the portions were generous, so we got the left-overs to take away for Sunday lunch. Desert was their new special - 10 flavours of sherbet (the sort that's like a sorbet, no the sort that's like sugar powder) - including Apple, Cherry, Chestnut, Date, Kiwi, Pear, Tangerine and Walnut.
For the flight back, I sadly had Mr-Keep-Seat-Fully-Reclined-At-All-Times in front of me (one of the stewards had to make him put it upright facilitate eating dinner, the guy in the window seat nearly smacked him one as he had difficulty getting in and out past it and the guy flat-out refused to put his seat up, and after the stewards came to check all seats were upright for landing etc, he promptly reclined it again. Plus I was in the second-to-back row, so the folks behind me could barely recline their seats at all, hence I wasn't comfortable in reclining my seat too far. Anyway, this meant that using the laptop wasn't really practical, so no fic-writing done. Ah, well...
