A couple of us were eating lunch on the terrace of a small Italian joint in the old town, and I was sketching the small church just across from us, when an older gentleman came up and, in French, complimented me on the drawing. He proceeded to tell me that I should make sure to get the bell tower in the sketch, and I assured him I would as soon as I finished filling in the details of the face of the building. He wished us a good day and went on his way.

As we paid our bill and were getting ready to leave, the same gentleman came by and asked to see the finished sketch. After looking at it and complimenting me on a job well done, he asked if he could draw as well, to which I responded, bien sûr!

He spent about five minutes drawing the little church for us, during which time I learned that he’s been living in Ajaccio, and in fact on the same little street as this church, since he was a little boy.

He finished up, handed back my notebook, and wished us a good vacation.

And my heart grew three sizes that day.

(Some photos courtesy Expat Edna, as watermarked.)

The ancestral Bonaparte home, Casa Buonaparte, is still intact, having been continually owned by members of the family until 1923. It is now a national museum housing relics of the Emperor and his family.

I did this weird thing where I was completely uninterested in the historically significant pieces inside the museum, but fixated on the windows and what you could see of of them instead.

Note to self: if I want my future children to be megalomaniacal, maybe have them grow up in a house with quaint vistas of colorful neighboring buildings and orange trees?

Tempting little buggers, aren’t they?

“Wander me,” they whisper. “You’ll surely be able to find your way back.”

For more Bastia:

• Milsters has a comprehensive roundup on the best of the best in this picturesque town.
• I’ve been waiting with bated breath to see Carin’s photos from our trip, and her first post doesn’t disappoint. French-Italian love child, indeed.

*Note: The Cleopatra’s Bling Giveaway contest has closed and a winner has been picked by random number generator. Congratulations, Macdaleine!

You see that plate of langoustines? €22. For serious. And they were head-sucking, finger-licking good. Simply grilled with some mystery herbs and seasonings, served with a big pile of hot fries.

I mean, there are other things on the menu. These mussels were good, too. But every single person in that fully-booked restaurant was there for one thing.

On va prendre cinq assiettes de langoustines, s’il vous plaît.

La Petite Marie
2 Rue des Zephirs
20600 Bastia, Corsica, France
04 95 32 47 83

Clearly, the people of Corsica are taking advantage of their good weather.

A jaw-droppingly beautiful island. A photographer’s paradise.

Seriously, I have to leave thirty minutes early for everything because I know I’m going to stop to take photos a hundred times on the way to wherever I’m going. We spent the entire first day walking around with our mouths open in near outrage at the relentless charm of the place.

I’m here with an awesome group of girls from all over the world, chillin’ out maxin’ and relaxin’ all cool. I’m constantly surrounded by the click-click-click of blogger lenses. Prepare for the onslaught of posts, dear reader.

More soon, but suffice it to say: Corsica is goddamn fantastic. You should all come visit.

Barbecoa is on prime real estate with floor-to-ceiling windows that look out on Saint Paul’s Cathedral, specializing in dishes centered around meat and fire, whether it’s steak on grills, chicken roasted in wood-fired ovens, or pit-smoked beef. It’s a testosterone-filled menu, though with the occasional delicate touch like my cocktail: a Death in the Afternoon with a rose petal for garnish.

Honestly, I felt a bit out-of-place. We went during lunchtime and were quickly surrounded by suits. Not that there’s anything wrong with suits, but the folks around us were clearly more interested in closing the deal than the (quite good) food in front of them.

Whatever. It isn’t every day you’re in London on May Day with your beau, not a cloud in the sky, and a massive budget to spend on just lunch. So: pork. Chicken. Fish. And steak. All the meats. The only way we could have done better would have been to replace our side of sweet potatoes with a skewer of lamb.

Not to mention: beer, cocktails, and wine.

The above photo of our Calvados panna cotta shows how a well-behaved food blogger shoots the plates in front of her. The below photo shows how we actually felt after that much alcohol and meat.

Barbecoa
20 New Change, London EC4M 9AG
+44 20 3005 8555

It’s in the same vein as some of my favorite spots in Paris: mostly natural wines and seasonal cooking with smallish, shareable plates. I would eat like this every day if I could. Serendipity, right?

But it was our first meal in London, so it felt wrong to get a glass of Bordeaux. We went for beer instead.

Wikipedia says that hipsterism “fetishizes the authentic.” Well I guess that makes this a hipster bar, what with the hand-written, daily-changing menus (with both smaller “bar” plates and larger “kitchen” plates), the wine menu scrawled on the wall, and the bring-your-own-vinyls policy for the record player, which was spinning Nirvana and the B-52s that night. Not to mention how of-the-moment the plates are.

Torn bits of rich, milky mozzarella atop warm sweet peas and a puddle of olive oil. Spring on a plate.

Wee olives for snacking are always appreciated with a beer or three.

Roasted Iberico pork with beans, greens, and some spicy stuff. I didn’t know or care at that point; me and the kitchen, we were like that. They understood me, man. This was exactly what I’d wanted. Despite the usual Brooklyn anti-chic decor that these kinds of wine bars are going for nowadays, this is straight-up well-made comfort food.

We finished off with another beer and a just-fine chocolate mousse, recommended by our pixie-ish server.

I was lucky to have stumbled into Duck Soup at 10pm on a Tuesday night. Next time I’ll be making it a priority.

Duck Soup
41 Dean Street, London W1D 4PY
+44 020 7287 4599

Here’s the thing about May in France: there are a ton of bank holidays, some of which land in the middle of the week, like May Day (French Labor Day) did this year. Lots of people faire le pont (“make a bridge”) between the holiday and an adjacent weekend, thereby making it a very long weekend, but one can’t be doing that every time. So, sometimes one has a one-day vacation with which to do as much as one can, and one may as well visit one’s neighboring country.

There are two basic ways to spend such a trip: either running around trying to see as much as possible in a short time, or just chilling out and wandering around, seeing what you happen to see. We took the latter route.

The only things I actually planned were where we would eat dinner and lunch, and we actually ended up skipping out on our dinner reservation due to a stressful moment involving the most unpleasant border control officer I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet and a missed train. No matter, we found a chic little wine bar just steps from our AirBnB apartment in Soho with, as it turned out, exactly the kind of food I enjoy most. A few more steps to a local pub for a late-night beer topped off my first evening in the motherland.

The next day was spent making our meandering way toward lunch, stopping to take pictures and make detours through gardens and parks when we happened upon them, finding the river and looking up to find our way toward St. Paul’s. I enjoyed the luxury of asking for directions in my native language.

After a huge lunch in a posh restaurant where we were surrounded by suits, which involved copious amounts of beef and wine, all we wanted to do was lounge around enjoying the fair weather. So we crossed a bridge, passed by the Globe, and found a lawn in front of the Tate Modern where we could people-watch and accent-listen and sketch and generally be happy until it was time to cross another bridge and head back to St. Pancras for our return train.

So, on my first trip to London I didn’t see Big Ben or Westminster Abbey or Buckingham Palace. And you know, I’m happier having seen the city in this light.

Chocolate chip cookies are my favorite thing to bake, so naturally I’ve gone through lots of recipes. But no matter how much I might mess around with ground oatmeal or brown butter or pumpkin purée or what-have-you, this is the recipe I go back to. Good ol’ Alton‘s got it right, as he so often has.

These cookies, like all chocolate chip cookies, are fantastic straight out of the oven. But the special thing about them is that they continue to be good, nay, I would even say better, for days after they’ve been baked. If you like a toothsome chew in your cookie, this is where it’s at.

I’ve recently learned that there are people in this world who will wake up in the middle of the night, hungry, and actually get out of bed searching for a snack. I have it on good authority that these cookies are excellent for those kinds of people, too.

Music to cook by: I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You [Tom Waits // Closing Time]