Open-Faced Sandwiches & Macarons

One weekend, Steph and I went down to the Byward Market and picked up some stuff for lunch. We dropped by La Bottega first. I found out that although Steph was in Ottawa the whole summer, she had never had any of their sandwiches. Sad, isn't it? We picked up some smoked gouda, prosciutto, and house-made porchetta.

I've always wanted to try some of the breads at Le Moulin de Provence. This was a perfect opportunity, so we made our way down the street for some fresh bread. We didn't know what to get, I chose something that resembled a baguette - but wasn't. It was a loaf of batard. It looked great. We brought everything to Lucy and Jimmy's apartment for lunch.

(Side story: I forgot what the bread was called. "Fatarg" kept popping in my head. Google didn't help. It turned it into 'fat arg' so it gave me links with titles like "Why do I feel fat? arg!" Fail. Thanks for remembering the correct name of the bread Lucy!)





At the time, Lucy and Jimmy still didn't have a table. No worries. We just used containers as our table instead. This was our spread. There was sliced mild cheddar, pickles, pepperoni, and smoked oysters too. Smoked salmon cream cheese was brought out a bit later as well.



I was seriously happy with just this slice of bread, prosciutto, and pickle. But there were so many other choices. We all found that the porchetta was flavourless and needed a lot more seasoning. I was expecting to see a layer of herbs and spices but all we saw were specks. The porchetta was super tender though.

We each made different combinations - some good, some not so good. Let's just say that pepperoni, smoked salmon cream cheese, and a pickle do not go well together.




For dessert, we went down the street to the Brown Loaf Bakery and got some macarons. Then we got some drinks at the Bridgehead.



Lucy had mentioned that the macarons are hit and miss there. We got four macarons: coffee, lemon, pistachio, and raspberry. And since there were four of us, we cut them each in four -- well, we tried to anyway.



Half of them were stale. The lemon was tough to cut in half. You can see it was a clean cut, whereas the coffee one was messy. That's never a good sign for a macaron. The raspberry one was also stale. The pistachio was the best macaron.

After lunch, we went to a park to enjoy the sunny weather. It was a simple but enjoyable afternoon with family. I'm very lucky to have family so close by.