My apartment in Paris

I had a good motivation to finally tide up my apartment (a 'studio', I should say, as there's just one room), because Konrad came to visit. It takes ridiculously quick to mess it up again so right away I took some photos to share with you.
As you can see it's not very spacius, but quite cosy and anyone of you who wishes to visit personally and maybe stay a while in Paris is more than welcome.














What do you think?

Lab christmas party

Even though there's still some time left to Christmas, my busy labmates couldn't find another day where we'd all be available to celebrate together and exchange presents, later than today. Everyone prepared a dish or brought cheese, dessert or wine.

Agnieszka, organized all the pretty decoration and 2 really delicious dishes: chicory with goat cheese, walnuts and home made caramel, and a herring and dried plum salad, that really made this lunch taste like Christmas dinner to me.


I made a winter fruit salad with dried apricots, figs and fresh pears, apples and pomegranate in vanilla-lemon-anise syrup, which turned out to be really yummi and fit well on the Christmas table. Find the recipe here.


Marie-Emily brought all different types of cheese, these in the front are Camembert and Brie, that have absolutetly nothing to do with the ones sold in Poland under the same name. These here are a lot more mature, intense and really delicious. Altough I'm afraid they wouldn't yet be appreciated by the statistical Kowalski...


The jar in the back of the table is foie-gras, home made by the family of Agathe, a colleague from the lab. It tastes like a paté, altough is a lot more delicate. I tasted once, put a 'tak' on my list of things I wanted to try, and honestly - don't think I'll ever come back to it again..


I made an attempt to prepare a polish Christmas soup - barszcz. It looked really promising during it's preparation, but the illusion ended after adding the spices: I couldn't find any from the original polish recipe, so I decided to add some random ones that I found in the nearest supermarket. The result was far from satisfactory - it tasted like leftover water after pickles mixed with overboiled carrots.. :)
I spared my labmates the effort to make a happy face while tasting it and spilled it all in my sink.


It was hard to come back to my experiments after all those goodies and a couple of glasses of wine. And with all the excess food we prepared it looks like the lunches will have to repeat in the following days :)

Salon des vins des Vignerons Indépendants

Paris is famous for it's world leading position in the number of organized congresses, expos, conferences and workshops. Where else, if not in Paris, could you attend such an excellent event as an expo of independant wineyards. I got invitations from my boss Stephane for my friends and me, but anyone can enter paying a fee of 6 euro. More than 500 wineyards exhibiting from all around France and you are welcome to taste whatever you like.

On the entrance they give you a wine glass..

And you can start exploring..

Nikolaus, a greek guy who's doing his erasmus exchange project in my lab, had an ambicious plan to taste all the most expensive champagnes..

We bought a couple of bottles to take home and one to share in place, tired after couple of hours of tasting by little sips...
My choice was a bottle of champagne Michel Loriot Brut Rosé and red wine Morgon, year 2007, from the wineyard owned by the Méziat family.