Birthday - Part 3

The Party Continues
While I was still chewing on golf cake my friend Ming called and invited me out for a birthday dinner.  We went to a cool, Frenchy wine bar where the food is good and the wine is perfectly paired by a Frenchy dude in a Frenchy sweater.

Ming was adventurous with her choice of black pudding.  It was blacker than this photo shows - I had to lighten it over and over just to get some detail.  I tried a bite - not my cup of tea.  If you don't know - it's a combo of curdled pig blood, liver and chunks of pig fat.

She also got something called Basque Bulots.  She struggled to give me an English translation.  Though she's American and grew up in San Fran, she's lived in Paris for over a decade and can no longer translate directly to English sometimes.  Turns out, they're whelks.  What's a whelk?  Go here.

I kept it inside the fence line, selecting some sliced ham and mashed.  Dodo, I think I need to take you here just for this.  It was the tenderest ham I've ever had.

Prior to the ham I got some carpaccio de lieu which is a fancy, Frenchy way of saying "raw fish."  It was drizzled with olive oil and was way better than I thought it was going to be.  I really liked it.  Our waiter went into the cellar and got us some kind of white wine that tasted pretty good.  He even covered it with some kind of sleeve to keep it cool.  Very, very Frenchy.