Paris - The Snacks.

I love a good picnic & Paris is certainly a great place to have one what with their abundance of natural food stores, parks and boulangeries. Sadly the last two times I've visited the temperature's been either below or close to freezing so the only chance for a picnic has been on the train home.

I always carry my trusty knife when I'm travelling & there was no problem getting it through security to get onto the Eurostar. Obviously if you're travelling by plane & not checking a bag a knife is not a good option! I love my Kuhn Rikon knives, they come with a blade cover & they're really sharp making cutting through bread or fruit an easy task. Also, they come in pretty colours!

We spoke to our hosts at the Gentle Gourmet B&B about buying bread in Paris & they confirmed that French baguettes would not contain any animal ingredients or be coated in an egg wash which left us free to choose our loaf from any of the many boulangeries we passed whilst wandering around Paris.

Our hosts also brought our attention to some great vegan margarine. We tried it at breakfast one day & we knew we'd be picking some up to take home. It came in very handy on our train picnic!

This spread is available in normal supermarkets, Carrefour & Monoprix are the two you'll see most often.

We were very impressed with the abundance of Naturalia food stores in Paris, they are not completely vegetarian but they stock many vegan & gluten free products. There seemed to be one around almost every corner in the centre of the city and a quick look at the helpful map on their website will show you where they are. We found the Sojami Garlic & Herb spread & the Wheaty slices for our train picnic there. There were loads of different seitan's, sausages & spreads to choose from & we picked up this Seitan to take home.

We're going to make a 'steak & chips' style meal from it soon. This seitan comes in two individually wrapped portions each with their own sauce...I'm only a bit tempted to keep them both to myself!