The 'Shroom:Issue 162/Critic Corner

Director's Notes
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Welcome to September, the month you thought was in the distant future but instead it's suddenly here right now, mostly gone with October peering through the window! While I personally have been incredibly busy not only moving myself into a new apartment while working full time, but I've been helping my brothers move out as well, all while one of them welcomed a new kid into the world! 🐣🍼 Uncle Anton is already spoiling the crap out of them, don't worry. Through all the chaos going on, we still bring you some wonderful reviews to help you get back, centered, and focused on what really matters--judging the world around you!

Thank you for voting Half-Baked Reviews as August's Critic Corner Section of the Month!! Be sure to give your love to all of our sections here, and give a shout out to our writers whether in chat or in their forum threads dedicated to their sections. Be sure to vote vote vote!

And now for my regular announcements: We've decided to implement in Critic Corner something similar to News Flush over in Fake News, where no formal sign-up application process is required for one-time or limited sections. From now on if you just want to send in a single review for something you just read, watched played, tried, whatever, you just have to send me your review privately either to me directly in chat, or in a message to me on the forum at least one week before each 'Shroom is to be released! There's no commitment or obligation to provide a full monthly section (although you absolutely can shift it into one if you so choose), just send us your thoughts on a thing and we'll feature it here! If you have any questions or curiosities about this, please feel free to ask!

As always, if you would like to help Critic Corner, we always have openings for more writers! You are free to write for sections such as Character Review and Movie Review, or really anything you'd like to do! There's no pressure to have a huge section; they can be shorter and concise! The application process is very simple, starting with reading the Sign Up page, and sending your application to Ninja Squid, our Stats Manager on the forum. Any idea you have is welcome, and if you have any questions or need help signing up, please feel free to reach out to myself or other 'Shroom peeps!

Section of the Month

'Shroom FM
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Welcome back to 'Shroom FM! If you're a fan of a) long albums, b) short albums, c) great albums, d) terrible albums or e) absolutely dire cover songs, I have some very good news for you.

Graphic Novel Review
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Greetings, readers! I’m back again with another book review, and this month, our featured book is Geek Wisdom: The Sacred Teachings of Nerd Culture!

I stumbled upon this book while I was on a walk through my neighborhood- a big goal of mine recently is to reach all of my local Lending Libraries, and this was a library that I had seen while riding in the car. If you want more information about lending libraries, whether that’s to start your own, or to see if there are any around your house, go to www.littlefreelibrary.com!

Anyways, onto our featured reading for the month. ‘’Geek Wisdom’’ bills itself as a sort of “Bible for Geeks.” Using famous movie, book, and video game quotes, the author connects them to life lessons we should all know, effectively turning a quote like ''“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means”'' into a relatable parable that you can apply to your daily life. Each entry is a short page, with the quote, the parable/reflection, and usually a fun fact about the piece of media it came from. This makes for easy guidance for "daily devotions," and if you are someone who doesn't like to sit down and read half a 500 page book in one sitting, check this one out. The short entries are perfect for pick up and put down reading, and you can read one entry at a time, or you can read a whole section if you like. There are no cliffhangers, you can read two pages and put down the book for two weeks and come back and not need to re-read those two pages to understand what's going on. Segal draws from a huge assortment of media sources to make the book accessible to many different types of nerds- book nerds, video game nerds, movie and TV nerds, you get the picture. From Lord of the Rings to Back to the Future to The Legend of Zelda, at least one out of the massive variety of media sources chosen will be familiar to you.

The physical book itself is also quite charming. Its small size makes it perfect to carry around with you. I tossed it into my work bag to read on my lunch breaks and it was lighter than my planner, and took up less space, too. The black dust jacket is covered in illustrations of various nerdy and geeky objects and characters- can't lie, I smiled when I saw Optimus Prime's silhouette right on the front.

If you're someone who enjoys references, or maybe you'd just like some nerdy humor sprinkled into your daily reflection, or if you maybe aren't a fan of reading, I would definitely recommend that you pick this book up. It's easy to read, easy to learn from, and easy to point finger guns and go "eyyyyyyy" at when your favorite movie is mentioned. Plus, you might find a new piece of media to check out!

That's it for me this month, readers! Tune in next time for a fresh Graphic Novel Review!

HalfBakedPretzelLogo.png
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France - Paris - Food To complete this massive series of reviews, we’ll return now to the primary focus of this section--food! The last like entire year of reviews has been incredibly information-heavy and has required a substantial amount of research and learning in order to complete them to my extreme level of satisfaction. Not this month, though! I’ve got too many things going on, including moving across the city into a new living situation. This month I’m just going to run through notable things I ate in Paris, tell you what they are, and what I thought about them! If I happen to run on for longer than that, it’s because I got really into what I was writing and decided to infodump. Enjoy this Paris finale, and here’s to whatever my next colossal and expensive review series I will absolutely beat into the ground until everyone is tired of it, then retread it for a few more months anyways!!

Boulangeries Because I don’t want to flood this entire review with a billion headers of each individual thing, I’ve compressed them into what I got from each bakery I went to that was interesting or notable.

Legay Choc Chouquette Uses choux pastry dough, which is just really simple dough made from water, flour, butter, and eggs, with steam used as the raising agent instead of yeast or whatever. It’s used in lots of things that you’re probably unaware of, like eclairs, cream puffs/profiteroles, I guess whatever you want to use it for really. The chouquette is just kind of a bread orb that fits in your hand, generously sprinkled with giant chunks of sugar. The flavor is nice and sweet, kinda hollow with a cheese flavored filling? Not really anything that’s satisfying in terms of lasting impact and flavor, but would probably be ok with a mug of hot chocolate. I need my pastries to act as a depression meal, though, and this is just simply too light and airy.

Brioche à l'Orange If you thought bread was too boring, try adding fractured cough drops into the mix because that’s apparently what this is. Soft and somewhat dense dough, with hard orange pieces. I couldn’t tell if they were candied, dried, or just stale, but whatever it was it just really wasn’t a pleasant experience biting into standard fluffy smooth bread and having your teeth come into contact with mildly sweet rocks. Perhaps if it was made with just orange zest and juice, like other recipes seem capable of doing, it would impart a delicate citrusy sweet tang to an otherwise rich and buttery bread, but whatever Legay Choc did was just simply jarring. I’m sure it’s more a problem on my end with my own preconceptions, tastes, and expectations, as I’m sure Legay Choc has wonderful products; I just simply chose two that weren’t for me.

La Baguette Magique Was briefly disappointed that the one I got wasn’t edible, but it makes for a nice souvenir. Made my dad proud.

Pret a Manger Canelé de Bordeaux |  I visited this one inside of the Galeries Lafayette Gourmet building, not knowing that it was even a Pret a Manger until I started fully writing these reviews out because it literally did not matter and I just simply couldn’t even tell due to how busy it was. Realizing that they hosted an everyday British fast casual sandwich shop inside of their recklessly extravagant food hall kinda cheapens the whole thing, like having a shopping mall anchored with a Sears. Whatever, though, because I waddled up to the counter and got something that I thought looked neat, and it turned out to be a canelé. A canelé is a little pastry flavored with rum and vanilla, sweet caramelized exterior, and doughy custardy interior. The whole thing looked like a Like Like, and sounders a lot better than it really was. Sweet, firm rubbery outside, kinda like mashed dense cake inside, but ultimately tasted kinda fake and dull. Given that this was the product of an international chain with a history of blatant deception and frozen procuts masqueraded as fresh I’m sure that this canelé was sitting in a plastic container until it needed to be thawed for display. I would certainly like to try a fresh one as the whole idea of rum and vanilla piques my interest, so at least there was some value in discovery.

Aoki I talked about this shop a couple months ago, situated inside the Galeries Lafayette Gourmet building. This trip was not too long after my even older review of macarons, so I was primed and ready to try some more once I came across some that posed a shot at being phenomenal and genuine. A macaron, if you don’t know and also refuse to click my incredibly helpful and thought-out supplementary links that I so graciously provide you, is a meringue-based cookie thing made with egg whites, powdered sugar, almond meal, and then enhanced with any kind of food coloring and flavoring you can imagine. I got three different flavors because if I got anymore I would start feeling it hit my wallet harder. Caramel salé (salted caramel) tasted pretty much exactly like a Werther’s, and the texture was really smooth. The outside shell of the macaron didn’t fragment into sharp splinters and instead dissolved with the bite. Citron (which is French for lemon, and is also the name of a completely separate fruit called a citron that the French also call a citron despite them being two different things) also had a smooth and chewy texture, so this is probably an Aoki thing. The flavor is subtle but it noticeably tart and citrusy, without losing its soft sweetness. Finally, Earl Grey, which is a brand of tea that resident tea expert confirmed to me that “ it's definitely different enough from other teas that like earl grey flavoured sweets would be a meaningful thing.”  According to a quick search engine research it’s because it has bergamot oil which lends it a gentle citrus flavor and makes it more mild than regular black tea. Neat, that sounds good, and about sums up how this macaron tasted. A notable aspect of this one was it had perfect macaron form, likely an expectation from a basically-celebrity chef at an incredibly luxurious and opulent gourmet shopping world icon; I’m just glad it costs less than €6 total.

Paul I stopped by Paul a few times throughout Paris and even at the airport. Paul is an international café and bakery chain headquartered in northern France, specializing in French products like macarons, beignets, sandwiches, pastries, all that you can find at any typical boulangerie in Paris streets. They seem to pride themselves on fresh ingredients, and there’s just simply not enough information or rousing of suspicion for me to question that. They seem authentic enough to me.

Mixte sandwich €5.70 for pretty much half a baguette, a few somewhat thick slices of ham, and some emmental cheese. Really not impressed with the simplicity of it, but I can’t ignore that this exact kind of sandwich floods every single bakery in France, and is enough of a staple to make it a significant portion of Disney’s replica display. It could’ve used some mustard or something, maybe a couple big lettuce leaves, just something that made it not so dry and dull. It certainly did fill my belly, though, so I guess I can’t complain much.

Bretzel I really love pretzels, so when I got this it was a no-brainer to get. Neither here nor there in terms of quality, it sure was a pretzel. Tasted fresh enough, firm exterior, soft doughy interior. Just wish it had a little bit more salt on it.

Beignet A simple beignet, basically a donut, filled with chocolate. I got it because it’s my favorite thing to get at Disney’s Les Halles. This one did not have a pleasant powdered sugar topping, but it still was chewy and fresh tasting. Satisfying amount of chocolate filling.

Raspberry macaron Fairly large, easily three times the size of your average run-of-the-mill macaron, and the price did reflect that. I’m not sure why I get raspberry filled things because I only really like that flavoring in tea, but nevertheless I got it. As I could’ve predicted, the flavor was almost too sweet and tart, and had I not had the savory pretzel and beignet to scarf down with it I would’ve been left feeling like I needed to guzzle a gallon of water or my throat would cave in. Pretty respectable macaron other than that, though. They had a couple other flavors, like pistachio and chocolate, so maybe those would’ve been a more appropriate selection for myself.

Viennoise chocolat €2.15 for basically a breadstick with some chocolate chips in it. Meh.

Some bakery outside my hotel I don’t even know if I went to the same one each time due to a combination of being somewhat lost in a foreign country without a chance to catch my bearings before zipping off to a new place, and how there’s literally just a bakery at the very least on every street corner. Regardless, these are two staples you can find absolutely everywhere.

Pain au chocolat Basically just some kinda pastry bread with chocolate pieces in it. The bread itself feels like a croissant that just kinda got turned into a ball, being somewhat buttery and flaky. If you know me, shoving some chocolate chips into something is an almost surefire way to improve it, and while this remains the case here, I just never felt it in a way that was..enough? Maybe I’m just a spoiled American with how stuffed everything is with chocolate that I’m just simply not impressed.

Croissant This isn’t your average Pillsbury’s premade dough tube, which is undoubtedly delicious, flaky, and fluffy. It tastes fresh, is surprisingly filling with only just one rather than having to consume the entire tube, and doesn’t leave me feeling ill due to not having a week’s serving work of butter in each bite. It’s worth trying at least one when you visit Paris just to know what your freezer section croissants should aspire to be.

Les Supermarchés Here’s a few things I bought at various supermarkets and shops and actually tried them out while going about regular vacation business.

Marguerite milk Tired of fruit juices and water, I knew my body was cannibalizing itself as I have not had a drop of milk in three whole days. Unacceptable! So, into Franprix I went in search of milk, which was mostly fruitless and distressing. Fresh milk is hard to find in Paris as most milk is UHT and thus not refrigerated, and that just wasn’t something I was willing to deal with at the time as my milk knowledge had not been refined through doing four months of research intensive reviews yet. Plus, I wanted cold milk, it’s the most refreshing and it was like 110°F outside. Eventually I found exactly one brand of cold fresh milk in one of the coolers, Marguerite, a fresh milk distributed by a dairy farm coop, not much unlike Organic Valley which I reviewed a few months back. The one I grabbed was the only one available, Lait Frais Entier, Whole fresh milk, 3.5% milkfat. A 1-liter bottle was a mere 1.75€, pretty much on par with the equivalent American quart pricing. From what I understand from the label and convening with on language peculiarities, they’ve replaced the standard pasteurization process and instead used microfiltering which helps preserve a ‘raw milk’ flavor, which differs from ultrafiltering in that the pores of the membrane the milk is passed through are larger. It tastes very clean, like Fair Life (an ultrafiltered brand), likely due to a similar filtration process, but has a noticeably milkier flavor like goat milk, or, well, raw milk, and is richer and creamier. I can also attest that it being chilly definitely made it more refreshing. You don’t know what you’re missing out on, France.

In case you’re interested in seeing what Paris has to offer in regards to milk, this thread here has a lot of opinionated people who apparently know what they’re talking about. The bottles tend to be color coded, just as they are in America, with red being whole, blue for 2% or skim, and green for non-fat and lower percentages. This one here is another good article, which is concise enough in case you don’t want to get lost down the fat content of milk Wikipedia page rabbit hole.

Baguette Baguettes are synonymous with France, and a significant and required part of their culture as well as the entire preconceived notion of their cuisine. As such, it was something I absolutely had to try. Apparently each and every basic baguette is unique with its own intent and flavor profile and whatever, despite the fact that they can only be a baguette if exact procedures are followed, so I’m not exactly sure how one can even tell what’s better or not if there’s a legal mandate to make every ‘baguette de tradition’ identical. Only wheat flour, water, salt, and yeast, cannot ever be frozen, cannot have preservatives or additives. Maybe it’s that I’m just not a baker, but I don’t see much wiggle room aside from quality and proportion of ingredients, which I guess can actually make for significant changes. I guess it’s just something you have to eat all the time every day to be able to discern the minute differences, which the French do indeed do. Like, if in this list of best baguettes in Paris the only differences between the winners and losers are the brand and organic nature of the flour, then why not, uhhhh, just copy them? Even though there’s reports and anxiety about the destruction of tradition in the face of mechanization and modernity, threatening the very traditional fabric that the French so desperately cling to in pretty much every aspect of their existence, there are baguette vending machines. Unfortunately I was unable to find any, to my great disappointment. If you want to read a lot more about baguettes, just click more of my links.

Because I didn’t particularly care about sampling a baguette from every bakery I walked past, I only got them from two places: Franprix, and Marché Bastille. The baguette from Franprix, nice and soft interior, firm and glossy exterior. Easy to eat on the go. Tastes natural and not mass produced. According to the label: certified organic, french flour, ‘cultivated with focus on the preservation of the environment’, use stone mills to crush the grains. It’s made from wheat, despite the fact that the word ‘blé’ is there; it suspiciously means both ‘corn’ and ‘wheat’ despite the speakers of the language being wildly particular about the use of one over the other. As jests, “mais ouais, les caprices et l'hypocrisie de la langue.”

The vendor I went to at Marché Bastille, Monsieur Bruno Plaisance, had all kinds of bread, but I had no idea what any of them were and didn’t want to risk it when this was a place where absolutely no English was spoken and nothing was labeled. Their baguette had noticeably fresher dough, but a much stiffer crust. I mean, it was good, but what else can I say?

It’s just bread.

Water It’s just water. I’m including this as a section because it’s remarkable enough to make note. Evian is like 60 cents for 1.5 liters, easily a quarter of the price you can get it here. That’s right, the brand of water in America that’s synonymous with being overpriced is dirt cheap in Paris. I guess that’s what happens when your water source is nearby, but even with that, comparably closer water sources in places I’ve lived in America don’t drive the price down that much. Water is just simply impressively cheap in Paris, and essentially becomes a lifeline dipping into a Franprix to grab a nice chilly bottle every couple hours. There’s an incredible amount of grifters on the streets near sight-seeing landmarks and tourist hotspots selling bottles of water sitting in buckets of ice for €1-2 each, when you can easily walk a minute to a nearby Franprix or another grocery store and get a case for the same price, without the superstitious health concerns or worrying about interacting with people.

Lays Saveur Moutarde Pickles Mustard and pickle flavored chips, sure, why not. Part of the fun in a capitalist hellscape is the endless regional and time-locked iterations of chip flavors. I’m not sure if it’s “mustard and pickles” or “mustard pickles” or “pickle mustard”, my best guess is “pickled mustard”; but I do know that there’s no indication of pickles anywhere except there being the word “pickles” on the front of the bag. Nothing in the picture, nothing in the ingredients. It also smells nothing like either of them, but is still a familiar scent, like cat food or some kind of cheap nacho flavor. The flavor is mustardy, sure, but not getting any pickles. It doesn’t taste too bad, but it does get to be a tiring flavor after a handful of chips; just not something you can gorge yourself on. Wonder how these would go with Canada’s ketchup Lays, together on a sandwich.

Bonne Maman Petite cookies pépites de chocolate Tastes like Famous Amos but with some kinda coffee flavor that just doesn't exist in the ingredients at all. Pretty good to-go snack if you didn’t already exist in a culture flush with easily accessible bakeries offering similar products at the same price and fresher, but beware of crumbs.

7up Mojito For those of you who don’t frequent the bar scene, or perhaps are not adventurous enough to read the entire Applebee’s menu, a mojito is a cocktail made with white rum, sugar, lime juice, soda, and mint. A real mojito is light, airy, and refreshing more so than a kick of strong alcohol. The 7up Mojito certainly smells minty, and definitely has a powerful lemon flavor which is usually the case for these drinks. Ultimately, it tastes like toothpaste; the mint is just kinda too much. Get this if you want your mojito to be excessively carbonated and offer you no drunken buzz.

Orangina Rouge Way back in Issue 141, when I was really starting to take this section a bit more seriously, I tried Orangina, a lightly carbonated orange soda with pulp that basically tasted like orange juice with some fizz. Orangina Rouge is blood orange flavored, which is a variant of oranges that supposedly have a stronger tart and sweet flavor. This drink tastes more like grapefruit, which I’m not complaining about because grapefruit is pretty good, but it’s definitely not orange. Not nearly as much pulp as I remember the brand having, but it is visually noticeable if you let it settle.

The ad for it keeps up with their standard of bizarre, as you can see in this one featuring a typical drive through Parisian suburb Saint-Denis. The throwback to Issue 141 also reminded me to check up on food review icon SNAKIN WORLD, to see that he has rebranded to SNACKIN WORLD. Me on my break trying to make a candy bar seem like a full meal while ignoring the multiple people trying to talk to me as if I’m still on the clock.

Limonade Limonade is different from lemonade primarily in that it is carbonated. It’s basically Sprite, but not necessarily with all the corn syrup and additives, and just simply sparkling lemonade or soda water with lemon juice. So, yeah, Sprite that won’t make your teeth sticky. At basically every sit-down food place I went to I ended up ordering a limonade because it was on the cheaper end, and was something I had a good expectation of what it would taste like. Two brands I encountered were Phenix Limonade and Pschitt! Limonade (pronounced in a way that would make your grandmother slap you); both vintage brands in France. You can absolutely find Pschitt! For under a euro for a liter in some stores, but don’t expect it to be chilled. The bottles you get in restaurants are puny and cost several euros, but at least they are iced enough to help you survive the world’s worst heatwave for a couple more minutes. Across the board they were all refreshing, carbonated enough to serve as a palate cleanser with enough citrus flavor to not feel like you got poisoned as you (I) would with plain soda water. I recommend getting this in addition to the standard carafe of water, even if it sets you back €3.

You can definitely find this at Whole Foods and The Fresh Market and other upscale grocery stores, perhaps even if you have an Italian specialty market nearby, but it’s ubiquitous in western Europe. Expect what you’d find in America to either suffer from massive import rates, or massive snob and pomp rates, so if you desperately need your fix just spend 50 cents on a 2L bottle of Sprite and let it go slightly flat. If you’re lucky enough to live near an area gentrified enough to host a Trader Joe’s, they have a French Market Sparkling Lemonade that only costs $2.99 for a 1L bottle that they forced into being labeled as 33.8oz. It tastes like what you’d get in France, if just a bit harsher with the carbonation, but it works. Here’s a good article that list all of the different things different countries refer to as lemonade because for some reason that’s a thing that happened across languages, just when you thought “le ver vert va vers le verre vert” and “quatre-vingt-dix-neuf” were enough.

There are absolutely more bakeries I went to, and more things that I collected and tried, but I wanted to focus on stuff I ate while still in Paris, gave off more of an impression than just “yeah, that sure is some fruit juice”, and not just snack foods I brought home. Don’t worry, you’ll see me milk this once again later on down the road!

Fire burn and cauldron bubble. Also, tell me what to review next! You can tell me to do can also be movies, shows, physical actions, trying new foods, music, literally anything and I’ll cover it eventually if it’s not too ridiculous. Just send me a message here on my talk page or PM it to me on the forum. Don't like what I have to say? That's fine, and probably bound to happen because I've been told about how much people like Super Mario 64 and how they feel about any criticism of it! We at Critic Corner will welcome your alternate review of it as a new section for the next issue!