We never set up the dining table for breakfast in Paris. Instead, Hubby would hike the 6 flights down to our local bakery (how I love that man!) and climb back up with a bag full of my requests. He would make dark, strong coffee, I'd prep some fruit and we'd read and nibble and sip and enjoy the morning on the couch. Sunday every day! I love pain de chocolat, and ate a good many of these, but I had an exhuberant fling with the chausson aux pomme, a flaky pastry filled with tangy apple puree. I wish it could have been a lifetime relationship, but I haven't found a Calgary version. For breakfast with fresh cherries - sublime.
Sometimes Hubby brought a goat cheese and tomato tart, which we would share, and he would have a croissant as well, and I would have pain de chocolat, each of us hoarding our favourite. There were no offers to share. 
Strawberries were in season, tiny, thin-skinned, juicy and voluptuously fragrant strawberries. Strawberries like I remember eating from the garden, and finding no where else in my adulthood of hard, pink, scentless blobs from Safeway. Why does Europe still have devastatingly good strawberries while we eat tasteless styrofoam? There should be an inquiry. It's a national scandal, but most of us have forgotten what we're missing and don't complain. Well I'm complaining now. I'm mad at North American strawberries and I don't know if there's anything they can do to make it up to me - short of giving up their hard-hearted ways and becoming real strawberries again.
I topped the lightly sugared berries with a healthy dollop of creme fraiche - just to round out our food groups - and gloated that such a thing was available at the corner store.
If I could eat breakfast like this everyday, I'd stop skipping it. I'd become a devoted, enthusiastic, evangelistic breakfast eater. All hail the continental breakfast! Okay, maybe especially when eaten on the Continent.
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