Tomato Sorbet

California on my Plate

2009-04-19T21:18:00.000+02:00

After a long winter away from home, I'm back in the Bay Area for a couple of days with my better half and dying to dig into some California-style eats. Oh, fresh avocados, how I missed you! You too, Pacific salmon, Napa Cabernet, and alfalfa sprouts. Ed and I don't have a single favorite local restaurant, though we've been looking for "our joint" for some time now. It's a tough job, but we work very hard at it.

What better place to celebrate our homecoming than at Calafia, former Google chef Charlie Ayers' new venture in Palo Alto? Ed had the good luck-- and good connections-- to be invited to Calafia on opening week in January and has been raving about it ever since. He's also been tempting me with mouthwatering tales of Chef Charlie's Southern fried chicken lunches at Google, so the bar was set ridiculously high, and I was hoping to be wowed.

The concept is simple and very, very NorCal: fresh, local, seasonal food served simply but creatively. We had some luscious little steamed duck dumplings while waiting for a place at the counter facing the open kitchen (all the better to watch the cooks work their magic), paired with a huge, chewy California Chardonnay to wash them down. (Yes, I said chewy. Because that's what California Chard is, for better or for worse.) The bottoms of the soft and well-seasoned dumplings were pan-fried, adding texture and a deeper taste that made us impatient for the main course.

For dinner, I had the New Bohemia salad-- pulled pork buried under a hill of crisp baby spinach, jicama, avocado, and pumkin seeds for crunch. I'm not a hug fan of pork, but I've been digging pulled pork ever since I survived a traumatic incident involving the tantalizing smell of slowly cooked whole pork at the Memphis in May barbecue festival and some silly rule prohibiting serving the public the day we wandered the fairgrounds. Calafia's pork was seasoned with a gingerbread spice-- was it allspice?-- that both intensified the taste and helped lighten the meat. A gingersnap effect, if you will. Loved it. I will have this salad over and over again.

We also had Charlie's famous Papas Con Ajo, shoelace French fries seasoned with garlic and smoked paprika. Ed put it best: "This isn't a side dish. It's a dish in itself."

The only let-down at Calafia is the chicken. I stopped by for lunch one day from the "Cafe a Go-Go" take-out section of the restaurant and had a grilled chicken sandwich. I ended up tossing the meat out when I realized the warm chicken breast had no seasoning whatsoever and tasted like a dietetic lump of poached chicken. I would have liked something a little tastier-- just salt and pepper would have helped, but fresh herbs or spices would have made my day. Ed also had the crispy chicken breast for dinner and again, the poultry lacked seasoning, though the crunchy crust gave it bite. I don't get why chicken is a weak link at Calafia, but I hope the kitchen fine-tunes its recipes in the coming months as the restaurant finds its rythm.

Be prepared for a wait. It's packed (for good reason) and well worth the trouble. It's also newly minted as "our joint," and we're planning on becoming regulars.

Macaroons

2009-04-08T03:00:00.003+02:00

I returned from Paris last week and had very little time to enjoy the California sunshine of home before heading to the wintery climes of Wisconsin to spend quality time with Ed and our friend Adam, who's been kind enough to give me free reign of his well-equipped kitchen while I'm in town.

Now that I've been in the Midwest long enough to satisfy the craving for beer-battered deep-fried cheese curds that I never knew I had, I've decided to take advantage of my downtime here in Oshkosh to practice some of the recipes I learned in Paris. It's so much more rewarding to cook for the ones you love than to simply cook for yourself, and I'm so happy to share some goodies with Ed and Adam-- and to use them as test subjects!

I eased in with some simple steaks with Bearnaise sauce, and in true French fashion, the sauce took ten times longer to make than all the other dishes combined. Today I made a simple chicken tarragon, and plan to bring that into a regular household rotation.

One of my two big challenges this week is to make macaroons for the very first time. We had a pastry demonstration in macaroons at LCB, but we never had the good luck to make the airy hamburger-shaped tea biscuits in the practical class. The chef warned us that they were difficult to make at home because macaroons require very precise temperatures and humidity levels to rise and bake correctly. In my typical fashion, I asked myself, "How hard can it be?" (Cue tragic music.)

I messed up my first sheet of raspberry-rose cookies by trying too hard to abide by the chef's instructions to bake the cookies for the first minute at 400 degrees on the lowest rack, turn the oven off for one minute, turn it back on to 350 degrees and move the cookie sheet to the middle rack. The almond-meringue drops cracked and collapsed, looking more like scrambles eggs than mini burger buns. For my second sheet, I simply placed the cookies on the middle rack at 350 degrees and opened the door for a few seconds near the beginning to let the humidity escape. Et voila-- simplicity won, and I had a dozen nearly perfect-looking macaroons.

The chocolate macaroons didn't rise quite as much, and the dough was harder to work with. I suspect that adding cocoa powder to the dry ingredients (crushed almonds and powdered sugar) changes the properties of the dough more than the chef let on, whereas the rosewater I hazarded to add to the first batch didn't change a whole lot.

Once the cookies were cooled, I paired them and topped one half with either raspberry jam or a simple homemade chocolate ganache, then topped off the sandwich with another cookie. It's not Pierre Herme, but I'm satisfied with my first foray into macaroons. And I won't lose any sleep over the question of whether anyone around here will eat them.

The Line-Up

2009-03-22T13:33:00.003+01:00

Would you like to meet the chefs who guided my tasty adventure at LCB? I thought so!

(If they all look bored, it's probably because of the administration's looooooong graduation speech, which the chefs-- most of whom are not known for their patience-- must sit through four times each year..)

From left to right: Chefs Bruno Stril, Jean-Jacques Tranchant, and Frederic Lessourd (the "Little Chef").

On the left, Chef Patrick Caals (the "Tall Chef") and on the right, Chef Philippe Clergue ("Mr. Bean").

And last but not least:

Chef Xavier Cotte, the "Mean Chef."

The Mean Chef apologized to his former students in his graduation speech, saying he was sorry "if I ever yelled at you... but you know, that's how I am, so that's how it is." Yes indeed.

Thanks for the memories.

Perfume

2009-03-20T19:53:00.005+01:00

The steep, windy streets of Grasse

One of the novels I most cherish is Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, by Patrick Suskind. It's a period fiction set in the perfuming world of 18th-century Paris and Grasse, and revolves around an outcast of a boy named Grenouille who has an acute sense of smell, but emits no bodily odor of his own at all. He becomes an apprentice to a Paris parfumeur, and soon longs to create the most irresistible perfume in the world. As the subtitle suggests, Grenouille decides that the path to aromatic bliss requires the taking of human life. I won't spoil it for you, but I do suggest that you treat yourself to this wonderful story: the plot, characters, beautiful writing, and humor make it a true masterpiece. (Or at least rent the movie, which is pretty darned good and features Alan Rickman, a.k.a. Snape, who is always brilliant.)

Overlooking the countryside around Grasse

And so it was a long-anticipated treat for me to visit the city of Grasse today. Grasse, just twenty kilometers northwest of Cannes in Provence/Cote d'Azur is the perfume capital of the world, owing to both its unique micro climate that is ideal for growing flowers like jasmine, lavender, and rose, and because of its long history as the home of notable parfumeries, namely Fragonard and Galimard.

The perfume "organ": the arrangement of different essences from which the "nose" selects the "notes" that make up a perfume. (Sorry for all the quotation marks.)

My bus left the frankly decrepit center of Cannes and wound its way up the narrow roads towards Grasse. It was cold and raining, and not what one would expect of French Riviera weather. I was quite disappointed with the looks of Grasse and rushed towards the warm interior of the Musee international de la parfumerie-- and soon realized I had entered Grenouille's world. The museum is surprisingly modern and functional, with interactive exhibitions and large gallery spaces. I was most interested in its seemingly endless collection of historic perfume bottles dating from antiquity to the present day. Who knew there were so many ways to package a precious liquid? The design of perfume bottles is very much an underrated and under appreciated art. I confess that I was completely captivated.

One of the many displays of perfume bottles across the ages

An interactive re-creation of a very cute, very pink perfume shop from the 18th century.

I was also more than a little taken with my first glance at real mimosa, which was blooming in the museum's garden. It's so much smaller than I expected! Each bloom is less then a centimeter in diameter. Or perhaps they weren't in full bloom?

Mimosas in bloom

After the museum, I braved the rain again to cross over to the Fragonard manufacturing center, and it was here that I was transformed from a girl who didn't much care about perfume beyond Suskind's vision of it to a girl who just might become a perfume gourmande (especially since learning that one can cook with essential oils). I was led on a small French-language tour with one couple and a very knowledgeable tour guide who explained both the history of perfume in Grasse and the different processes of making it at Fragonard. We were told about the means of extracting essences, the notes in perfumes, the educational requirements of qualified "noses" or nez (the fifty official experts worldwide who craft the leading perfumes), and so much more.

The two above pictures depict the process of enfleurage, by which the most delicate of fresh flowers, like jasmine, are pressed into a thin layer of scentless animal fat on a glass pane that is in turn framed in wood. The natural oils from the flowers transfer to the fat, and the fat is then emulsified with alcohol to produce perfume. The movie version of Perfume has some nice scenes with these.

What I especially liked about this aromatic experience (besides leaving with my clothes smelling like roses rather than fish, for a change from LCB) was the new understanding that perfume is a lot like wine: many notes make up the smell (and taste, but we won't go that far) of both perfume and wine; some are immediate and fleeting, while others take some time to open up and then linger in the air; both offer premium brands that can break the bank, but can be enjoyed perfectly well in simpler formulations; you can play "what's that smell?" with each of them-- is it red cherry or black? Vanilla or caramel?-- and with time and experience gain knowledge that makes their enjoyment all the more fulfilling. I could go on, but I'll spare you.*

Already, with just a day in the perfume capital, I feel myself opening up to the possibility that perfume is more than a silly accessory. At the very least, I should read Perfume yet again.

A perfume with my name on it!
Caron is one of the old-school parfumeurs, and this is a 1929 bottle of Tabac Blond ("Blond Tabacco"), which they still make. I'll be visiting Caron's Paris headquarters next week. Should I ask for a family discount? (There's no relation that I know of. But you never know!)

*I hereby promise not to undertake a "certified nose" course in perfumery. Ed, you have it in writing.

Final Cuisine Exam: Prickly as an Artichoke

2009-03-17T21:23:00.004+01:00

The good news is that it's over and I did not receive an emergency call telling me I failed the exam and to please not present myself at tomorrow's graduation. The bad new is that I choked on the choke.

For the most part, my classmates and I went into yesterday's exam relatively calm. For those of us also in pastry, the worst exam was already over. I got to school about an hour early yesterday and learned that news had leaked from an undisclosed source that the exam would be veal stew or fish in white wine sauce. Great. I studied those two recipes for a bit, then we all went up to the exam kitchen to pick our tokens.

I got the fish. I was happy not to get the stew, which is a horrifically bland, geriatric mix of boiled veal, white button mushrooms, pearl onions, and cream sauce. As if it wasn't white enough or nutritionally deficient enough, it's served with white rice. In Cameron's words, it's "the most boring recipe on the planet." It's easy enough to make, though, and a bit of a giveaway for the exam.

The fish was just as easy, though a little tastier. The five of us who got fish had to fillet half of a brill (a large, flat fish similar to sole), chop up the trimmings and fish head along with vegetables for fish stock, turn six potatoes, bake the fillets, and make a white wine sauce with tomatoes. The sauce and the filleting were the technical part of the dish, and they took up most of the time. It all went well, and I was happy with my final dish.

Brill in White Wine Sauce with Pommes Anglaises

The real trouble came with our official technical test. Just like in pastry, where we had to roll out a short sweet crust, every student had to perform the same technical test for the final cuisine exam. We were asked to turn an artichoke, which consists of snapping off the stalk, trimming off the side leaves with a paring knife, lopping off the top and bottom of the choke, and carving out a bowl from its base. You then boil it in a "blanc," a simmering pot of water, salt, flour, and lemon juice that is supposed to help the vegetable retain its color, and then dig out the fuzzy interior in order to serve something inside, like a sauce or brunoised vegetables.

We've turned a handful of artichokes in class this semester, and I've always been pleased with how mine turned out. My knife skills have improved, so my artichoke should have been as nice as, or nicer than, the previous ones... right? Nope. My artichoke was a prickly little nightmare. I received a paltry little guy in my basket of vegetables with a thin bottom and precious few leaves. I'll spare you the details, but after boiling over twice-- something that never happened to me in class-- and starting the blanc over when I realized the choke was undercooked, I tried to dig out the fuzzy interior with my spoon and the whole thing fell apart. It was the worst turned artichoke in my class. The horror. It's a little like messing up spaghetti when you normally produce perfectly assembled feasts.

Not that I would ever mess up spaghetti.

But now it's done-- and I'm done! Good-bye to the LCB kitchens and that endearing little submariner hat. Our graduation is tomorrow morning, and I will return to admiring artichokes at farmers' markets but not eating them myself because I am of the humble opinion that artichokes taste like plastic. And they're prickly suckers.

Flavor of the Month: Raspberry-Rose

2009-03-17T17:53:00.002+01:00

Spring has sprung in Paris. The weather has changed from cold, gloomy, and rainy to sun-kissed and postcard-perfect, with cherry blossoms a-blooming and birds a-chirping in the early morning hours. I even enjoyed my first lunch on a terrasse today, which made me more than a little homesick for Montreal and its sunny sidewalk dining. (Though it seems la belle province has just begun to see more asphalt than snow on the roads, and al fresco dining is months away.)

The change of seasons in Paris is happily accompanied by small changes on local menus, as vegetables make way for greener options. I’ve recently discovered a new flavor that is not exactly seasonal, but rather symptomatic of my craving for a brighter, fresher palate after a winter of heavy meats and sauces at LCB. As I walked to class on a gorgeous morning last weekend, I sneaked into Pierre Herme to treat myself to a birthday croissant and picked up an interesting-looking treat that became a true revelation: it wasn’t just a plain old heavenly croissant, but rather an other-worldly treat of raspberry-rose-lychee paste piped into a croissant, which was then topped with a light rosewater icing and raspberry flakes. I made the mistake of sampling my breakfast as I walked the rest of the way to school, and it was so astonishingly wonderful that I stopped in my tracks, closed my eyes, and, much to the confusion of passers-by, uttered an audible, “Mmmmmmmmm!” It’s no stranger than what goes on in the metro, I suppose.

Later in the week, I started noticing raspberry-rose flavors everywhere: in the sorbet at Berthillon ice cream shop, in the cocktails at Flute champagne bar, and in the individually-sized Saint Honore cream puff cakes at Laduree bakery. (I had to scope out my competition for the title of Queen of the Cream Puffs. They win.) It’s a marriage made in tastebud heaven: the soft, floral notes of rose are complimented by the tartness of the raspberries, and there’s no cloying sweetness. I’m wary of most rose-flavored candies, desserts, and drinks, which are popular in some Middle Eastern cuisines, because they often taste like soap to me, or like a beloved great-aunt’s potpourri blend. But in this brilliant combination, the acidity of the raspberries neutralizes any perfume-y taste. It's lovely.

And whatever comes in raspberry-rose flavor is normally pink, which always makes me happy.

Cream-Puffy Goodness

2009-03-14T10:35:00.006+01:00

In preparation for our cuisine exam next Monday, Kim invited Erika and I over for a cooking party aboard her cousins' houseboat in the canal near Bastille. I have never been on a houseboat before and didn't know quite what to expect. I certainly didn't anticipate the 6-burner gas stovetop and granite work surfaces, and was thrilled to have a real kitchen-- in a boat, no less-- for the first time in nearly three months. Paris apartments aren't known for their roomy kitchens, and it seems I've been lucky to even have an oven in my studio rental.

Choppin' away

We got to work right away with the help of Emma and Don, Kim's cousins. Erika and Kim turned and julienned carrots and fennel, then roasted a perfect chicken that would bring tears of pride to the eyes of LCB chefs. I gave in to my inexplicable intuition that St. Honore cake would be on the pastry final and prepared one for practice. (It was on the final, but I didn't pick the right colored token.) Emma tracked our progress with her camera, so I though this would be a good chance for a pictorial how-to on the making of St-Honore:

See how easy that was? Thanks to Kim, Emma, and Don for hosting a great party (and for providing wonderful wine).

Final Pastry Exam: Easy as Pie

2009-03-13T13:49:00.006+01:00

It has been a busy week at cooking school. We wrote our final exams last week, and spent the last five days-- after a very short 1-day weekend-- rushing to finish up our last demos and practicals while studying for the final practical exams that make up 45% of our final grades for Basic Cuisine and Pastry. For the students continuing on to Intermediate Cuisine and Pastry at LCB, it was an especially stressful time, as students must receive a passing grade to move on.

The Final Exam

I had my final pastry exam this morning, and while I wasn't exactly nervous, visions of curdled buttermilk frosting and fallen sponge cakes still invaded last night's dreams. Three weeks ago, we were given a list of ten pastry recipes to study from among the twenty we already produced in class. Three of these recipes were chosen secretly by the chefs for the test, and we would each be asked to make one pastry that would then be graded by a panel of chefs from outside the school.

My class assembled outside the kitchen door fifteen minutes before the exam, and the overseeing chef (not the Mean Chef-- hurray!) presented us with a bowl filled with fourteen tokens, one for each student in the class. The tokens were either red, yellow, or green, and each color represented a different pastry. I selected red, which I soon learned was the Caramelized Pear and Crunchy Almond Meringue Tart. It was, in my opinion, one of the easiest recipes we'd done all semester, and the five of us lucky enough to fall upon it sailed right through our exam.

Make pie dough.
Caramelize pears
Make meringue
Assemble pie: roll out pie dough, pipe out meringue, spoon pears on top, pipe out meringue pattern on top, sprinkle with almonds and powdered sugar, bake, and voila.

Caramelized Pear and Crunchy Almond Meringue Tart

My classmates did not all get off so easy, which wasn't exactly fair. One group got the St-Honore, a "cream-puff cake" that I practiced this weekend and that I would gladly have made for the final exam (it's technically quite demanding, but fun to make, and it tastes great!), and the Pithivier, an almond-cream-filled puff pastry cake that my class made during the one practical that I missed, so I didn't have any practical experience to fall back on. I mistakenly assumed the Pithivier would never be on the final, and would have been a goner if I'd selected the yellow token. That was a close one!

We each also had to perform one technical test: the making and rolling out of a sweet short pie crust, pinched edge and all. Easy as pie.

Ready to be graded

I'm fairly confident everyone did well. The chef even helped some of us out during the exam, rolling out our dough and lending a hand in whipping egg whites or cream. Now if only Monday's cuisine exam goes as smoothly... though after having a gift like the Pear Tart fall on my lap, I expect my luck to change. I'll soon have visions of beheaded and disemboweled fish keeping me awake... or I could get lucky and wind up with roasted chicken...

Paris Half Marathon

2009-03-08T17:26:00.005+01:00

Enjoying some celebratory wine and my finisher's medal

Well, I finally did it.

It was the double-threat of a recent birthday (taunting me with a very round number) and the fear that all these croissants, cream sauces, and almond cakes would set up shop permanently on my thighs that motivated me to sign up for the Paris Half Marathon way back in November, and to my utter amazement, I actually ran it today.

I am not a runner. The only modes of self-propelled transportation I enjoy are cycling and walking. But I've wanted to run a half marathon (13.1 miles, or 21 km) since 2004, when I signed up for the Ottawa Half Marathon with my law school friends Eva, Erin, and April. I had to bow out when I was hired to guide bike trips at the Tour de France that summer, so I passed my bib number to Eva, who ran under my name... so *technically* I ran that one, and there are photos of Eva with my name on them somewhere on the internet. (BTW, she ran it much faster than I ever could.) And so I've had this unfulfilled desire to test myself with a half marathon for the past five years, and today I did it with 24,999 other runners. Yes, that's twenty-five thousand runners in a single race with only one distance to choose from... and only 5 porta-potties at the starting line.

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The route started and finished in the Bois de Vincennes, on the eastern edge of the city, looping to the center of Paris before turning back, and staying on the Right Bank the entire time. We passed Bastille twice, on two different roads, and ran in front of City Hall. We came temptingly close to my place on Ile Saint Louis, but I managed to forget about the amazing ice cream shop and my warm bed and stayed on course.

It began to rain just before the starting gun went off, and rained throughout my 2+ hours out there. By kilometer 18, it was pouring, but I didn't care because I could almost see the finish line. My friends Erika and Kim from LBC came to cheer me on, but I couldn't see them for the big crowds on the sidewalk. I just kept thinking, "I hope they gave up and are sipping hot tea in a warm cafe somewhere." Nope, they stood in the rain. How sweet is that?

Once I made it through the freezing trip home, I made up for the caloric expenditure by wolfing down a fresh croissant with peanut butter. (What? I needed protein.) Then I had a really great lunch at my favorite local restaurant, Le Fin Gourmet, with Kim and Erika. I'm still too wiped to feel that great about it all, or to say whether I'll ever do it again or do a full marathon, but I'm sure I'll be happy when I wake up tomorrow. Done and done. =)

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Guillotine

2009-03-06T06:54:00.003+01:00

I spent a morning wandering through the astonishingly badly curated Carnavalet Museum of the history of Paris last week, and once my headache (caused by how badly the artworks and historical artifacts were organized and displayed) diminished to a dull throb, I was able to enjoy some of the items it had to offer. Here's one that especially caught my eye. I had just gone through the French Revolution rooms, and I unwittingly read "guillotine" instead of "guinguette" on the caption to the drawing below, so that I thought it was called A Family on its Way to the Guillotine:

Family on its Way to the Guingette

Don't they look a little too... happy? I leaned in for a closer look and saw that it said guingette, which means a sort of open-air market, or picnic, not guillotine, which made their clueless smiles much less worrisome than if they were about to get their heads lopped off.

Sadly, it was just about the highlight of my visit. I am dying to get my hands on this place and to whip it into shape. Great collection, great potential, zero planning. I'll put it on my list of things to do.

Christmas in March

2009-03-06T01:00:00.004+01:00

Layers of Spongy Goodness

There was some out of season feasting at LCB today. The Basic Pastry students tried our hands at chocolate-pistachio yule logs and very successfully got chocolate ganache all over our hands, arms, hair, clothing, and, of course, mouths.

Chocolate-Pistachio Yule Log

This cake had several layers: there was the cake base made of eggs, pistachio paste, crushed almonds, flour, sugar, and egg whites; the cherry-based kirsch and sugar syrup poured over the cake; the chocolateganache between the layers made of cream and dark couverture chocolate; the chocolate fondant poured over the assembled cake; and finally, the ganache decoration.

Assembling the Layers

It was a fun recipe (except for hand-whipping the egg whites, which just strengthened our calluses). I really like the process of assembling desserts from various prepared parts-- it puts me in the same meditative state as assembling Ikea furniture in those rare instances when all the parts are really in the box like the instruction leaflet says they are.

What Happens When Your Ganache Separates

My little chocolate squiggles on each side and along the top of the cake were the weak part of my otherwise winning concoction. Here's what went wrong: I finished pouring the fondant (the smooth chocolate enveloping the surface) early and was enlisted to whip up a few extra batches of ganache for the class. While I was doing that, and then waiting for my turn to use it, the ganache hardened and separated, resulting in a lumpy garnish. Hence the crooked-looking squiggles. Ganache is a fickle ingredient, but my life is complete now that I know how to make it.

The Culprit: Chocolate Ganache

The fun part of my day came as I was leaving class with my yule log tucked safely into a long cardboard cake box and held up by my left hand as the right hand carried my heavy knife kit. As I passed through the kitchen door, my left sleeve caught on the doorknob, immobilizing my arm and sending my layered handiwork flying through the air. It was one of those moments when everything suddenly slows down and you can hear a voice coming from deep inside saying, "nnnnnnnnOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!" The box landed squarely on the floor with a heavy "THUNK" and then opened a little. A very nice advanced student from the classroom next door came running over, opened the box, looked up at my panic-stricken face, and said, "It's okay-- it's still alive. We can save it." He brought my cake box into his classroom, showed me the damage (just some cracks in the smooth couverture icing), closed it tightly, and told me to take good care of my cake. Phew. That was a close one. The cake made it all the way home and is now sitting peacefully in my freezer, in binge-discouraging, individually-wrapped packages.

It will not survive my chocolate cravings until Christmas.

Killer Mousse Cake

2009-03-04T17:13:00.007+01:00

Layer upon meltingly yummy layer

Ingredients: impressive quantities of chocolate and raspberries. Not a hint of almonds or meringue. In short, perfection!

This is my Mogador, an airy cake made up of a chocolate sponge cake base, a raspberry jam filling, and a chocolate mousse top, all covered with a thin layer of raspberry coulis and, in my world, a handful of fresh raspberries tossed in icing sugar. I'm taking birthday requests (my own included).

Mogador

The bottom half is doused in simple syrup mixed with raspberry brandy, which makes it a bit soggy for my taste but the French chefs insist on it-- in fact, I didn't put quite enough for Chef Walter's taste, but it was passable. I'll omit the syrup entirely when I make it at home.

And now for a confession: I messed up my sponge cake base. Shocking, I know! I didn't whisk the batter enough to get it thick and light, like whipped cream, but rather poured a thin liquid into the bottomless ring. You can see the delectably messy results below. (I won't have this problem at home thanks to my loyal friend Kitchenaid, who will also rid me of my whisking-induced blisters from whipping up my own meringues, sponge cakes, and chantilly cream.) My classmate Kathryn stirred up a perfect base and was generous enough to share her leftover batter, which I then poured into a second mold.

A taste of where my real baking skills lie...

Once again, I donated my cake to the noble cause of raising my classmates' BMI and cholesterol, and it was gone from the common room in a heartbeat. Thank you all for saving me from having to eat it all myself-- which I admit I am entirely capable of doing.

In a Pickle

2009-03-02T07:14:00.005+01:00

Le Cornichon

The itty-bitty cornichon finally made its way onto our curriculum last week, and in the strangest of ways. A tiny gherkin pickle smaller than my little finger (I have very diminutive hands, which I blame for my failure to become a famous concert pianist), cornichons are a staple of the French country table. A small jar of cornichons usually finds itself perched beside the mustard in traditional bistros, and is useful for whiling away the hours until your order is taken. They're very mild-tasting, though probably not mild enough to make my husband get over his pickle aversion, which is his counterpart to my mayo intolerance.

In Quebec, we use the word cornichon more broadly to denote all pickles. It's a more precise designation in France.

My cuisine class made a sauce charcutiere to accompany our pork medallions last week. This was done by deglazing the frying pan we used to cook the lean pork and its trimmings with white wine, veal stock, and shallots, reducing for about thirty minutes, and finishing with mustard, chopped herbs, and julienned cornichons. Yep, you read correctly: we sliced the little guys into tiny strips measuring 1mm x 1mm x 4mm and added them to the sauce to make what I like to think of as pickle sauce. Seriously, folks: pickles in the sauce? On the table, yes. But swimming over my meat? Definitely a cultural thing.

Best of all was a very useful little fact I learned while researching cornichons: apparently, running an electrical current through a gherkin will cause it to glow like a fluorescent light. Question: who figured this out, how, and why? In any case, thank you for doing so.

Snack Time for Napoleon

2009-02-28T19:01:00.000+01:00

Not Bonaparte. I'm talking Dynamite.

The Little Chef prepared some very fancy-sounding potatoes this week to accompany our pork medallions: pommes dauphine. The recipe called for pureed potatoes mixed with choux pastry (the same dough as used for eclairs, but without milk or sugar). Oh la la, I thought. Then I saw the finished product, and burst out laughing:

Pommes Dauphine

Yes, the fancy French potatoes in question are known back home as Tater Tots, that ubiquitous cafeteria spin on French fries. Even more shocking is that stripped of all corn-based additives, they're pretty bland tasting. I was nevertheless disappointed in practical when Chef Fireman showed me how to pipe the tots in small circles onto baking paper to make them safer for deep-frying. (The paper is then lowered into the hot oil and the dough peels right off, rather then cutting the dough directly from the pastry bag into the deep fryer, where the "plop" of dough hitting the oil could burn you.) I mean, they promised me tots, so I wanted tots!

What could I do but chuckle to myself all day long, thinking of nothing other than Napoleon Dynamite? *GOSH!*

Salad, Please!

2009-02-28T09:26:00.009+01:00

This was a bit of a ho-hum week, with the return to routine after last weekend's great escape. The recipes are all beginning to resemble each other: cook meat (grill, fry, braise, poach, or bake), make sauce, reduce reduce reduce, and cut vegetables into a series of impractical and time-consuming shapes that comprise one of the more anachronistic elements of classic French cuisine.

(I must admit, though, that taking the time to calmly "turn" vegetables-- basically, carving them into little torpedoes-- is a much-needed break in the bustling student kitchen, where we spend most of out time running around, making sure our meat isn't burning and our water isn't boiling over, finding the right pots and pans, and lining up for the deep fryer/grill/food mill. Just don't expect me to do it in the light and airy peace of my own home kitchen.)

A turned potato

Exam Madness has set in, with students asking teachers about our upcoming written and practical exams at every opportunity. Perhaps it's that I'm only here for my own amusement and not for my career, or maybe I'm comparing the relative merits of replacing the mental hard drive space currently occupied by the details of the Russian Revolution with the exact amount of paprika in Beef Stroganoff... in any case, I think that studying too much would be a poor use of my time, and that I'd rather hang on to the history stuff and crack open a recipe book when I need to know about paprika.

And so, without further ado, here's the barnyard range of furry and feathery creatures we served up this week:

Roasted Duck with Turned Turnips

Grilled Veal Chops with Turned Potatoes (Cocottes), Mushrooms, and Pearl Onions

Beef Stroganoff with Brunoise Vegetable Rice

Pan-fried Pork Medallions with Pommes Dauphine

Do you see any patterns in the color of what we're preparing?

I haven't mentioned it, but we usually clean up the cuts of meat ourselves. We're given a hunk of meat that contains the cut we're preparing encased in bone, gristle, and fat, and we have to carve out the good parts. This little bit of butcher work is actually quite useful in getting to know various cuts of meat and what to look for at the market. For the pork medallion, for example, we were given part of the loin with the ribs and an extra bits of flesh still attached. We trimmed the loin off the bone and sliced out four medallions, reserving the gristly meat between the ribs to form the base of our sauce. For the veal chop, we had to scrape all the meat and fat off the bone to expose it ("Frenching" the bone), and chop off the tip. Very useful stuff.

All this meat has turned me into a temporary vegetarian. It's just too much meat, day in and day out. So instead of filling my belly, I've been filling the bellies of others or, at the very least, my freezer, and opting for the green stuff when I get home at night. And I can't wait for spring produce in California!

It Could be Worse

2009-02-23T17:40:00.004+01:00

Here's the GPS track of my Sunday run through the vineyards from Beaune to Meursault. It rained, and it was cold, but the sick part of me kind of enjoyed it. And the foie gras had to come off!

Two weeks till the Paris Half Marathon...

&amp;lt;a href="http://www.mapmyrun.com/run/france/france/703070762844"&amp;gt;18 km Beaune-Meursault&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br/&amp;gt;&amp;lt;a href="http://www.mapmyrun.com/find-run/france/france"&amp;gt;Find more Runs in France, France&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;

Scenes from a Country Market

2009-02-22T12:28:00.000+01:00

From Whining to Wining

2009-02-22T12:07:00.000+01:00

I was itching to get out of the city this weekend, so I hopped on the TGV ("Tres Grande Vitesse" -- Very High Speed) train to the town of Beaune, in Burgundy wine country. Two hours later, I was worlds away from the hustle and bustle of Paris, sampling local food with a modern twist at the bustling Le Caveau des Arches.

Beaune is a small-ish town in the northern part of Burgundy, just south of Dijon. It has everything you could need in a town, and you can cross it by foot in half an hour. On Saturdays, the market takes over virtually the entire town, and everyone from the region pours in to fill up on fresh fruits and vegetables, meats, cheeses, flowers, and even clothing. I wandered through the market in a contented daze yesterday, happily picking up a few choice items to bring home to the U.S., like tarragon mustard from Dijon, and other goodies to devour on the spot, like fresh olives and dried apricots.

In the afternoon, I rented a bicycle and took the windy "Route Verte" bike trail through wine country to the town of Meursault, home and namesake to one of my very favorite French wines. (Apology to California: you know I love your rich reds, but I prefer the oakiness of your whites in my floorboards, not in my mouth. Except Chateau Montelena, which will always have a special place in my heart.) I had to enjoy some local Boeuf Bourgignon for lunch, and then I was off to the Chateau de Meursault, where they have been making this wonderful Chardonnay for hundreds of years. The caves were spectacular, and shockingly large-- like a subterranean football field divided into little alcoves. Just the cellars warranted the trip out, and were much nicer smelling than the tunnels in last week's underground adventure. This is where they age the wine in oak casks and then in bottles. From the generous "degustation," or tasting, I selected a lovely bottle of the Chateau's Premier Cru, or First Growth, to bring home with me. Happily, it survived the bumpy ride to Beaune.

My trusty steed. Not as sexy as my Orbea, but it got me where I wanted to go

Chardonnay vineyards, trimmed and ready for spring

Then I was off on the bike again, cruising through the vineyards and passing through the wine-producing towns of Pommard and Volnay on my way back to Beaune. The evening was capped off by dinner at Le Benaton, a Michelin 1-star restaurant with great service and a good grasp of food pairings-- like seared foie gras with pistachio paste. Mmm.

After what I hope will be a nice long run through the vineyards today, I'll be going back to the city again to jump back into my classes, refreshed and satisfied, and planning my next trip out.

The Route Verte

I didn't have the gears to get up this very steep hill... so I walked it. The shame.

Random wine estate. Ed: "I want that one."

The Chateau de Pommard

The caves at the Chateau Meursault

Nerd Notes: Burgundy produces both red and white wines, and almost uniquely Pinot Noir for the former and Chardonnay for the latter. There are a lot of different Burgundy regions to learn, and I'm constantly adding to what I learned for my Certified Sommelier exam, but just knowing those two varietals helps a whole lot. If you know that Chablis is in Burgundy, for example, and that Chablis is always a white wine, you know it'll be a Chardonnay even though the varietal is rarely on the label.

Steak Frites

2009-02-19T17:18:00.000+01:00

In the spirit of mastering French classics, today we made steak frites. (Simply, steak and fries.) It was possibly the most instructive class to date. Not only did we practice our emulsion-making skills with a Bearnaise sauce, but we learned to prepare steaks in a range of donenesses. (If that’s not a real word, I am hereby officially coining it.) Chef B. prepared 4 steaks in demonstration, one each cooked to "bleu," rare, medium, and well done. I was duly impressed with his exactness.

I should note here that French standards for doneness are a bit different from North American ones: a rare steak here would be called "alive" back home; French medium is our medium-rare, and French well done is our medium-well. They don’t really do well-done, and when they do, it’s with a side of mashed contempt.

My own attempt to grill three steaks to the required doneness produced the anticipated result: I overcooked them a smidge. Unlike the roast beef class, I failed to remind myself to waaaay undercook the meat to meet LCB standards. As a result, my steaks were a nice range of North American medium-rare, medium, and medium-well, and would have been at hit at our house (especially with a side of perfectly creamy Bearnaise, which will unfortunately fill your kitchen with a nauseating stench while the vinegar and herbs reduce). My steaks didn’t quite meet codified French norms, however, though they featured a perfect network of grill marks. A couple of minutes less on the stovetop grill would have done the trick.

More beef

My favorite new kitchen trick is learning to tell when a steak is cooked medium: droplets of blood will start to appear on the surface of the meat. This is the blood that has run out of the center, and it's the reason why the middle of the steak is no longer bright red.

Chef Clergue, a.k.a. Mr. Bean

And now, as the award frenzy that is the Academy Awards is upon us, I'd like to bestow the award for my favorite chef at LCB: that would be Chef Clergue, whom everyone calls Mr Bean because of the resemblance, but who makes me think more of the aspiring young chef in Ratatouille because of his freckles and upturned nose. Chef Clergue is the winner of this prestigious distinction because he is so refreshingly calm and helpful. Instead of yelling at students when they're doing something wrong, as many chefs do, he gently explains that it would be better if we used a different knife to peel the artichoke, or used tongs to turn our steaks to get nice grill markings. Thank you, Chef Clergue. It is a pleasure to learn from you.

Happy in Love

2009-02-18T18:30:00.010+01:00

Have you seen the movie "Sabrina"? No, not the more recent one with Harrison Ford, though I'd watch any flop of his just for some quality time with Hans. I mean the original 1954 version with Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart, in which Hepburn plays the innocent daughter of a gazillionaire New York family's driver. She's desperately in love with the family's youngest playboy son, who doesn't know she's alive because she is, after all, "the help." She leaves New York to attend the Ecole du Cordon Bleu in Paris, hoping to forget all about what's-his-name while learning to cook and, of course, becoming a chic Parisienne.

Sweet Sabrina and her sad souffle

One of the movie's classic scenes is when Sabrina fails the souffle course, presenting her sad, unrisen souffle to the chef. The caricature of a French chef-- which, as it turns out, is not such a caricature after all-- reveals to Hepburn the secret link between love and souffles:

"A woman happy in love, she burns zee souffle. A woman unhappy in love, she forgets to turn on zee oven." Sabrina forgot to turn on the oven.

We made cheese souffles in cuisine yesterday, and here's my toasty result:

A love-ly souffle

Our ovens don't have windows, and I couldn't open the door to check whether or not it was done yet, so I had to rely only on timing. In my defense, the chef said it was probably overcooked because our ovens aren't calibrated properly and really just need to be replaced. But still, I blame Ed for my burnt souffle.

Here's how my classmate Kathryn's turned out, which I think is much closer to the ideal:

And now a much prettier souffle

I won't spoil how the movie ends, but if you haven't seen it, I do recommend it. Followed by a warm chocolate souffle, burnt or otherwise. To tempt you, here's the LCB highlight. Just so you know, the only thing realistic about this shot is the chef. The similarity is striking!

I Make Super Mayonnaise

2009-02-17T02:48:00.003+01:00

Is that a sharp intake of breath I hear?

Yes, apparently, my mayo is "super," or rather, "soup-AIR," which might warrant a pat on the back if I didn't loathe mayo with every fiber in my body that is connected to my gag reflex. It's a longstanding animosity, but we've both come to terms with it: I stay out of mayo's way, and it stays out of mine. I am fully aware of the difference between a corn-syrup-laden grocery store tub of the white stuff and a homemade bowl of the yellow stuff, and have tried to accept both forms. But I just can't will myself into it -- try as some soulless creatures might to sneak it onto my sandwiches, into my salads, or beside my fries (ick!).

On the other hand, I love cottage cheese, and most people seem to experience the same wave of simultaneous panic and nausea when confronted with cottage cheese as I feel when I see mayonnaise-y "secret sauce" spilling over a hamburger patty, so maybe we can all just get along and agree to disagree on our choice of offensive white condiment?

Yesterday in class we had a pub-grub day: deep fried jumbo shrimp with tartar sauce. The tartar sauce is a simple mayonnaise mixed with minced herbs (tarragon, parsley, and chervil), hard-boiled egg, and raw shallot. Seriously. As if my stomach wasn't turning enough, we had to go and make the mayo lumpy and green.

Making mayo is actually quite interesting, and I'd be rather happy to make it again so long as I don't have to eat it. You just mix an egg yolk with a tablespoon of mustard and some salt and pepper, then start whisking while very slowly drizzling in some oil-- the French are partial to peanut, but why not olive? The key is to form an emulsion, a homogeneous mixture of liquids that would otherwise not mix, by whisking the liquid just where the oil is falling, and then incorporating the rest of the egg/mustard mixture. The first few seconds are the most important, because that's when your emulsion should form-- failing that, the mix could separate and leave you with an even less appetizing bowl of clotted eggs suspended in oil. I like the challenge of knowing it could fall apart at any minute, and still trying to make it work. (Though if you just put it all in a blender or food processor, your risk of failure is nearly zero.) Once the emulsion is at the right thickness, defined as however thick you want it to be, add a splash of wine vinegar or lemon juice, and voila-- homemade mayo.

Reb Lobster Night at LCB

I was at a bit of a loss during this whole process, since a) I wanted to taste the stuff as little as possible, and b) I didn't have an exact idea of how it should taste, but I still had to make it taste right. I ended up tasting it twice-- once at the mayo stage, and once at the tartar stage-- and concentrated very hard on not decorating the kitchen with the contents of my stomach. It was hard. The slimy/raw yolky/acidic taste and creamy mouthfeel of it just won't grow on me. But the chef thought the mayo and tartar sauce were "Super," which shocked me almost as much as it shocked Chef B. to learned that someone could dislike mayonnaise, that staple of French living.

Now where can I get some cottage cheese around here?

Cycling Interlude

2009-02-16T07:04:00.003+01:00

If you've ever asked me a question or made a comment about Lance Armstrong, you'll know that I'm not his biggest fan.

I do, however, admire people who are well-spoken, and couldn't help but cheer for the guy at a recent news conference at the Tour of California, when a reporter was being a jerk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHLwdaFjDYc

Weekend Ups and Downs

2009-02-15T20:17:00.007+01:00

I embarked on what may be my greatest gain and loss in vertical feet in Paris this weekend, climbing high to the top of Montmartre and descending underground into the city sewer system. (Yes, on purpose). The total elevation difference was probably less than from the bottom of our street in California to the top, but it's a lot for Paris, which is pretty darned flat (and therefore great for beginner half-marathons!).

Sacre-Coeur Basillica

Saturday I walked around Montmartre with my classmate Erika. It was a beautiful, frigid day in the city, and a nice respite from the many days of rain we've been having. Montmartre is the old artist enclave once populated by Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Stein, Matisse and company, and is now mostly populated by tourists, pigeons, and very bad painters. We were lucky to avoid the crowds by steering clear of the Sacre-Coeur Basillica, circling just close enough for a photo op and a quick dodge through a tour group, and then resuming our peaceful walk in the 18th arrondissement.

Clos-Montmartre

The most pleasant discovery of the day (besides the amazingly real-smelling tomato leaf candle I picked up at a shop recommended by the object of my blog-stalking, Clotilde Dusoulier) was the Clos-Montmartre, a small vineyard on a steep hill right in the city. It was planted in 1933 as part of a green urbanism effort, and it produces 500 liters of wine per year that is sold at auction for the benefit of local organizations. Erika read somewhere that the wine is pretty awful, but the auction itself is quite the swanky affair. Grapes have been grown for wine in the Montmarte area for centuries, and I was tickled to read an old 17th century rhyme about how drinking a pint of Montmartre wine will yield four pints of, in the proper French of the day, "pisse."

Clos- Montmartre

Nerd attack (courtesy of Wiki): "Montmartre" comes from a pagan term meaning Mountain of Mars, which was then Christianized to "Mountain of the Martyr" -- fittingly, because this is where St. Denis, the patron saint of France, was beheaded.

On Sunday, I went underground for a walking tour of the Paris sewer system as part of my quest to visit new places and see new things that have eluded me on past visits. I became particularly interested in this tour after seeing two swimmers in the Seine this week, decked out in drysuits and snorkle gear and accompanied by a boat. I even took a photo to make sure I wasn't losing my mind.

Two swimmers, just above the boat

The two swimmers, I was told, are likely police or firefighter frogmen on a training swim. About eighty people who fall or jump into the river are rescued-- or recovered-- each year by frogmen.

The tour itself wasn't as exciting as I'd hoped, and I don't know why I hoped it would be exciting in the first place. I mean, it's a sewer. But it was interesting in unexpected ways. For example, the tour takes place in the actual working sewer, and you can only hope that the metal grate supporting the whole group's weight above the flow of waste doesn't collapse. Before 1974, the tours used to go through the waste pipes on boats-- yes, boats, floating on human detritus. Then one day some "tourists" jumped off the boat unnoticed, and soon after a big Paris bank was robbed. The authorities discovered that the burglars had made their way up through the sewers from pipes accessible only by boat on the tour line, and the culprits were never found. This smells (literally) of a Hollywood movie, doesn't it?

Where our waste goes... TMI!

Another interesting thing I saw was this device used to help clear the sludge from the bottom:

Cue John Williams

It's the Indiana Jones ball! It's about as tall as I am, and as wide as I'll be by the time I get back to the States when my cooking class is over. I'd much rather run from it in a cave like Indy did than through a sewer system. Ick.

Ahhh, adventures in Paris.

Going to Hell in a Breadbasket

2009-02-13T20:37:00.007+01:00

So much for my resolution to eat well but in reasonable quantities while in France.

You want to be my friend now, don't you?

We made croissants and pains au chocolat this afternoon, and I only gave about four of my twenty or so pastries to the dishwasher-- and only because they didn't fit into my giant Tupperware box. Let's just say I won't starve this weekend, but I might sweat butter on Sunday's long run.

This was a really exciting class for me, because what--besides baguette-- is more French than a croissant? It's a rather complicated pastry that I've never gotten around to trying on my own, mostly because I'm way too impatient to wait an entire day for the dough to rise twice, and I don't normally bake anything that requires about four sticks of butter and that I am inclined to eat entirely on my own before my husband realizes I ever made it.

Croissants are like puff pastry in that they require making a detrempe (base dough) that is rested and chilled before incorporating dry butter with a series of "turns," whereby the dough is rolled out into a long, thin sheet and folded over three times, then turned ninety degrees and rolled out again. The process is usually repeated three to five times, or turns, depending on the recipe. The main difference between croissant pastry and puff pastry is that the former also contains yeast, which creates that light, moist airiness of croissants, whereas puff pastry is light and flaky, as in an apple turnover. They're both labor intensive, easy to mess up, and so worth it.

The same dough is used for croissants, pains au chocolat, and cinnamon rolls. We only made the first two, which is good because I can probably consume an even vaster quantity of cinnamon rolls than the other two put together. My pastries turned out "tres bien" today, according to Chef W, and I second that...but I think I'll need to work on them some more to really perfect the turning technique... Woe is me.

These all look the same because I hid the irregular ones in my Tupperware before the chef came over to grade them... yes, I'm learning some new tricks! Like Lucy and her chocolates, though, I had to move so fast that some could only be hidden in my mouth.

An interesting little nugget of information that bisects law and pastry here in France: if my information is correct, a croissant pur beurre, made with real butter, must be shaped in a line straight across, like it's holding its arms out. A curved, crescent-shaped croissant ordinaire may contain margarine (*gasp!*). The shape of the pastry, then, reflects whether it contains butter or plastic. I'm shocked that anyone in France is allowed to sell croissants made with margarine at all, though I suspect they're mostly the prepackaged ones sold in grocery stores and are intended to have a long shelf life, not a blissful flavor.

We only made the pur beurre ones, of course.

LCB Student's Life Expectancy Plummets in a Single Day

2009-02-12T19:46:00.007+01:00

We made a classic French dish today: Estouffade de Boeuf a la Bourguignonne (or Beef Bourguignon where I come from.) It's a simple beef and wine stew that I made my own version of a few weeks ago in a slow cooker. I just seared some stewing beef and then tossed it into a slow cooker with chopped onions and carrots, a bottle of red wine, beef broth, some herbs like thyme and chives, and salt and pepper, and let everything simmer on low heat all day long without bothering to turn or baste the meat. Easy Peasy. When I was ready for dinner, the beef was fork-tender and all the harsh wine flavors had mellowed out into something rich and heady. Serve over roasted potatoes or brown rice, and voila.

The Cordon Bleu recipe was much more likely to induce early death by heart trauma. Besides the large quantities of oil used to sear the beef and the lardons (bacon) we had to cut from a big chunk of pork fatback, we also had to trim the fat and skin from the fatback and toss it into our Dutch ovens with the stew. By the time it was done, there was a red glob of fat about the size and thickness of my hand floating on top of the stew. For our presentation plates, we sauted button mushrooms, lardons, and pearl onions in an ocean of melted butter, as well as broiling butter-doused croutons and boiling a few turned potatoes. It looks good, but will kill you on the spot.

My Boeuf a la bourguignonne

When I got home, the stew (sans lardons) went straight into my slow cooker for another couple of hours to make the meat more tender, then into the refigerator, and tomorrow I can scrape all the congealed fat from the top and hope to live to the age of thirty.

Chef B. digging into my coronary-on-a-plate

We also had a pastry practical yesterday in which we made the most horrendously anachronistic cake on earth. It's called a Mocha, and as you would guess, it's coffee-flavored. It's a walk through time because it was a very popular cake around the same time that Edith Piaf was alive and kicking, before they knew that saturated fat in excessive quantities wasn't the best thing for the old ticker.

We began by make a sort of meringue/angel food cake and slicing it in two crosswise so as to frost the inside. We then doused each layer with a truly nasty mixture of sugar, water, and artificial coffee extract. (We were told we could use real espresso here, but the world's finest cooking schoo only uses the artificial stuff.) Then, we whipped up a buttercream frosting that consisted of hand-whipping egg yolks and adding hot sugar water, which produces an aroma akin to rotting fish, and finished it off with an entire package of butter and more artificial coffee extract. Then we slathered this frosting in and on the cake in ungodly proportions. As if we weren't sick enough of the thing already (and of the chef blowing his lid at us for two hours), the chef asked us to pipe out a decoration on and around it, and to finish the whole thing off with some chopped almonds. We cannot, it seems, have too many almonds in our curriculum.

Mocha

While my lopsided cake received a "bien," the decoration I was forced to pipe on the center of the cake was deemed "pas tres jolie," or rather ugly. Which was fine, because by that point all I wanted to do was shove the cake in the pastry chef's face. Astonishingly, my cake was gobbled up by the vultures in the common room.

As icing on the cake, so to speak, we just learned that this is one of the recipes we must study for the final exam, and that we might have to reproduce for the tasting panel. Coffee never tasted so bitter.

L'Atlelier Joel Robuchon

2009-02-11T16:22:00.006+01:00

This is the Paris flagship of the Atelier in Las Vegas where Ed and I discovered Chateau d'Yquem Sauternes and where I discovered I really-- I mean really-- liked fine food and wine. Everything was wonderful at lunch today-- the food, wine, service, waiting times, music, people-watching-- everything. Pure bliss.

Iberico ham-- the pure taste of the Pyrenees

Seafood broth with mushrooms, lobster, and oyster, and lightly perfumed with ginger, lemongrass, mint, and cilantro

Sole with celeriac and black truffle

Phantasmagoric pie sampler -- cinnamon, lemon, caramel, apple, and chocolate. They're tiny pieces, I swear. The dessert eclipsed all the other courses-- and that's saying a lot.

There Will Be Blood

2009-02-11T14:02:00.010+01:00

I'm a medium-well kind of girl. This might surprise those of you who have known me to eschew red meat on most days, finding steak and roasts to have an unpleasant texture and generally not bothering to eat them except for the sake of politeness at events like dinner parties. This all changed when Ed introduced me to some carnivore's havens: Craftsteak in Las Vegas, Arcadia in San Jose, and Ruth's Chris Steakhouse (everywhere, but especially in Maui). It's hard to dislike beef once you've had a real Kobe tasting menu. That's about the time I became a medium-well kind of girl.

In the spirit of eating good beef, Ed and I bought a quarter share in a grass-fed cow raised at pasture in the North Bay last year, filling our freezer with various cuts of lean beef high in Omega-3s come harvest time. Unfortunately, I overcooked way too many nice cuts. My relative newness to eating and cooking steak is what made this week's chapter on beef at LCB one of the more interesting ones to me: I would finally learn how to get it to just the right doneness, and maybe even learn to like it medium-medium.

The French like their steaks bloody-- either saignant (rare, or literally, "bloody") or worse, bleu (virtually still mooing). Asking for a medium steak here will usually result in something we North Americans consider to be rare. The cozy restaurant downstairs is kind and willing enough to oblige when I ask for my steak "A point, style Americain" (American-style medium).

Yesterday, we made a coeur de contrefilet roti-- a sirloin roast-- with mashed potatoes. This lesson was also especially relevant because it's one of the few things I'm learning to make at LCB that my husband will eat. I paid close attention in demonstration and took detailed notes so that I could reproduce the roast perfectly in practical. Much to my surprise (see the part about me being a "medium-well kind of girl," above), I was able to serve up a rather appealing (but to my eyes, appalling) roast, cooked rare. Yes, the photo you see below is considered rare in France, not even bleu, though I'm not sure it would pass health inspections at home. I got a "tres bien" from the Little Chef for the beef, potatoes, and accompanying jus made from the pan drippings.

Sirloin roast -- a roast of New York Strip steaks.

By the time I got home with my Ziplocked hunk of meat, the bag was half-filled with blood. That's how rare it was. I sliced a steak, few pan-fried it to an edible doneness, and feasted like a Brazilian queen with a nice Bordeaux.

In pastry class, we're still stuck on meringue- and almond-everything. Everything. Even the pear tarte we made on Monday had to be topped with meringue and sprinkled with sliced almonds. This pie was a bit of a take on Tarte Tatin, a caramelized apple pie, in that we caramelized the pears before filing the sweet crust. I was surprised that we used canned pears rather than fresh ones, and the Mean Chef got huffy in demonstration when we asked if this was normally supposed to be the case. (As with most of our questions to him, we couldn't get a straight answer.) The Tall Chef gave me a "tres bien" in practical and said it could be sold in a boutique. I gave my pie away to the happy and sweet dishwasher to share with LCB employees for lunch.

Pear tarte, with more stomach-turning meringue and almonds

Two pieces of news that make me smile: we will soon be making croissants in pastry (no almonds or meringue!), and the Mean Chef is going on vacation for a while. The stars are aligning.

Comments finally enabled!

2009-02-07T20:32:00.005+01:00

It's taken me over a year of using Blogger to figure out how to post (and read) comments. Your comments are welcomed! (As long as you're not the mean pastry chef, in which case, Chef X, get the f&#k off my blog.)

Here's what you do: click on the title of the post you want to comment on. When Blogger takes you to a full page of the post in question, click on the "comment" button at the bottom. You'll have to write out one of those squiggly words to ensure you're a person and not some spamming software, and you're done.

Feel free to praise my plates lavishly. Or you can be cruel, so long as it's funny, too.

P.S. I'm not really worried about Chef X reading this. His English is limited to the word "mainteNOW," which he thinks is a witty combination of the French and English for "now." Sigh. He needs a vacation.

In No Particular Order

2009-02-07T13:12:00.002+01:00

The Cordon Bleu held its group dinner for students in Basic Cuisine and Basic Patisserie this week at L'Atelier Maitre Albert, on the Left Bank, close to Notre Dame Cathedral. It was refreshing to see everyone all dressed up and, for the most part, exhibiting a definite gender (a characteristic usually hidden by our cooks' uniforms), but we were disappointed with the meal. The restaurant was chosen by the school and is recommended by the Michelin guide. It's the second Guy Savoy restaurant I've eaten at (the other being Guy Savoy in Las Vegas): the first time I wasn't wowed; the second time I was disappointed. Should I see if he strikes out?

Basic Cuisine students with Chef L, the "Little Chef" (front left) at our group dinner. From left to right: Molly from Egypt, the Little Chef from France, Alice from Australia, me, Andy from England, and Erika from New Hampshire

This was a good week in pastry, mostly because the mean chef wasn't around much. We had other, much more pleasant, LCB pastry chefs for demos and practicals. It was interesting to notice right away how much calmer I was, and how much better my pastries turned out, with positive reinforcement and constructive criticism rather than the rantings of a madman at top volume right in my ear. I was able to concentrate on getting a handle on the pastry bag, which helped to make my cookies the right size and shape. Instead of "Ugh! Ca, c'est du MacDo!" ("Ugh! This belongs at McDonald's!") from the mean chef, I got "Impeccable!" from Chef M on my almond tuiles and tea cookies.

(I still gave everything away to other students and to the dishwashers, and can't wait for the day when we make something without ground, chopped, or sliced almonds-- which, unfortunately, won't be this week. What's the deal with almond everything these past 2 weeks?!)

Tuiles aux amandes and Palettes aux raisins

More almond cookies:
Batons de marechaux (dipped in chocolate) and something else (filled with raspberry jam) whose name escapes me

A couple of weeks ago, I got together with a group of my classmates for dinner at Mon Vieil Ami just down my street on the Ile Saint Louis. I had high expectations-- this "neo-bistro" has gotten rave reviews from all over on account of the veggie-forward menu. The accolades were well-warranted: the impeccable quality of the vegetables was matched by the perfect preparation of surprisingly meat-heavy dishes, as in my caramelized pork breast with root vegetables. I think I had beet in everything that night-- beet salad for an appetizer, beets in my main course, and even a beet martini to kick off the night. Yup, a beet-infused vodka martini. Don't knock it till you try it-- the cocktail was surprisingly refreshing, with just a hint of both sweetness and tartness that made me crave the rest of the beets to come. The place was a hit! Culinary students may be hard to please, but our crowd was wowed. And since it's so close to home, you can bet I'll be back!

Caramelized pork breast at Mon Vieil Ami-- really, just perfect slab of bacon-y goodness-- with caramelized carrots and golden beets

The Beetini. Yes, I made up the name.

We'll Always Have Waterloo

2009-02-05T18:44:00.003+01:00

In the absence of any really exciting recipes in the last few days-- just more drab, almond-sprinkled cookies in pastry and drab, poached fish in cuisine-- I found myself thinking about the relation between the workings of a French kitchen and, naturally, war.

Chef B taught a theoretical class on the organization of a restaurant kitchen several weeks ago. We learned that many French culinary terms are inspired by the military. For example, the word for the entire team that works in the kitchen is brigade, the same word used by the military to denote a unit comprising many battalions. Like in the army, kitchen brigades are comprised of teams (one department each for meat, fish, sauces, pastry, etc.) with a determined hierarchy of employees (sous-chef, commis, and stagiaire) among whom labor is divided.

Chef, of course, translates to Chief, and he or she is the culinary general, or head honcho if you want to get technical.

As my mom taught me many years ago, a batterie de cuisine is the ensemble of tools at the chef's disposal, from the humble potato peeler to the miraculous food processor, just as in miltary terms, a battery is a group of armaments used to wage war, from guns and cannons to torpedoes and land mines.

These ever-so-deep thoughts made me think back to my undergraduate days as a history student. Bear with me.

Up until the French Revolution or so (and this is hotly debated, so I'm going out on a limb by throwing my hat in one ring), the culinary leaders of the Western world were the Italian kingdoms and principalities-- Florence, Siena, and Rome especially. The Renaissance brought Italy to the top of the heap for a couple of hundred years in all matters of culture, including gastronomy. It was only with the arrival of Napoleon in the early 1800s that French cuisine really took off.

Hey, wait... isn't that when France's military went from dominating the world-- Old and New-- to royally (er...imperially?) sucking? After years of conquering both neighbors and far-flung lands (give or take a period of exile in the Mediterranean), Napoleon was defeated for the last time by the British at Waterloo in 1815, as any schoolchild will tell you. Enter la haute cuisine.

That French military might came crashing down at almost precisely the same time in history that French gastronomy emerged as world leader, as well as the heavy use of military terms in the French kitchen, is waaaaaaaay too much of a coincidence to be unrelated. It's my completely unfounded (yet highly overeducated) opinion that they're inextricably linked, like a Provencal truffle forager and his beret or Lance Armstrong and his massive ego. Either the French military sucks because all the would-be generals suddenly became chefs instead of commanders, or French gastronomy rocks because the military's day in the sun had passed and its ambitious soldiers had to do something.

The question now becomes: will France once again become a global military force to be reckoned with now that several nations, including the United States and Japan, have arguably surpassed it in culinary might? Will Googling "French military victories" and pressing "I'm feeling lucky" actually yield results about new French military victories, rather than having the spell-checker suggest, "Did you mean French military defeats?"

Heads did roll

2009-02-04T07:01:00.006+01:00

Warning: if you're a vegetarian, animal rights activist, or otherwise sensitive about where that sanitized piece of flesh on your plate comes from, you may want to skip this post.

I expected yesterday's cuisine practical to be bloody and traumatic, but not quite in the same way things turned out. Yesterday, you see, was our foray into the French Revolution, Cordon-Bleu style. We were making braised rabbit with mustard sauce and, as with the fish, the raw rabbit came with its head on. It was skinned and shorn of ears, and very clean-- not the goopy mess I was expecting, and much neater than a chicken.

The first thing we were to do is pull out our cleavers and lop the rabbit's head off. I spent most of the morning's two demos barely paying attention to the chefs, focusing instead on my mental pep-talk: "You can do this. People do it all the time. The bunny won't feel a thing." When we got to the kitchen at 3:30 in the afternoon, I was determined to get it over with quickly. I pulled out my knives, put my cleaver next to the cutting board, and waited for the chef to arrive so that I could go pick out a rabbit and get it over with. At his signal, I marched myself over to the bunny bin, took the closest one, almost ran back to my station, and without thinking too much about it, raised and lowered my cleaver. "THWACK." And it was done. I gathered the evidence into a metal bowl, dumped it into the nearest lidded trash can, and breathed a sigh of relief.

There's nothing like neatly slicing off a head to bring you closer to the French. I would have paused to savor the moment by lighting up a Gauloise and tipping back a glass of pastis, but I still had the liver, kidneys, lungs, and heart to remove before cutting up the remaining rabbit into individual portions for the braise. Things went swimmingly from there, and I thought the worst of the day was done.

I completely underestimated Thumper. He has a direct line to the big bunny in the sky. A little while later, as he lay stewing in white wine and mustard, the rabbit got his revenge. We were all working on our fried potato rounds, with a half inch of oil bubbling in cast iron pans and little sprays of scalding oil shooting dangerously up from the stovetops. I made the mistake of adding butter to the oil (yes, butter AND oil) before the potatoes cooked rather than after, which turned the spuds black and did not go unnoticed by Chef B. He made me dump out the oil and start again, which I was rushing to do for fear of not finishing on time when I slipped on a greasy patch of oil on the ground that had probably been sprayed out by our potatoes. As I slid downwards, my left hand reached out instinctively to try to grab something to stop me, which it did-- but unfortunately, it was the hot stove top I had just cleared of its pan, and I left behind the back of three knuckles on my left hand as a souvenir to roast on the burner.

After a bit of icing and self-pity, Chef B kindly bandaged me up and I finished preparing and arranging my meal. The rabbit (and its liver and kidneys, grilled on a rosemary skewer) turned out very well, but I wasn't able to really salvage the chips. That's the revenge of Peter Rabbit: I somehow managed to pull myself together to guillotine a rabbit and make a lovely dish, but I messed up the freaking potatoes and burnt my hand. I'm not quite French yet.

The hand will be fine.

Boo hoo.

Cheese, please!

2009-01-31T20:40:00.005+01:00

I love French cheese as much as the next person. No, probably more. Stinky or mild; smooth or crumbly; cow's, goat's, or sheep's milk-- I love'em (almost) all. Fine dining in gastronomic restaurants is really just a pretext for the moment when the pungent cheese cart is rolled to the table and my eyes grow to the size of Canadian loonies and a dollop of drool falls on my lap.

I recently discovered a wonderful new cheese, Trappe Échourgnac, a cow's milk cheese made by Cistercian nuns at an abbey in the Dordogne region of France (just east of Bordeaux). Aged in nut liqueur, it has the consistency of Gouda and surprises your palate with its smooth walnut flavour. It's absolutely divine on its own, or with dried fruits or homemade jam, and I might get arrested trying to smuggle cases of it to California in a few months.

Yet in spite of my not-so-secret love of fromage, I was craving something a bit simpler and closer to home today. My tastebuds awoke screaming for cheddar, and I had to oblige. But try finding a decent cheddar in Paris! It's like ordering a salad without cheese or bacon in the Midwest (though as my classmate Ben from Iowa commented this week, "Why would you want to?"). And so I set out with the help of my faithful friend Google to locate an open-minded soul in a city where California wine is virtually a black market item requiring a password at the door. Happily, I found what I was looking for.

Thanksgiving is an American grocery store with a Cajun restaurant on the premises. Though I didn't get a chance to sample the restaurant fare, I did my part for the local economy by stocking up on things I didn't even know I missed and that can't be found on local grocery shelves: Jif peanut butter, Quaker instant oatmeal packets, tortilla chips and salsa, Goldfish crackers, Celestial Seasonings tea and, of course, some lovely cheddar. (I'm not even sure if it's American or English, but it's just what the doctor ordered!) There was a surprising number of other processed food products for homesick Americans and Canadians: Pop Tarts, maple leaf cookies, cajun seasonings, root beer, maple syrup, Kraft Dinner, Betty Crocker cake mixes, and much more.

I shudder at the thought of a French foodie stepping into this shop and confirming his suspicion that all North Americans eat like college kids. But in a fix, such as the one I found myself in this morning, it's a welcomed sight in a sea of brie.

I Heart Bacon

2009-01-29T16:01:00.003+01:00

As you may recall, I gave my husband a Bacon of the Month Club membership for his birthday a few years ago. Today, I found something to make with all that bacon, and it's a monster:

The Bacon Explosion

I think it'll replace all future birthday cakes.

The latest

2009-01-28T19:18:00.004+01:00

As promised, here's a photo of my presentation plate from our latest cuisine class. I got a "tres, tres bien" from the worn-down Chef B. I thanked him and ran. You know, in case he changed his mind.

Grilled salmon steak with lemon, butter, and chive sauce; baked potato puree well with bechamel sauce and emmenthal cheese; sauteed spinach with butter and nutmeg.

And now for my first "tres bien" in pastry-- from Chef D., a kinder, gentler chef than our regular guy:

Dacquoise

I finally did something right in pastry: the chef used my marzipan rose as an example to the class of a "good first try." Unfortunately, it brought back vibrant memories of making 500 marzipan cacti for a Mexican-themed party at the snooty country club I worked at when I was but a young lass of sixteen. Yikes. Fortunately, I was able to stop at one for the cake.

From "Pas mal" to "Bien"

2009-01-27T00:02:00.006+01:00

First shot at eclairs

The glass ceiling was finally shattered: I graduated from "pas mal" ("not bad") to "bien" ("good") for my scrumptious eclairs today... after quite a bit of hand-holding for us all by the chef. (Methinks someone had a conversation with him about the sudden increase in sales of voodoo dolls in Paris, so he changed his tune for at least a day.) It's a simple enough recipe to make, though the techniques involved are not as easy to master. I've come to realize that piping from pastry bags does not come naturally to me. Eventually I'll get the hang of applying the proper amount of pressure and twisting my wrists in the correct manner for each project, but for now I'm all thumbs. The piping for the eclairs went pretty well for a first try, but I suppose I'll have to bombard everyone I know with eclairs to get it just right...

Our second project, chouquettes, was quite easy. We used leftover choux dough to pipe out big Hershey's kisses-like dollops on a baking sheet, covered the lumps in giant sugar crystals, and baked them. I got rapped on the knuckles for not pouring enough giant sugar crystals onto the dough before baking it. When oh when will I learn not to attempt to lighten up time-honoured French pastry traditions?

Chouquettes

My roasted chicken went splendidly this morning, as did my "turned" artichokes, which are peeled and then trimmed to a small scoop shape, then boiled for freaking ever until tender, at which point they're used as serving bowls filled with thinly sliced and heavily buttered vegetables. I really need to take more photos of my cuisine creations, but the preparations so far have been almost too simple to warrant a recording. Tomorrow we're making grilled salmon (prep time: 8 minutes) with mashed potatoes gratin in choux pastry (prep time: 45 minutes), and whatever else the chef decides he wants us to make in the three hours we'll be in the kitchen. The salmon he made today was sooooo tasty, and I'm looking forward to reproducing it for several salmon lunches and dinners over the next few days.

Unfortunately, we're not making the vanilla ice cream profiteroles that the cuisine chef demonstrated (or taunted us with) today, though I carefuly noted the instructions and immediately added that to my growing "to make at home" list!

Getting the Cream Puff Kicked out of Me

2009-01-24T09:26:00.002+01:00

If only making lovely cakes didn't involve so much heat-- from the chefs, not just the ovens!

This past week was pretty harsh, with the chefs really taking the gloves (oven mitts?) off. They decided we needed to step it up. The primary pastry chef, in particular, came in each day with guns blazing. He’s a bit of a loose cannon, to tell the truth. He’ll yell and curse and bang things around for a couple of hours, then the bipolar part of his brain kicks in and he’ll squeeze your shoulders and say, “Not bad.” I suspect he’s been watching too much Gordon Ramsey reality TV. I’m generally happy and positive at the beginning my pastry practicals—after all, we’re making yummy things!— but as the class progresses (and as the chef does angry laps around the kitchen), I feel my shoulders get tenser and tenser until they’re almost touching my ears and they feel like I’ve just ridden a century.

While I’ve taken a beating from the pastry chef this week (one day he seemed to want to “remove my liver with his bare hands,” as my classmate Nicola put it), I’m still really pleased with my desserts. They may not make the cut for the window display at Laduree, but they sure taste good! Here’s the proof in the pudding, so to speak:

My Saint Honore, a choux pastry cake dipped in caramel and topped with roughly seven tons of whipped cream, as required

I feel the need to specify that we each whipped our own cream for the topping by hand-- after beating the choux pastry dry. I mention it because it's the approximate equivalent of running 5 miles with your arms.

Now here’s how it looked about 10 minutes (according to witnesses) after I sliced it and left in on a table in the break room:

They were all over it like a fat kid on Smarties
(or M&Ms, for my American readers)

The same happened last week with my Gateau Basque, and I’ll content myself with the conviction that if it’s good enough for my fellow culinary students, it’s good enough for me!

My chaussons aux pommes (apple turnovers), which I greedily kept all to myself

The week was quieter in the cuisine program, as we focused on making traditional soups and clarifying bouillon, the latter being a useful skill for students planning on designing menus at old folks’ homes. We did get to face our first real “ick!” task, namely hacking up little live crabs with cleavers for a crab bisque. I chose a particularly active basket of crabs who scuttled across my board as I tried my best to get them in a single, merciful blow. My classmate Erika from New England enjoyed this task as much as I did; we bonded early on over seafood and both having insisted on lobster at our recent weddings.

The cuisine chefs as a group are really wonderful. They can at times act like TV chefs, too, but for the most part they’re quite forgiving and supportive, and I really feel great both going into and coming out of those practicals. My knife skills are getting better each day (and not just with the cleaver!), and I’m quickly learning not to be inventive with my recipes in order to please the chefs. I’ll save the creativity, and the lightening up of cream- and butter-rich recipes, for when I get home.

Baking for Bikers

2009-01-21T23:32:00.005+01:00

Normally, I like to reward myself with a generous slice of Gateau Basque after a hard bike ride in France. The crusty cake with a pastry cream filling and, if I'm lucky, a hefty spoonful of black cherry preserves is just the thing to replenish my depleted stores of butter and sugar... I mean, salt and glycogen.

But now I've discovered something that may just usurp the Gateau Basque's place of honor:

The Paris-Brest. It's a cream-puffy island of paradise made up of a flat pie shell bottom, a puff pastry ring sliced in two lengthwise, a praline cream filling, and topped by the other pastry ring half. This one's sprinkled with almonds and dusted with powdered sugar. It looks heavy, but tastes light. (Unfortunately, my thighs agree with the initial appraisal.)

The pastry was invented in the early 19th century by a baker who lived and worked near the route for Paris-Brest, an annual bike race that begins in Paris and ends in-- you guessed it-- Brest, in Brittany, on the northwestern coast of France.* The baker's tasty treat was inspired by the wheels of the bike, and is guaranteed to make up for any cycling- (or mountaineering-) related caloric expenditures.

All I can say is mmmmmmmmmmm. But after taking my obligatory bite (we really are required to taste everything), I promised myself that I wouldn't dive into another one of these calorie bombs without biking up a Pyrennean- or Alpine-sized mountain first.

Where's my bike when I need it??

*(I hope typing the words "Brest" and "Brittany" in the same sentence won't make any special, misspelled "ads" pop up on any readers' screens.)

A Day in the Life at the World's Most Famous Cooking School

2009-01-21T14:15:00.004+01:00

What's LCB like for a student? In one word, busy. Some of my classmates are, like me, taking both the Cuisine course and the Pastry course simultaneously, which makes for very full days. Others are taking just one of the two streams and have a bit more time to relax and enjoy themselves. Most days, I have three 3-hour classes, beginning at 8:30 or 12:30. (Thankfully, my weekend classes and classes ending at 9:30 pm are all done for the semester.) Each stream has demonstration classes (3 hours) followed (not always immediately) by practical classes in the kitchen (3 hours), and a regular day will be some assortment of each. Tomorrow, for example, I'll have a 3-hour pastry practical, a 1-hour break, a 3-hour pastry demo and a 3-hour cuisine practical.

We all arrive early in the morning to change into our kitchen clothes-- we're specifically prohibited from wearing these clothes outside. The uniform consists of solid kitchen shoes, checkered pants, and a white kitchen shirt. For practical, we also have to wear a neckerchief, an apron, a tea towel tied to the apron strings, and a super sexy combination of hairnet and a hat that looks like it belongs on a German late World War I submariner. Once dressed, we can barely tell the men from the women, which may be the outfit's ultimate purpose. The mens' and womens' locker rooms host all the students in the school, roughly 120 in all, and can almost fit into my home walk-in closet. With so many people coming and going, getting changed is an exercise in acrobatics... and sometimes contortionism.

The oh-so-trendy kitchen uniform, complete with hairnet

The demo classes take place in a large demonstration kitchen, with the chef at the front working on a counter top about ten times larger than the space we'll each actually have in the kitchens. He shows and tells us (in French) how to make the recipe, and we all furiously take notes on our recipe sheets that only list the ingredients and their quantities. All the students at the Basic level, about forty or so, are present at the same time for the demo. A translator translates to English as we go along, which makes the time pass twice as slowly for those of us who understand both languages. This is made up for by the fact that the translators sometimes put their own spin on things, or else tell us something completely different-- usually much funnier-- than what the chef said. (Ben, you know who you are.) Once the recipe is done and presented, we can all take pictures, and then we have to taste the final dish to make sure we can replicate it in practical.

Killing time while cakes are baking by practicing our decoration skills

In practical, we break down into groups of 10-14 to each make one or two of the two or three recipes the chef demonstrated. We assemble all the tools we need from our knife kits and kitchen supplies, portion out the ingredients, and furiously try to remember and remind each other how the chef proceeded in what may have been a very complex, disorganized presentation. The kitchens are TINY, with very little counter space, and we end up stepping all over each other during the course of the class. But we all manage quite well, and I'm lucky to have ended up with such a cheerful, helpful group. No major injuries or fingers lost yet! A chef (not necessarily the demo chef) walks around and helps us out, sometimes critiquing, sometimes complimenting, depending on the chef and his particular mood that day. Some chefs speak very little to no English, and reserve their highest compliments as well as their most biting critiques for the students who understand them... a double-edged knife in the kitchen. Once we're done-- the time usually flies-- we present our dish to the chef for a grade and, invariably, some comments. The we pack up our food to take home or give away, clean the kitchen, and run to go drink water/coffee, have a snack, pee, and do everything else we haven't had time to do all day.

And that, in a nutshell, is a day in the life of a very fortunate, and very busy , LCB student.

My Gateau Basque-- which I normally eat only after biking up the Pyrenees. (BTW, that's a Basque cross-- not a swastika-- in the bottom right corner.)

The little brother of the fidgety crabs we sent to crustacean heaven with our cleavers

City of Cobbles

2009-01-18T16:54:00.003+01:00

This morning I went for my first outdoor run in Paris. It was a balmy 8 degrees Celsius, and there were dozens of runners on the lower banks of the Seine, where the streets are closed to motor traffic on Sundays. I started on the eastern edge of the Ile Saint Louis, crossed to the Right Bank, and ran down to the Eiffel tower, passing City Hall, the Louvre and Tuilleries, the giant ferris wheel, and the Place de la Concorde on my right and the Musee d'Orsay and Invalides on my left before crossing over to the Eiffel tower on the Left Bank and making my way back east. Would it be overly superlative to call the run glorious? There was almost-- almost-- no time to think about the pain in my knees as my feet went over patches of cobblestones. In my 10 km run (the avatar says 9 because I spent one km calibrating the foot pod), I marveled at the centuries of architecture around me and the great and not-so-great moments of history witnessed by the silent cobbles under me. *Sigh*. Paris.

I'm all teched out thanks to a great Christmas gift from Ed, a Garmin Forerunner watch that features all the basic sports watch functions-- heart rate monitor, time elapsed, etc.-- as well as having GPS functions that track my path, display the distance covered, show me my speed at any moment in time, and can guide me back to my starting point if I get lost. When I get home, I can download more data than I'll ever need onto my Mac, as well as spitting out a map of the track I just ran. It's awesome. Add that to my Nike + iPod, which interrupts my music or audiobook every so often to tell me my distance ("2 kilometres done"... "5 kilometres done; halfway point" ... "3 kilometres left"...), and I don't need to think about anything except putting one foot in front of the other until I'm told my workout is over. How did I ever run without this much data? =)

Now if only all these gadgets would burn off all the calories I've been consuming in pastry class while I sit in a cafe and sample the local chocolate...

Market Tour

2009-01-17T22:28:00.007+01:00

The fresh Saint Jacques, or scallops, in season at the fish market

I met up with a few of my Cordon Bleu classmates for a walking tour of the old Les Halles market area on the Right Bank during our day off today. The neighbourhood, filled with buildings, narrow streets, and alleyways, is where farmers and wholesalers from the outlying provinces would descend on Paris daily to sell their fresh fruits, vegetables, meats, cheeses, fish, and flowers to restauranteurs and retailers. Les Halles was the centre of Parisian gastronomy for hundreds of years until 1969, when the wholesalers market moved to Rungis, a vast complex near the airport that food industry professionals still travel to daily for their goods. (I’m currently reading Emile Zola’s book Le Ventre de Paris (The Parisian Appetite or, literally, the Stomach of Paris), written in the latter part of the nineteenth century and poking fun at Parisians’ intense appetite for both basic provisions and luxury foodstuffs that required such a massive production as Les Halles to invade the city each day.)

Mmmountain of mmmacarons at the bakery of the former patissier du roi. There's a "caron" in the name for a reason.

The tour itself was nothing to write home about, so I won’t write about it, but the neighbourhood was wonderful. Right in the centre of Paris, I somehow managed to miss it on every single one of my previous visits. The official market is long gone, but the streets are filled with a dangerous number of appealing shops selling fresh food and delicacies, as well as historic bakeries and restaurants that have been filling Parisian bellies for about as long as my home town has been on the map (almost 400 years), like the former king's patisserie. We also found several kitchenware shops with everything from knives to industrial blenders.

Serving snails for almost 200 years

Sculpture in St. Eustache church, in the heart of the Les Halles district

The highlight of the day: finding a half bottle of Sauternes for 7.70 Euros at a shop specializing in foie gras. At that price, my veins will be filled with the syrupy sweet nectar of life in no time.

The pork producers association is going to heaven

The tour left our feet cold and our stomachs rumbling, and so I joined Erica from New Hampshire, Ilaria from Tuscany, and Azham from southern Russia for hot onion soup at Le Pied de Cochon, a local institution that’s been around forever (roughly). We couldn’t pass up the seasonal raw oysters washed down with Muscadet, either. Being a gourmand—a greedy little epicurean—in Paris is like an alcoholic running a liquor store. (Or like my sweet mother-in-law Connie working at a scrapbooking store). And now I know where to get the good stuff.

Of cakes and salt

2009-01-14T22:48:00.007+01:00

All goes well in cooking school land. Today, I'm recovering a bit from the hectic schedule of the past week. I only have one class, a cuisine demonstration, and so I'm taking advantage of the time to catch up on paperwork, house chores, and correspondence, so that I can have my weekend free to wander around this beautiful city.

We're still learning the very basics of cooking and baking-- how thickeners react to liquids of different temperatures, knife skills, how to truss and carve a chicken, how to make simple cakes and doughs, piping icing. This week, I've made sugar cookies, apple pie, poached whole chicken with cream sauce and rice, fruit cake (yuck in any language!), madeleines, and a pissaladiere (a French pizza), with 2 more cuisine practicals to go before the week is through.

My group has had a variety of chefs overseeing our kitchen practicals, and it's neat to see how each person (well, okay, each man, because I haven't seen a single female chef yet... curious...) interacts with the group. As a general trend, the chefs tend to speak zero to very little English, and most of them stick to the few French speakers in the class like glue. This is good in that Nicola and Ilaria (my Italian, French-speaking classmates) and I get lots of guidance from the chefs, but not so good because sometimes it's just plain too much attention. (How can I concentrate on making tiny cubes of garlic and keeping all my fingers with someone breathing down my neck?) But they certainly know their work.

No matter how you slice it... fruit cake is fruit cake

We had the sweetest pastry chef come in to our practical class on Tuesday. He's a retired chef working part-time at Cordon Bleu simply because he loves teaching his craft to new students from around the world. We could tell he was thrilled to be passing his knowledge on to us-- he was beaming-- and we drank it all in. His recommendations and critiques were all very gentle, so as to encourage us amateur pastry chefs and confectioners to keep at it. I hope we see more of him.

The legendary madeleines, fresh out of the oven

A word about my classmates: they're quite wonderful. There's a good bunch of native English speakers from around the world (Canada, US, Australia, Britain), as well as many English-speaking people from Europe and abroad (Italy, Russia, Japan). About half of our group is Asian (Japan, China, South Korea), and unfortunately we seem a bit segregated from each other at the moment. I hope that'll change as we all warm up to each other.

Pissaladiere, a French pizza-like specialty from the southern, coastal Nice region.

I made the above "pizza pie" yesterday. The name pissaladiere says it all (if you speak Latin or ancient Nicois, which I don't). Pis derives from poisson, or fish, and sal relates to salt. It is in fact a briny treat: nicoise olives, capers, and anchovy filets top a base of sauteed onions and skinned tomatoes, along with the mandatory sprinkling of garlic and thyme. I expected all the onions to throw me off, but they're cooked so much-- though not caramelized-- that you can't really identify them by taste or texture. With an acidic green salad and cold glass of wine-- delish.

On a related note, I'm about to begin listening to an audiobook called Salt, by Mark Kurlansky, all about the history of salt, and hope to get more ideas for artery-hardening delectibles...

And so the scale goes up. Worth every bite, though!

The sweet taste of SNAP

2009-01-12T19:48:00.006+01:00

I'm glad cuisine is going well, because I've been told-- today, at regular intervals, by one chef-- that I'm a less than exemplary student in patisserie.

We began early with a practical class in "diamants," round sugar cookies that are rolled out into logs before being sliced crosswise into little tea biscuits. They're mostly comprised of butter and sugar, a timeless recipe for success. I decided to make them bigger than the chef demonstrated because I like soft, chewy cookies rather than hard, crunchy ones.

Lesson #1 of my Cordon Bleu education: do NOT show initiative. Classic French cuisine is classic because no one dared to do anything new. The chef called my cookies "MacDonald's-style" as he slid them into the oven, and no one needed a translation from French to know what he was saying. In the end, I saw the very good reason why the cookies are supposed to be tiny: the edges of my big guys collapsed, and while they tasted the same as the others, they didn't look as pretty. Oops. Lesson learned.

After another 3-our demonstration class in patisserie, my group went right back up to the pastry kitchen to try our hands at a French apple tarte. I've made a couple of pies in my day-- not very many, but a good dozen-- so I felt fairly confident that I wouldn't flop on my face again. Wrong. I assembled my pie as instructed (or at least I thought so), and was pleased when it came out of the oven looking good, but the chef begged to differ. The very same pastry chef who dissed my American-sized cookies said, "I asked you to make something nice today. This isn't nice at all. You need to learn to follow instructions." Ouch. He added that the crust was good, probably to stem a potential case of crocodile tears.

The offending pie

As eager as I am to learn from the experts, I ask you: isn't this a pretty pie, and at the very least, "nice"? I'm sure it'll be perfectly yummy when I drown my sorrows in tarte aux pommes and diamants tomorrow morning. (My sorrows being that my better half left Paris this morning to start his new job teaching university in Wisconsin.)

It's been a long day. Nine hours of classes, plus all the waiting before classes, plus locker room time, is a lot of time to be in school. (And I consider myself a bit of an expert on being in school.) A cup of tea and a bit of ice cream on that pie will make everything better.

Day 1 and I still have all my fingers

2009-01-08T09:43:00.005+01:00

My first full day of classes at Le Cordon Bleu went well, especially considering that I was coughing like an old pickup, my brain was oozing out of my nose, and my throat felt like it had swallowed a yard of steel wool. Not that I'm complaining.

But it really was quite a good start to my time here. The first class was a demonstration, and the chef spent three hours showing us how to cut vegetables. I'm not kidding. It was entirely a knife skills class, and it was one of the reasons I wanted to come to cooking school in the first place. We learned some of the classic cuts, like brunoise (tiny perfect cubes about 1mm x 1mm), paysane (tiny, thin triangles), julienne (very fine matchsticks), and mirepoix (bigger cubes about 3mm x 3mm). In the practical class, we each had to use some of these skills to make a simple vegetable soup with paysane-style cut veggies, as well as a presenting our new skills in small mounds of cut veggies in each style. Sounds easy enough, right?

Wrong. The practical class seems to have the uncanny ability to make people forget that they already know how to cook. Each small class of 14 or so students is presided over by a Cordon Bleu chef who walks around correcting and sometimes praising our efforts. I fully expected to be ripped to shreds by our kind-looking but extremely picky chef-- were my carrot triangles too thick? Did I put the ingredients in the pot in the right order? Did I add too much salt?

But alas (I write with a huge sigh of relief), my first practical went rather well. I actually got a compliment! Was I in an alternate universe when the chef asked if I had worked in a restaurant kitchen? I suppose they're supposed to be nice to everyone on the first day so as not to scare off students. My soup was deemed good (just a tad more salt would have been better, he told me), my knife skills were good, and my hygiene and cleanliness of the work station were good. Yay!

I also had my first pastry class, in which the only non-scary-looking chef demonstrated a bunch of recipes that we would never have to make because industrially produced goods are just as good and less time consuming: pralines, apricot glaze, sugar glaze, and coffee extract. I especially enjoyed the translator in this class-- an English bloke who added his own commentary to what the chef actually said, and providing a rather more humorous recipe to the English speakers than the chef did to the French-speakers. It's nice to be bilingual here.

It was a long day overall, with almost 9 hours of class ending at 9:00 p.m. and no time to eat, and I was happy to get home to Ed and go to bed.

Whiteout in the city

2009-01-05T20:05:00.008+01:00

Who says the snow in Paris doesn't stick around?

I went out for a short walk through the Latin Quarter before breakfast this morning and saw that the reason the sky was so dark-- besides the fact that it doesn't get light till 8:30-- was that it was snowing. I've only been in Paris in summer and fall, so this was a treat for me. (And it brought on a little bit of nostalgia for home. The one in Montreal, I mean, not California!)

Ed and I had a special date today. We had lunch reservations at the Jules Verne, the posh restaurant atop the second landing of the Eiffel tower. Normally I would shun such a tourist trap, but it turned out to be an absolute delight. A few years ago, Ed gave up a seat at the Jules Verne offered to him as part of a group cycling trip in order to take me out elsewhere for our first date, and he's been wanting to make good on the place ever since.

As we entered the South Tower of the Tour Eiffel, we were whisked up to the restaurant in a private elevator-- so much nicer than being crammed into the standard elevator with hordes of tourists not opting to take the stairs up. Then we were escorted to our seats near the windows, which would normally offer a superb view of the city but for the falling snow and low clouds. At the beginning, we could see several blocks away, but towards the end, all we could see was the ground immediately below the tower. It wasn't a disappointment at all. In fact, it felt like we were warm and cozy together on top of the world.

The Jules Verne was recently taken over by Alain Ducasse, of Plaza Athenee fame, and he touched it up in an attempt to bring it back to its former glory. You'll still find it tourist-ridden-- we were surrounded by Russian, German, and English-speaking guests-- but the cool, minimalist decor and mostly on-the-mark food soon made us forget about that (or just not care).

I had a Brittany lobster appetizer that grounded me in my seat for a few delicious moments-- a ring of fresh sliced lobster over a celeriac salad with tiny black truffle matchsticks, celery, and a well-balanced horseradish zing, all topped with a whole lobster claw. It was sigh-worthy. Ed was won over by the perfectly prepared filet of beef with seared foie gras (his very favourite restaurant choice). It's been our experience that when you ask for your meat done "medium" in France, you'll get it rather rare, but the JV got it right. We we both captivated by the accompanying crunchy, lighter-than-air triangles of French fried pillows with just the right amount of salt and extra points for presentation.

It was a great lunch, and the moral of the story is: don't avoid a place just because it's touristy; the guidebooks might actually have it right. (The price, however, was on the stroke-inducing side, but we sucked it up in the name of fine dining.) We left with smiles on our faces, full bellies, and a small bag of fresh madeleines in hand, the last one compliments of the JV.

Then we stepped out into a winter wonderland-- and we could feel immediately that we had perfect packing snow under our feet. As we walked back home along the banks of the Seine, we stopped to make a small offering to my new city: a little snowman, complete with 2-cent Euro eyes and a little smile.

Where beggars eat like kings

2009-01-04T20:41:00.004+01:00

Ed and I arrived in Paris last night, and today we're closeting ourselves in our little studio apartment to deal with jet lag and lingering colds before braving the city. It's Sunday, which means virtually everything is closed, so it's a good day to recuperate and to make plans.

Around lunchtime, I stepped out to pick up a few snacks at the first open bakery I could find. (When we awoke to no discernibly dreamy smells, we sadly concluded that the bakery next door was closed for the day.) There was a small queue streaming out the door of a bakery down the road, so I waited patiently out front and tried to keep my drool from mucking up the display window. It was here that I overheard this conversation between a panhandler standing outside the bakery and a woman kindly offering to buy him a baked good.

Woman: "Je vous offre quelque chose?" (Can I get you anything?)
Panhandler: "Eh... oui... mais quelque chose de sec." (Something dry/bland.)
Woman: "Quelque chose de sec?" (Something dry/bland?)
Panhandler: "Ouais... pas trop sucre, je n'aime pas les choses trop sucrees." (Yeah... not too sweet. I don't like it too sweet.")

Even the beggars here can afford to be gourmands. I wonder if they stand outside the caviar joints and insist on Russian beluga.

...

In case you're wondering... the bakery had one millefeuille left and it was yummy.

In the beginning, there was butter

2008-12-16T05:12:00.009+01:00

A few months ago, my foodie book club read "The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry" by Kathleen Flinn. It's a food memoir about Flinn's adventures at the Ecole du Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris. She writes of her adventures working towards the Grand Diplome-- the good, the bad, and the undercooked. Having harbored a secret wish to go to cooking school for some time now, her book struck a giddy nerve. My husband Ed and I were driving along one day and I told him Flinn's story. "I would looooooove to do that," I crowed. "They even teach how to make millefeuille!" (I'm a millefeuille addict). Be careful what you wish for, indeed. Ed just said, "So do it! That would be great!" He's certainly got something to gain from a classically trained cook for a wife, but I think he's encouraging me to go just because he's amazing.

And so begins the adventure. I'm heading to Paris in January for 3 months to do the Basic Culinary and Basic Pastry courses. (The Grand Diplome is Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced courses of either stream, Culinary or Pastry. I'm not aiming for that... yet.) The classes will focus on classic French cooking styles, flavours, and techniques-- with lots of cream, butter and foie gras. I fully expect to be wearing my fat pants by the end of my first month-- French women do get fat when they make Bearnaise sauce every day!

I'm not planning on becoming a professional chef (in fact, I've just submitted my graduate school applications for 2009), but hope to learn enough to be do all the basics really, really well-- and blow my friends and family away every now and again, just for kicks.

This is a dream come true. Forget sugar-plums-- I have visions of millefeuilles dancing through my head.