Don’t buy Windows Vista. If you buy a new computer next year and have a choice, stick with Windows XP and run a firewall – I use and recommend ZoneAlarm – anti-virus (Norton) and anti-spyware (AdAware and Spywareblaster). In about four years time you’ll have to stop using WXP because the security updates will have stopped coming, but by then you’ll be ready to buy a Mac. I know I will.
Vista is going to be horrendous; it will add a little more kernel security (if you don’t know what this means don’t worry, it doesn’t matter much to you) and some pretty screens at the cost of doubling (minimum) your RAM and forcing you to add a more expensive graphics card (WXP works on this machine with the card I bought in 1997).
What’s wrong with Vista? Everything, really. Read http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.htmland http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/21.html and then consider that this is ONLY about the shutdown menu; not the code that makes it work, just what’s actually listed on it.
Good grief.
Take the money you would need to spend to upgrade to Vista and go to Venice or Prague for the weekend. Your old computer will work just fine when you get back and you’ll have had a great weekend, not two days (or more) of grief as you tried to get Vista to work.
There. No more technology.
I feel so happy.

We have our first all-day test exam today, written papers in the morning and practical this afternoon. It’s the first time I’ve done any exam papers at all for 20 years – and back then, at the age of 25, I sat in my final exam and calculated that it was exactly my 50th public exam (not counting the probably hundreds of test exams I’d sat at school and university). I promised myself that day that I would never, ever sit another exam paper for the rest of my life.
So here I am taking my 51st exam. All in French.
The written parts are all based on previous CAP (Certificat d’Aptitude Professionel) exam papers but only covering what we’ve studied in the past three and a half months (three and a half months already?). So there’s a hygiene paper where we get asked about the five conditions necessary for the development of bacteria (37 degree heat, water, protein and the presence or not of oxygen), a business practices paper (calculate how much money Monsieur Marsaud has left to spend after he’s paid his rent and mobile phone bill every month) and a kitchen technology paper.
The latter is the hardest for me, partly because all the vocabulary on this has been new to me this year, and partly because the photocopied photograph of a kitchen range on which we’re supposed to label everything is smudged into an indistinguishable grey mush. So that thing down the end is either a deep-fat fryer or a bain marie. I plump for the latter, and it turns out to be a sauteuse. There you go.
The practical this afternoon is what we all see as more important. It’s the only ‘failing’ section of the exam – fail any other part and you can still make up the marks you need elsewhere; fail the practical and you fail the exam completely. Which is as it should be.
We have to produce two dishes in four hours, a chicken curry and an apple tart. And, as we’ve been taught, I set to writing down on the back of my exam paper which order I should be doing things in, and conclude that I should butcher the chicken, do my veg, prep my pastry and then put stuff on to cook while that’s resting, then finish the apple tart. That way, all the ‘dirty’ stuff – meat, veg prep – is out of the way before I use my work area for making pastry.
Then I look up and see that at least half the class has started out by making pastry. Hmm. The temptation here is to join them just because it’s what everyone appears to be doing, but I have confidence in my calculations and it works out fine. We all finish at about the same time, but I’ve spent less time cleaning my workstation and more time cooking.
In France, ‘Chicken curry’ is essentially a fricassée of chicken with some curry powder stirred in; they’re not big on authentic, Indian sub-continent cookery here and definitely not into hot-tasting foods so I moderate the amount of curry powder I put in.
The apple tart is a ‘tarte fine’, pronounced feene, which is a circle of blind-baked pastry, crème patissière and then the apples sliced thinly and arranged attractively on top. Everyone knows what these things look like because they see them every day in the patisseries in town.
We also have to do a Pilaf rice to go with the curry, and not everyone succeeds with this; several get burned when they forget the 17-minute cooking time, others go soggy when the get stirred immediately after being removed from the oven by those curious to see how they’ve turned out. I remember the 17 minute rule, the no-stir rule and it works out fine. The curry’s good too, and I serve my plated meal and my two side dishes with the remainders in good time.
Just as I’m returning to my workstation I notice my neighbour about to set off with his plates; “Julian, you’ve forgotten the diced-tomato garnish!” I warn him.
Stoner Julian, ever laid-back, replies simply, “Yeah, I was hungry, I ate the tomato.” I lend him some of mine, generous person that I am, but see him picking at it on his way to the examiner.
Check any curries you eat in France carefully – if the diced tomato garnish is missing, your meal may well have been prepared by a stoner.
When we’ve all finished we clean and scrub the kitchen – there’s a collective mark for the condition of the place at the end of the exam so it’s worth doing it properly.
And then we’re free for the next two weeks, two weeks during which we can remember every mistake and error and fault in the dishes we prepared….
Next week: Result!

http://www.funnynewswire.com/wordpress/?p=51

If you’ve never started your day by sticking your hand up a chicken’s bottom, I heartily recommend it as a way of waking yourself up, clearing a muzzy head and getting yourself to the head of the queue for the loo.
Well, it’s not that bad really. Today we’re doing ‘Habiller une volaille éffilée’, dressing a drawn piece of poultry – in this case, a chicken. Volaille almost always means chicken, but can mean turkey, guinea fowl, even rabbit – which is very handy for serving rabbit to those who think they won’t like it but who will, once they’ve tried it. As in ‘volaille surprise’ – which looks like breasts of chicken wrapped in bacon and served with a tomato sauce. The surprise, of course, is that it’s rabbit not chicken.
We learn how to ‘vider’, empty the chicken – most of the guts are gone, it’s just the heart, lungs and delicous liver left. I do like a good chicken liver salad, sautéed until they’re just rosé inside and deglazed with some raspberry vinegar.
Tasty.
And we also get to learn how to tie up a chicken with the giant darning needles we all bought at the start of the year because they were on the list of ‘must have’ kit. Actually I didn’t buy mine, my Restaurant Chef gave me one of his since he had several spares. He’s kind like that. We learn this even though it’s now been taken of the list of required things to know for our CAP exam – nowadays all chickens are tied up with elastic string which is cheaper and quicker. You can also slip off the elastic to poke around inside an allegedly PAC, Prêt à Cuire (ready to cook) chicken to make sure it’s been properly emptied before seasoning the inside and then slipping the elastic back on to hold it all tightly together. You need to hold the legs and wings tightly together so that you have as compact an item as possible which will cook evenly – if you leave extraneous wing tips and feet sticking out they’ll cook more quickly and even burn before the rest of the bird is done.
It’s just a detail and one I hadn’t really thought about before; I’ve bought hundreds, even thousands of chickens in the past all tied up like this and never really known what to do with their bondage gear – leave them tied up, set them free, what’s the difference? It never says anything on the label about the string so I’ve always considered it optional. But a little cheffy common sense points to the right answer, so leave it on it is.
We roast these chickens – and thanks to my Restaurant Chef I already have this one down pat; 15 minutes on one thigh, 15 minutes on the other, 15 minutes on its tummy and finish off with 15 minutes on its back to crisp up the skin over the breast. This avoids cooking the breast too much, exposing the thighs to more heat – when we do a dish with a chicken cut up into portions we cook the breast for 12 minutes and the thighs for 15, since they need it more.
To go with the roasts we do Pommes Dauphine, a mix of pâte à choux and mashed potato, both of which we’re now expected to be able to produce without any further information from our School Chef. He wants us to add 400 grammes of mash to a choux pastry based on a quarter of a litre of liquid, which ends up as a roughly tant pour tant mix – equal amounts of each. My Restaurant Chef thinks this is wrong, we should be putting a quarter choux to three quarters spud. Last year’s Seconde de Cuisine had it the other way round.
So we stick with today’s recipe and pour lumps of pastry/potato mix into a vat of oil. The easiest way to do this is to hold your piping bag correctly and whack at the dribbling end with the back of a knife, which gives morsels of the right size if you get your timing right. And very tasty they are too, as is all fried food. Well, nearly all – the fried fish in the school canteen at lunchtime has gone through all for levels of the Kitchen Kids ‘Make it inedible’ regime, and they’ve succeeded once again. France’s future cooks – I’m bringing sandwiches.
We start this afternoon with a nap. Sorry, with our Hygiène class, talking all about Water and its various roles. Its first role is Plastique, one of those Faux Amis French words – it doesn’t mean plastic. Indeed, I’ve never really got any sort of handle as to what it means. In this case it means that water aids in the construction of our billions of cells and in repairing wounds, so I guess it means something to do with building. Water also has, it turns out, a role to play in blood. Yes, it’s the water in blood that makes it so liquid. Well, you learn something every day. If you’re 16 and stupid, that is. For a classroom full of adults it’s not the best way to start an afternoon in a sunny classroom after lunch which may have included a glass or two of red wine. Well, unless you like to start your afternoons with a siesta, that is, which it seems most of us do.

If you were wise enough to buy a copy of my great oeuvre The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Troubleshooting Your Computer, your investment is about to pay off.

I love THIS, particularly the speed-skating bit.

Pancakes up first today. Well, crèpes really; French people generally disdain ‘pancakes’ as overly-thick English creations suitable only for use as fireblankets and airplane wheel chocks. For my response to this, see last week’s mention of pudding.
‘Nuff said.
So, crèpes are lace-thin pancakes, as you probably alread know. And, as most of us in class are either French or cooks or both, most of us have already made the odd one or two in our lives. So today’s competition is to see who can make the most crèpes with the half-litre of mixture we make up. I get 24, Eric – who makes these damned things every day (note I’m getting my defence in early) – managed 30. but they weren’t all complete, and didn’t taste as nice as mine anyway.
We use them to make ‘Aumonières Normandes’, small parcels with butter-fried diced apples inside. Very yummy and, for once, we get to eat them as we take them over to the self-service cafeteria where some of us eat every week.
The quality of food in the cafeteria is, as I may have mentioned before, variable. This week’s it’s edible, though, veal chops with mixed vegetables. The veg look very regularly diced into a lovely brunoise from a distance, and tasting confirms that they’ve come out of a tin. Our class doesn’t get to do TPs (Travails Pratiques, practical work sessions) in the caféteria kitchen, but the youngsters doing the same course as us but full-tiem over two years get regular sessions there. Some, it’s obvious, like it more than others.
There’s a big debate going on in the French catering industry that this qualification, the CAP (Certificat d’Aptitude Professionnel) should be more oriented towards opening cans and microwaving vacuum-packed mush. A debate led, of course, by Big Business, the sort that have large chains of restaurants where economies of scale (the scale economy of employing low-talent droids to push microwave buttons instead of people who know how to prepare fresh veg) are important. The small businesses want cooks who can cook, of course, but lots of little voices are drowned out by the few big, loud ones.
Me, I’m happy to be getting a classical French cooking training in the heart of Provence from a great school chef and an excellent restaurant chef. I count my blessings daily.
Or at least weekly. During, for example, our ‘Droit’ class, which we have this afternoon. ‘Droit’ strictly speaking means ‘law’, but in our case means general business administration as well. Today we learn about “business partners” – clients, suppliers, “l’état et les organimsmes sociaux” financial partners, banks, investors, you name it.
And then, just for fun, we do a household budget – work out that, if Monsieur Marsaud spends X on electricity, Y on food and Z on his mobile phone bill then he has only 38 cents a month left to live on. Or something like that. Perhaps he can eat microwaved meals in a local chain restaurant.
This afternoon we do ‘Carré de porc poëlé ‘Choisy’ – Choisy in this case meaning ‘containing lettuce’. Our lettuce is first poached in hot water (départ à chaud – I’m learning about what vegetables to cook in hot water, cold water, and how important it is to refresh in iced water immediately after cooking to preserve the vitamin and mineral content, enhance the colour and halt the cooking process before it turns to the sort of mush you get from microwaving vacuum-packed rubbish…(OK, I promise to stop going on about this. Can you tell my Chef has been indoctrinating me? Although we use sous-vide – vacuum-packing – a lot in the restaurant, he hates the microwave and doesn’t actually have one in his home kitchen. The one at work is used for defrosting breadcrumbs).
Then we have to form them into a ‘fuseau’ which is either a spindle, or one leg of a pair of ski pants, so I’m going for ski pants and achieve the required effect (if you wear huge, baggy ski pants like I do). This is then cut in two lengthways and braised in the oven at the same time as the Carré de porc, the section of pork ribs we each have to de-bone and cook.
We were going to have a run of four ribs to de-bone and cook whole and my restaurant chef has been ordering them in all week for me to practise on. Which, as it turns out, means I’ll be the only person doing such a thing this week since our school ones arrive frozen and already sliced into individual chops. We do get to cut one of the bones off each chop, but it’s no real challenge.
We do try following the rest of the recipe (cooking the pork in the oven with a regular GA, garniture aromatique of onions, carrots and a bouquet garni) but it seems slightly futile to try and re-assemble the chops into a joint at the end. So we don’t do that.
The lettuce are very good, though, I’d never really thought of using them as a cooked vegetable. Like radishes, which we also cook at the restaurant.
Next week: I’m a chicken plucker!