Journée excellente à l’école aujourd’hui; Filets de Rouget, sauce bonne femme avec légumes glacés à blanc. And you know what, I’ve just realised I thought and typed all that in French. I see Wendy once every week or so and chat with my mother every couple of weeks, but normally I just don’t speak English at all. I’m losing the habit; I’ll be wearing a beret and stripey shirt next.
Anyway. Good day at school, as above. The English is about the same, come to look at it. We were due to be doing Merlan but they didn’t have any, unfortunately, so we got rougets (the cheap kind, not the ‘de rochers’ type Chef buys at the restaurant – check to see if they have pointy noses – if they do, they’re the cheap ones, you want the good rock-dwelling kind).
On average I do about a hundred rougets a month, so cleaning and filetting 10 today wasn’t much of a hardship, really. We were supposed to do three or four each, but school Chef knows I know how to do fish so he gives me all the extra left-over ones to do. Which I enjoy doing anyway, so that’s fine and I’m pleased he has confidence in me to make me do them.
Sauce Bonne Femme is made with a réduction à glacé of the fumet de poisson we made with the bones and a handful of onions, shallots, leeks, vegetable trimmings and whatever you can scrape from under you knuckles. A glacé means reducing the cooking fluid (after cooking the fillets in the oven) down to a syrupy consistency, then monté it au beurre – stir in lots and lots of butter (a hundred grammes in about 50 ccs of fumet).
Today, though, was the first time we’ve had to present our work on a plate to Chef, and I’m extremely pleased to have got great marks for everything except for my courgettes, which apparently didn’t have enough salt in them. Chef is a demon for salt, however, and ‘enough’ for him is ‘blerk!’ for normal people, so I’m not too worried about that; still, know your client and cook accordingly. He marked us + or – on seven criteria – overall presentation, cleanliness of the plate (ha! I was the only person who thought to wash their provided plate before serving, and then to heat it up in the oven), warmth of the dish, taste of the fish, sauce and vegetables. I got a + in everything except the courgettes, which he marked as +-, and the overall presentation which got a double ++ as the most original of the day. Cool. I served it with the two fillets back-to-back in the middle of the plate, vertically, with the veg (two each of three veg – carrots, turnips and courgettes) arranged along the sides like rays of sunshine, the sauce at either end but not between the veg, then a long line of chopped parsley dribbled vertically up the plate and right over the edges. Looked nice I thought, anyway, and so did Chef. We’re supposed to go for height, too, but I’m really not into building towers and propping fish fillets up with bits of turnip. Still, know your client.

Mondovino and you’ll never buy any wine except what you can find up the road ever again (like Alex – see right – does already). Very highly recommended, although it’s only in French. Worth three years studying the language to appreciate it.

Apart from that a waiter cut the end off my finger the other day so I can’t type very well, but school’s cool and I’m really enjoying it; I hope to write something by the end of the week and even get started on an online recipe database (this will be an embarrassing post to read in 5 years’ time).

http://www.talklikeapirate.com/piratehome.html

More to follow to explain this gibberish:

Just finished the first day; disappointed we’re NOT allowed to eat or
even taste what we cook, they flog it off in the college brasserie the
next day; also not much technique today – “slice those apples,” he
said; I knew how to slice them nice and fine, but the chap sharing my
workstation was cutting them half an inch thick to fan on top of an
apple tart.
And at the moment they’re saying my UK qualifications – my degree –
aren’t recognised by France so I’ll also have to sit papers on French
and English language, history, geography, maths and so on. Bummer. May
be appealing to the European Court of Human Rights.
Chef’s nice enough, but told me off for turning up in my cycling
clothes – trainers, jogging bottoms, anorak – and said I should be
arriving in a suit and tie! This after cycling 5kms from the centre of
town!
Right, I said, sure. It’s 50 metres from the gates to the changing
room and we stay in our kitchen clothes all day. Of course I’m gonna
put on a suit and tie for that distance.

Blimey, this is the list of stuff I need for school – starting next Monday.
Bonus points for anyone who knows what a canneleur, douille cannelée and a spatule en exoglass are.

Trousseau professionnel

Tenue vestimentaire
* Pantalon
* Veste
* Tablier
* Calot
* Tour de cou
* 2 Torchons
* Chaussures de sécurité

Ustensiles
* 1 Eminceur
* 1 Filet de sole
* 1 Désosseur
* 1 Office
* 1 Econome
* 1 Canneleur
* 1 Fusil
* 1 Verre mesureur
* 1 paire de ciseaux
* 2 Douilles cannelées ( 5 et 10 mm)
* 2 Douilles unies (7 et 12 mm)
* 1 Pinceau
* 1 Corne ou maryse
* 1 Spatule en exoglass + 1 plate inox pour lisser
* 1 Fouet à sauce
* 1 Fourchette à rôti
* 1 Aiguille à brider
* 1 Cuillère à racine
* 1 Cuillère + 1 Fourchette

And if you know what a ‘Cuillère à racine’ is, I’ll buy one for you too. Clue: It’s NOT a rooted spoon, because that’s just gibberish. And it’s not a spoon invented by a 17th century French author, either. I think.

http://mgno.com/

http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/15/pf/training_pay/index.htm – $32,000 starting salary! That’s TWICE what I earn! I’m moving to the USA!

So I’ve been doing a fair bit of Computational Adjustments myself recently, with some results that may or may not be interesting.
This all began a few months ago when I finally gave up on Norton AV which was point-blank refusing to allow me to pay for another year’s service, so I installed AVG from Grisoft. Which promptly allowed in a virus which wiped the MBRs of three hard discs. I got the data back with a very useful widget called GetbackNTFS – highly recommended – and just did a new install of Windows XP on the C: drive. Which promptly went bang, as did one of my data discs.
The C: drive was an 8-year-old Maxtor and entitled to do so; the data disc was an 8 MONTH old Samsung, and not so entitled. Now, suffice to say, this computer has three 200 gigabyte Maxtor HDs and I have a claim in against Samsung.

So we went to the pictures and ate out last night; Garden State at the Utopia – good flick with one of my favourite actors in it, Zapp Brannigan or whatever that bloke out of Scrubs is called (OK, not so ‘favourite’ that I can remember his name). Then Tapas at TapaLocas much to the derision of the cooks at work today. Apparently the grub there is ‘rubbish’, not that any of them have eaten there. Still, they’re impressed that TL did 900 covers a day during the festival last year. I just think about the PBD (Poor Bloody Dishwasher).
Sunday night we ate at Les Artistes, just down the road from here in front of the Hotel d’Europe. We ate in the square and very pleasant it was too, with a decent menu for EUR15. Snails, chicken in wild mushroom sauce, good ice cream and wine at EUR6 a pichet – pretty decent for the centre of Avignon.
OK, Delphine only got two filets of rouget for her main course, but then rouget isn’t cheap compared to chicken, so I got a large portion. Nice cocktails too, once we persuaded the waitres that, yes yes you do have cocktails here, we’ve had them before, they’re on the ice cream menu.
Lots of shopping yesterday, groceries at Lidl (I love shopping there, you fill your trolley and get a bill for EUR21 at the end of it all. Bargain), lotsa makeup and stuff at Yves Rocher (not for me, I’m afraid, I took the opportunity to listen to all the CDs on trial at Virgin next door. Bad customer that I am I noted down all the good ones and will buy them from allofmp3.com.
Recent discovery: The Blind Boys of Alabama, aka the Alabama Blind Boys. Really cool gospel blues; OK, the lyrics, as we say in French, are nul – but boy, those boys can’t half sing. Strong work, chaps.

http://www.allofmp3.com
Support the Russian mafia! I do!