[ad#standard]
Normally we do a couple of recipes a week at school. Today, we do five, just to keep ourselves busy: Gnocci à la Parisienne, Millefeuilles, beignets de pommes, omelettes and pintadeau rôti sur canapé.
Lots of interesting stuff there. Parisian gnocci are potatoes mashed, mixed with choux pastry batter and then deep-fried in churro-length portions. Millefeuilles are, well, millefeuilles, sheets of puff pastry interspersed with crème patissière. Beignets de pommes are apple circles deep fried in batter. Omelettes are omelets, this time with mushrooms. And pintadeau rôti sur canapé is guinea fowl roasted and served on toast. Canapé, it turns out, is not what you eat with your evening cocktails but the small slice of toasted bread on which you serve it. Who knew? Apart from every French person to whom I point out this remarkable fact, that is. Duh, they say, You Eenglish peeple, you steal all our words.
French people are like that because they’re used to all their words having several meanings. The French language has the smallest vocabulary of any European language, a fact which they will vehemently deny – even when you prove it to them. They get around this first, as I say, by using each word several times over, and then nicking lots of words from English (as we nicked many of our words from the French back in the Norman invasion days). Even when they’ve already got a perfectly good French word for whatever they’re talking about – instead of using ‘grignoter’ to describe snacking between meals they now talk about ‘le snacking’.
Chef’s idea today is to get us to do an entire meal from hors d’oeuvre (‘outside the [main] work’) to pudding, which sounds cool although his choice of menu wouldn’t necessarily be mine.
The Parisian gnocci are popular, but then what’s not to like about any form of fried potato? And not really difficult to make either, just equal quantities of mashed spuds and choux pastry batter, piped into hot oil from a plastic piping bag, cutting appropriate lengths with scissors. Actually it turns out to be easier to do this in pairs, one squeezing the piping bag and the other working the scissors.
The crème patissière for the millefeuilles is one of those recipes that looks simple – it has only four ingredients, flour, eggs, milk and sugar after all – but which can go horribly wrong if you don’t pay attention and do it properly. It’s all too easy to end up with tile cement or yellow water with lumps in it, so keep stirring! And I discover that it’s much, much easier to cut puff pastry into interesting shapes before you cook it, rather than afterwards. And that no matter how sharp your sharp knife may be, a serrated knife is what you need for cutting cooked pastry.
Beignets de pomme are also very simple. I’ve done them at home using cider instead of water in the batter, and very good they are too. Just core and slice your apples, dip in flour, dip in batter, fry, coat in sugar. We churn out a few hundred and send them on over to the school canteen so we can eat them for lunch ourselves – not that we have enormous appetites since we’ve been stuffing ourselves on Parisian gnocci, millefeuilles and apple fritters all morning. And then omlets, the last thing we do before our own lunch break, and everyone has their own way of doing these things. Meh. I like to just mix three eggs, salt and pepper, oil in the pan, nice and hot, pour in the eggs and drag mix from the outside to the centre with the back of the fork I used to mix the eggs up. When it’s setting, pop on the fried mushrooms and fold over and then fold out of the frying pan onto the plate.
Being French, Chef tells me that the omelet I’ve produced it too coloured – they should be yellow not browned, he says, nul points. Huh.
Our after-dinner nap is the complicated version of the Fiche de Stock we started the other week. Good grief. No really. Apparently we can use the ‘Méthode PEP, Premier Entré Premier Sorti’, first in first out, or ‘Méthode de court moyen pondere’ which I don’t even pretend to understand. It’s something to do with working out the average cost of stock because it all costs different amounts depending on when you buy it. Apparently. Anyway, first-in, first-out sounds much more sensible so that’s the one I’ll be sticking with.
We finish off jointing our pintadeau, browning and then roasting them and serving them up on slices of toast. Personally I think a smear of Marmite or marmalade is more manageable on toast than a quarter of guinea fowl, but what do I know? The toast works to mop up the juices dripping out of the fowl, apparently, and it’s a very old-fashioned way to serve up such delicacies which we have to know because all good French cooking is Very Old. Well, a century old anyway.
Stood the test of time though, hasn’t it?[ad]

Week 20: Pulling a sickie

Today, I should have been cooking a Genoise cake, making my own noodles and filleting trout to cook in red wine.
Instead, I spent it being poorly. Properly ‘You should really go to hospital’ poorly.
Back in 1997 when we were first looking for a house to buy in the South of France, I fell very ill one night in the B&B where we regularly stayed.
It started out as a flu-like symptoms with my right leg swelling up, then developed into a frightening bout of the shakes as I heated up and cooled down in turn with a temperature a couple of degrees above normal. That night I woke up and tried to go to the bathroom for a glass of water and found I couldn’t stand up. I got out of bed and immediately fell to the floor, and simply couldn’t get up again – I was unable to work out which way was ‘down’ to push against the floor to pick myself up. Very frightening.
We called a doctor and he couldn’t find anything wrong, but did rule out having been bitten by something. The day before we’d been house-hunting in the Camargue and I feared I’d been bitten by a mosquito and had contracted malaria. Malarial mosquitos, said the doctor, are a few thousand miles away in Africa – has this man never heard of A Mighty Wind blowing them across the Mediterranean? And what about those little red spiders that are supposed to live in the vines around here? They’re poisonous, everyone who knows nothing says so.
After a day or two the fever went away and I was fine until the symptoms came up again a couple of years later, again without a doctor being able to diagnose the problem despite me undergoing various tests. And then I got another bout of the mystery illness about once a year, so when the problem came up this weekend I rushed round to the doctor immediately. I’ve come to recognise the symptoms early now, particularly the swelling of my right leg, so she was able to order a blood test while the problem was in full flow.
I have, it turns out, an ‘erisipel’, a blood infection. I have – have always had, since my early childhood – athlete’s foot which comes and goes and I control with topical creams to kill the ‘champignons’, the ‘mushrooms’ as the French so delightfully call the fungi. Every now and then they get into my bloodstream via a cut or break in the skin on my foot and infect my whole body – my leg swells up as it’s nearest the site of infection.
My doctor says the best thing is to go to hospital immediately since this is a very serious problem and I could die if I don’t get it sorted out. Ha! Has she never heard of the Cook’s Code of Conduct? Rule 1: Always Go To Work, No Matter What. Rule 2: See rule 1.
The restaurant is officially closed at the moment, but I’m working with the Chef on a few passing groups and our resident group of Gendarmes (groups of CRS Gendarmes, the French riot police, are regularly stationed away from home all over the country and we have a permanent group staying in the hotel). So as it’s just me and him there’s no question of me leaving him to work alone so I tell her to find another solution.
Hmm. Well, you could take this, and this, and this and use this cream and this special soap and lie in bed at home and a nurse will come round and give you twice-daily injections in the stomach to try to stem the infection, she says. Eight prescriptions? I must be poorly. In France, others judge your real level of illness by how many items you’re prescribed – one or two and you’re clearly faking it. Three or four and yes, well, OK, you might be a bit sick but it’s not serious. Five or six items and you’re definitely poorly, take the day off. Eight items, plus a nurse coming round morning and evening to give you an injection? Now you’re definitely sick, lie down straight away.
So I go with this option, except the only nurse I can find in the yellow pages who will take me on doesn’t do home visits so far away from home (she’s a five minute walk from my flat) so I have to schlepp round there twice a day. Me, who’s supposedly so ill I should be on a drip in hospital.
Anyway. So I do that and continue going in to work too, collapsing in bed as soon as I get home. Delphine is working at the moment but, sterling trooper that she is, manages to drive me to and from work most days and I get the bus the rest of the time rather than taking my bike – I’m really not up to cycling the five kilometres to the restaurant.
And the Cook’s Code of Conduct, she rules sternly, doesn’t apply to school and I get to spend the whole day in bed. I do go in to work in the evening, but it’s only for a couple of hours so it’s almost a complete day of rest.

My very old friend Simon Grosset – we’ve known each other since 1980 when we met at the offices of the London Student newspaper, he as a photographer and I as a reporter – has taken some stunningly brilliant photos of our wedding last weekend. http://www.q-photography.co.uk/CDprints/
It does help that he’s a professional wedding photographer now, of course.
The ‘official’ pictures are being processed at the moment by Walter, of Studio Italiano – another great photographer with a great website, http://studioitaliano.fr/

A microbe, our teacher tells us in our ‘Hygiene’ class today, is an infinitely small living being visible only through a microscope. I want to tell her that anything that is ‘infinitely’ small is, by definition, not visible through anything, let alone a microscope, but desist. No one likes to be corrected by someone older and wiser than they are when they’re pretending to teach 16-year-olds.
Which is one of the recurring – indeed, perhaps the only – problems I have with this course. That is, it’s really designed to be done by young adults stepping out into the world for the first time, not smart-arsed 46-year-olds who are already more highly qualified, not to say intelligent (and modest to boot) than their teachers. But classes on hygiene, as it’s called, and law and so on are part of the course and will come up in the exam and so yes, they have to be done.
What is also annoyingly starting to become clear is that I may also have to do all the other exams the 17-year-olds do when they take their cookery exams, i.e. In French, maths, geography, history and so on. When I signed up for this course last year I was told that, since I already have a higher exam qualification in the UK (my degree, in fact, poor though it was) I would be excused all but the cookery exams. Now, it turns out, the French educational system farts in the general direction of the English educational system and refuses to recognise it as in any way worthwhile whatsoever. “Ah doo nat recognaize yorr deggree,” it says in its heavily-accented English, much in the style of the French soldiers in that Monty Python film. I can appeal, of course, a process which will (a) take for ever, (b) cast a bad light on me and (c) will be won by the French so I might as well do the other exams and get it over with. As Delphine says, even if they agree now to recognise my English Degree they could decide not to in a few years’ time and take my CAP away, so just knuckle down and do the other exams.
The problem is that the other adult education students in my year come in on Tuesday mornings to study these other subjects (the teenagers are at school full-time and take two years to complete the course) and I now have to glean, second-hand from them details on exactly what these examinations may be about.
This one will run and run.
Like some of the cheeses we start talking about amongst ourselves in our hygiene class. It’s usually Eric who starts these discussions – he’s a bit, but not much, younger than me and runs his family restaurant just outside Avignon. He often manages to get our Hygiene teacher going on another subject than the one she’s teaching us (how much more fat there is in a tablespoon of mayonnaise than a tablespoon of vinaigrette is one of her favourites) and the ensuing discussions often serve to wake us all up. Which is not necessarily a good thing, but anyway.
The important thing we take away from today’s class (says our teacher) is that MOs (Micro Organismes) have five conditions essential for their life: something to eat, particularly proteins; at least 40% water in their environment; an agreeable temperature of 37 degrees centigrade; neutral pH of 7; and either an oxygenated atmosphere for aerobic bacteria or a lack of it for anaerobic ones. I, being a clever dick, think about those bugs that live inside volcanic vents in the ocean, inside frozen food and elsewhere these conditions don’t apply, but that’s just me being a clever dick. For the purpose of this exam, bugs like the conditions that apply inside our bodies, full stop.
Today’s cooking is a Gibelotte de Braconniers, essentially a hunter’s stew made on this occasion with rabbit. I’ve worked with rabbit a fair bit in the past; at my first restaurant we made rabbit terrine by stewing rabbit thighs with a few onions and then picking off the meat to stuff into aluminium ramekins, topping them up with the cooking juice and thyme laced with gelatine and allowing them to set. At my current restaurant chef sometimes puts rabbit on the weekly menu and I’ve had a go at cutting them up a few times.
Today we learn how to divide the body into six portions (some of them fairly mean ones it has to be said, there’s not an enormous amount of meat on a rabbit after all) and David impresses us by producing a series of côtes de lapin, rabbit chops which they serve as amuse bouches in the restaurant where he works (which is even posher than the one where I work). Hey David, no one likes a smart arse…
This afternoon is a ‘Charlotte aux fruits confits’. The ‘Fruits confits’ turn out to be tinned strawberries, which is fine. Charlottes are cream puddings set either by the addition of fruit or gelatine and, to be on the safe side, we use both, and they work fairly well since most don’t turn out too runny and several are definitely edible. And it’s good practise for me since it’s Delphine’s birthday this weekend and we’re celebrating at home in Avignon by inviting the family round. Delphine wants a charlotte – she’s celebrating in conjunction with her brother who’s birthday comes soon – and traditionally they have a charlotte, so I’ve promised to make a gigantic one.
We finish off the day making something much more interesting – salmon profiteroles with beurre blanc. Beurre blanc – translating it as ‘white butter’ doesn’t really have the same cachet does it? – is a favourite of mine, easy to make, great tasting and it seems to impress people a lot. Every time I go to see Nick and Amanda in London I have to make it for them, with Amanda practising hard to perfect it herself. Here’s a tip: you can’t keep it in the fridge and use it again the next day, Amanda…
Of course, this being France and the recipe only having four basic ingredients – chopped shallots, wine and/or vinegar, salt and butter – the inverse square law of arguing about how to make it applies. That is, the less ingredients something has, the more different ways there are of making it. The arguments in class centre around how the proportions of wine and vinegar change depending on what you serve it with. Me, I just go for a 50-50 split but this is, clearly, the Easy, Foreign way out. What if you’re serving it with sole? Salmon? Surely you need more vinegar with the salmon…
The salmon profiteroles are simple by comparison: poach the salmon in a little cream, season, stuff into the choux buns you made earlier. Choux buns I do enjoy making, especially now I’ve got over the temptation to cook them too little – they always need more time in the oven than you think to dry them out properly. For which you also need an oven with vents that open to let the steam out – this may be why your choux buns don’t work at home, the oven is sealed shut and keeps all the moisture inside, preventing your choux from stiffening suitably.
Now there’s a tip…

I’ve been marvelling at myself recently, marvelling at the skills I have now that I simply didn’t have four or five years ago. Last night, for example, I sliced up some home-smoked salmon with which to make some smoked salmon, dill-cream lasagnes (long story about how I got to the point of making salmon lasagne in the evening to follow one day) and was amazed to see how thinly I can now slice a filet of smoked salmon.
Ditto slicing up juliennes of red pepper to decorate a salad, or a brunoise of lemon peel. So actually I suppose it’s my knife skills that are impressing me most right now, even though I have always been easily impressed.
Where did these skills come from? The past four and a bit years of working in professional kitchens, obviously, earning my living doing what I like doing.
Five years ago if I didn’t buy smoked salmon ready-sliced it was going to be served in chunks, and the nearest thing I’d heard of to julienne of red peppers was probably Julian Clary. Now I can do both myself, and make a cracking beurre blanc, cook your steak bleu, à point or, if you insist, bien cuit and serve 55 people their starters inside an hour. Blimey.
But I still love writing, which is why I’m here at 7 in the morning trying to crank out some book chapters. Or rather, here avoiding cranking out some book chapters by pretending that this diary is a way to earn money when it really isn’t.
Ciao.

Kids. Leave them alone for five minutes with your computer and this is what they do to it…

I was actually swapping in a new HD for my Macbook Pro, a 320 GB monster to replace the titchy 200 GB  item with which it was supplied. I did this by buying a Western Digital external USB HD (that’s its red enclosure in the background), putting its HD into the Macbook Pro and then the Macbook Pro disc into the WD enclosure to use as a backup. After a frightening moment when the MBP wouldn’t boot (hadn’t pushed the RAM sticks all the way back in – rookie mistake, RAM always needs a heftier push than you think it needs or dare to give it) all is well. I used CarbonCopyCloner to copy the old internal disc over to the new external one before doing the swap and voilà, instant new HD.

The MBP has actually been poorly this week for the first time in its life (14 months old and counting now). Luckily I bought the extended AppleCare warranty to extend the regular 12 month warranty to three years, and it’s paid off; the left fan failed, unremarked by me, and subsequently the left I/O board overheated and failed, taking out the left two USB slots, the sound and the Airport WiFi card.s A quick search on the Apple website (the MBP still worked and connected to the internet via wired Ethernet) and I found my local Apple approved repair shop. Dropped it in Monday evening, collected it repaired Wednesday afternoon, no charge for a repair which would otherwise have cost me about €150 in parts and double that in repair person’s billable hours, i.e. more than the €367 I paid for the warranty last year. Bargain. And it’s a worldwide warranty too – break down anywhere, get it repaired for free in the local Apple repair shop, no charge.

So yes, Apples do break down. But as I’ve said many times in the past, you judge a company by how they put things right when they go wrong and in this case the service was exemplary.

I’ve been following David Allison’s move to Macs with interest, having done the same myself over a year ago. His latest post neatly sums up my thoughts. In fact while my MBP was away in the clinic I used my old Windows XP machine – another decision I made a very long time ago was to keep as much of my work online as possible so my computing life continued almost seamlessly – and found that I didn’t hate it. It worked fine. But now that the MBP is back, well, it’s turned off again.

Those who’ve been around here since the start will remember Anne Weale. She first contacted me when Dr Keyboard launched in The Times and was one of the very first testers of this site back in 1996. I’ve just learned that she passed away last October – I was looking up her e-mail address to write to her and found her website was gone. I’m sure we’ll all miss her very much.
http://bookwormonthenet.blogspot.com/ for her blog
http://www.romancewiki.com/Anne_Weale for the Wiki about her life.
My condolences to her family.

OK, this is a large-ish film, over 20MB; one for the grand-parents only, perhaps.

Scarlett screams at bathtime

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmostxlnt.co.uk%2Fdiary%2F&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=en&tl=fr

Attention: par machine, donc pas trop fiable… mais quand meme.