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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 affilée’, dressing a…
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More omelets this morning, followed by an ‘examen blanc’ this afternoon. ‘Blanc’ as in ‘pretend’ – so a ‘mariage blanc’ is a fake marriage undertaken for the purposes of gaining French citizenship, a ‘nuit blanc’ is a sleepless night and so on.The omelets are interesting because we get to use poitrine salée, salted pork belly…
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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…
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We’ve just had our second ‘examen blanc’ – mock exam – and I got 14.5/20 for the practical, which was OK. I was aiming for 16, but lost at least one and possibly two marks because I turned in my tricornes late – choux buns baked on a small tartlet base of pate brisé (pastry)…
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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…
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French bureaucracy is complicated for a number of reasons, not least the fact that it’s charged with keeping French bureaucracy going. In the UK, 11% of the workforce works for the government in one capacity or another – policemen, nurses, bureaucrats, whatever. In France, the percentage is 24%. Twenty-four percent! A quarter of the workforce…
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Our weekly classes are settling into a nice rhythm now that we’re over half-way through our year here at the Ecole d’Hotellerie in Avignon.We cook one dish in the morning, a second in the afternoon and have an hour-long lunch break followed by one hour of classroom lecturing in the middle.I hadn’t realised this before,…
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Per Bourdain’s advice, although still tired after my recent illness I manage to keep up with this morning’s recipe, “Appareil à Bavarois aux oeufs”. The English for ‘Bavarois’ appears to be ‘Bavarois’ – I’m already largely losing my ability to talk in English much of the time. Well, you can call it a ‘Bavarian cream’…
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One of the things that encouraged me to take up cooking professionally was Anthony Bourdain’s book ‘Cooking Confidential’. I enjoyed his swashbuckling stories and formulated a plan to learn to cook and travel the world, mixing it up with fellow kitchen workers from Mexico to Mauritius, living out of a suitcase, three months here, a…
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If you have to take time off sick from a restaurant in the South of France, you’re supposed to do it in the winter when it’s closed anyway. Luckily for me it’s January and the restaurant is – mostly – closed for the whole month, only due to officially re-open on St Valentine’s Day. There…
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