-
Last day at school today. We cook poulet chasseur, chicken in mushroom, tomato and wine sauce, pommes au four (roast potatoes) this morning and do it without having to be told much. This afternoon we spend going over a few basic techniques, ideas and problems to revise for our exam next week. Chef says he’s…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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)…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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,…
-
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’…
-
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…
mostxlnt.com 