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Delphine drives me to school this morning. I’m still not up to cycling, so she drops me off on her way to work and I’ll get the bus home this evening.I apologise to Chef for missing last week and he checks to make sure I’ve been given the recipes they worked on while I was…
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14.5 out of 20 for my exam at the end of last term, which I was very pleased with indeed, third in the class behind David, who’s a waiter-turned-cook working in a posh restaurant north-east of Avignon, and Beatrice, the Belgian owner of a very smart local chambre d’hôte bed-and-breakfast. And then Philippe our teacher…
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We have our first all-day test exam today, with 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…
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A side of EnglishThe French people with whom I work are always smugly pleased when one of the two English-named (or so they think) dessert dishes they know of comes up. The first is crème Anglaise which they translate as English Cream and English people translate as Custard. The French make this by beating together…
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There are, it turns out, rather a lot of soups. Going back to the days of Escoffier and earlier, rather than calling soup with carrots in it, ‘Carrot Soup’, the French call it ‘Potage Crècy’, named after either Crècy-la-Chapelle in Seine-et-Marne, or after Crècy-en-Ponthieu in the Somme. Both claim they grow the best carrots and…
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Pancakes up first today. Well, crêpes really; French people generally disdain ‘pancakes’ as overly-thick American creations (as in MacDo breakfasts) suitable only for use as fire blankets and airplane wheel chocks.So, crêpes are lace-thin pancakes, as you probably already know. And, as most of us in class are either French or cooks or both, most…
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The French are initially surprised to find an English person cooking at all. There’s a famous TV advert here for After Eight chocolate mints which shows a group of BCBGs (French for ‘yuppies’) eating After Eights with their post-dinner coffee and finding them distinctly edible, if not positively quite nice. “After Eights,” the tagline runs,…
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Ingredients5 kgs veal bones – many butchers give them away. This is easy to say, but the idea of asking for something like this may frighten you. Don’t be frightened. Most good butchers – all good butchers – like customers who like interesting bits of dead animal. They literally throw away tens of kilos of…
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I get the whole idea of progressions; I understand why we do them and I even think I understand how to do them. But, to start with, I find it hard to actually write one down. A progression? It’s literally how you plan to progress through the day, in 5, 10 or 15 minute increments,…
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It’ll soon be Christmas and although the season has wound down completely and we have no more than a couple of rooms occupied in the hotel at any one time (if any at all), we’re still fairly busy in the restaurant with Christmas lunch and dinner groups. December was supposed to be quiet because the…
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