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Once again Chef (restaurant – as opposed to Chef (Ecole)) came up trumps by getting me to make a few kilos of puff pastry in advance of this week’s school session. Normally in the restaurant we use bought-in sheets of frozen puff pastry, one of the very (very very) few ready-made things we use, for…
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In my diary today I wrote, and I quote: “Journée excellente à l’école aujourd’hui; Filets de Rouget, sauce bonne femme avec légumes glacés à blanc”.I didn’t realise I’d written it in French until I read it later. I’ve started speaking and thinking in French almost all the time, even when I write my diary. Apart from…
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I was on quite a high after last week’s class, to be honest, despite being told that my jogging bottoms are not smart enough to wear in public. This week brings me right down with a large bump.It didn’t help that I’d spent a great weekend welcoming old friends to Avignon, showing off my new…
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After weeks of preparation, months of planning and a couple of years of thinking about it, my first day at cookery school finally came and, just like in the restaurant, went in a fast-moving blur of put your stuff here, cut that, boil the other and find yourself a saucepan.The biggest disappointment of the first…
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Starting work at Les Agassins was a lot of ‘hurry up and wait’. The restaurant closed for Christmas and New Year with a few groups booked in here and there until Valentine’s Day, when the hotel and restaurant opened – still part-time – for the new season.It wasn’t until towards Easter that it was open…
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I worked with Franck and Isabelle for six months before I had the confidence to believe their urgings to go out there and get a proper, paying job.During those months I’d come in every Thursday morning at 9 am and they would already be hard at work – they live in the flat above the…
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Only young people have the luxury of knowing everything, simply because they know so little. As you get older the day finally comes when you realise that not only will you never know everything, the amount of stuff you will never know is increasing exponentially.Worse, there are things you didn’t know you didn’t know but…
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Chef stands me in front of a big bowl of fresh, green French beans, haricots verts, a plastic cutting board and a knife.”You can start with these,” he says before moving off to start doing something serious to the lumps of meat that have just arrived.Now, I’m not daft. I’m not stupid. I’ve done French…
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PrologueIt all starts, as do so many lunatic ideas, with lunch. Because I had so much free time on my hands as a journalist I’d started a book club for local ex-pats and we met in my favourite local restaurant, La Grange de Labahou, in Anduze, Gateway to the Cevennes mountains.We were discussing Toast –…
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