this little piggy went to market

I've had some great food experiences recently: dinner chez my Dutch friend Sjoerd (from superior class); dinner at Le Hide - a fabulous restaurant in the 17th run by a Japanese chef who trained under Joël Robuchon; dinner round at H's for her birthday last week; a fondue night at Le Refuge des Fondues in Montmartre where they serve wine in baby bottles; several market trips; and a visit to the world-famous Poilâne bakery where you can buy a very cool bread box for a cool 244€.

Our class dinner at L'Atelier Maître Albert however - "a restaurant with Guy Savoy" - was disappointing. The amuse bouche of tiny grilled mussels on cocktail sticks had bits of shell and dirt in them and the chilled tomato soup tasted just like Heinz. The cod with herb mash was very good, if a bit basic, and the lamb shanks, while perfectly cooked, could have done with some figs or prunes or similar to sex up the sauce. Not really what you'd expect from a restaurant with links to a Michelin starred chef (actually, chefs aren't awarded Michelin stars, their restaurants are, but let's not split mussel beards).

***

H is determined to be fluent in French by the time she leaves Paris in five weeks - which for someone starting from scratch and who sounds as if she's convulsing when she speaks it - will require a miracle of biblical proportions. She's started reading children's books, the French equivalent of Janet and John, and she likes someone, anyone - me, J, waiters, shop assistants, unsuspecting passengers on the Metro - to read words out to her to help her with the pronunciation. So I spent an excruciating 20 minutes in a posh coffee shop in chic St-Germain-des-Prés last week, reading Jeanette et Jean: Allons-y jouer (let's go and play)  aloud.

This badgering even continues in class. I'm pretty focused in our practicals and don't like to engage in idle chitchat, so I'll be concentrating on filleting a lemon sole or making a brunoise of carrots when I'll look round and see H through a haze of smoke, leaning casually against the wall admiring her nails, and she'll say: "Mate, how do you say in French, my saucepan's on fire?"

Strewth!

We have our written exam in just under two weeks so I'm going to have to knuckle down and start studying - which means no time for frivolous blogging I'm afraid.

a busman's holiday

When I arrived home last weekend I was surprised, in a Samuel Johnson 'dog walking on its hind legs' kind of way, to find that BB had cleaned the house. Not that it had been done well; but that it had been done at all!

It was great to be home. Before I came to Paris I was afraid I would love it so much I would never want to leave, but it transpires I'm a simple country girl at heart. I miss the mountains and the wide-open spaces ...

... and not having neighbours. I left my building here in Paris yesterday at the same time as my hobnailed-booted upstairs neighbour (who turns out to be a  Little Old Lady!) and found myself tailing her, trying to check out her footwear. I reckon she's a European size 36 so I'm going to send her a pair of soft slippers.

On Saturday the usual suspects turned up at Nainbo's for apéros and we watched with amusement as he went round the garden scattering grass seed, closely followed by La Blonde, scattering weedkiller. Bit of a communication problem going on there I think.

Everyone wanted to know about my course and after a lengthy discussion about recipes there was a long expectant pause, at the end of which I tried to say: "I'm going skiing tomorrow", but it came out all funny and sounded like: "Why don't you all come round for lunch tomorrow?"

So instead of hitting the slopes or just lounging in bed with my cats, a cup of green tea and a good cookery book, Sunday morning was spent in the kitchen.

Now that the frost's gone my leeks are ready for pulling up so we started with leeks gribiche - braised leeks smothered in a smooth sharp caper-laden vinaigrette with a generous handful of snipped chives. Then we had pot roasted rabbit with rosemary sage and lemon served with turned artichokes and roast potatoes with saffron, followed by home-made vanilla ice-cream. Miam.

Since I'm struggling to find time to blog, a friend suggested I sign up to Twitter, so you can follow me at twitter.com/atasteofsavoie.

vegetable turning and nasty chefs

We're into week four and already a third of the way through the course - I can't believe it.

To give you some background info on the school: Le Cordon Bleu offers certificate courses in cuisine and patisserie with students progressing through basic, intermediate and superior levels, after which they gain Le Diplôme de Cuisine, Le Diplôme de Patisserie or Le Grand Diplôme (if you do both cuisine and patisserie at the same time). I enrolled for the basic cuisine course only (as did J and H) but we're loving it so much that the three of us are thinking of coming back in the autumn to do the intermediate course.

We had our first blip last week when we were set upon by 'Gordon Ramsay' Chef. We have nicknames for all the Chefs, so there's 'Mr Bean' Chef (our favourite, who looks like, er, Mr Bean), 'Blackberry' Chef (who plays on his Blackberry when he should be supervising us in practicals), 'Hot' Chef (no explanation needed), 'Short' Chef (ditto) - and now 'Gordon Ramsay' Chef. Not only is he thoroughly unpleasant in a shouting and bullying way but he's plainly never heard of sexual harassment in the workplace (maybe it's not against the law in France - I wouldn't be surprised) as evidenced by his unwelcome and unnecessary physical contact with female students. Hopefull we won't see too much of him because he's a patisserie chef.

 

 

We're on to stuffings and tournage de légumes (vegetable turning) now - when you spend an hour paring down a carrot into a small barrel shape with seven sides. It's very traditional and very French, but extremely slow and repetitive and Paris is full of restaurants where dishwashers and commis spend hours a day locked in this seven-sided-servitude hell.

I'm going back to Savoie on Friday for three days. I actually made a surprise flying visit at Easter - only it was me who got the surprise when I saw the state of the house, so BB's been warned. He's just called to say he's down to the last of the beef stew PC dinners "which is a result" - and I don't think he meant that in a kind way!

puff pastry with leeks, poached eggs and albufera sauce

We had a nice civilized 12.30 p.m. start today - after our group photo at midday. In today's demonstration the Chef showed us how to make puff pastry with leeks and poached eggs with albufera sauce and pear and raspberry tarts with almond butter and an apricot glaze. We actually made the puff pastry in our last practical - or rather, we started it off. I've never made puff pastry before and I don't think I will, through choice, again because it's quite a lengthy process and it's very hard to source the main ingredient (even here in Paris!) - beurre sec ("dry" butter) - so called because it has a low moisture content and high fat content which helps to keep the flour from turning into a greasy mess.

You start off by making your basic pastry in the same way that you would choux pastry - by adding melted butter, water and salt to flour - then leaving to rest in the fridge for 20 minutes. After that you roll out the pastry in a cross shape and place a heart-stoppingly large pat of beurre sec in the middle and then fold and roll and fold, flip over and do the same all over again, six times - or six "turns", to give it it's technical term (resting in the fridge for 20 minutes after every two turns) . My Canadian friend J, says she only gives her puff pastry one turn - she jumps in her car, turns the key in the ignition and goes to the shop to buy it! She has a point though because we were all agreed that Chef's puff pastry wasn't so earth-shatteringly different to bought stuff - so why bother?

The leeks and poached eggs in puff pastry recipe was sublime. You gently cook julienne of leeks with a little bit of butter and water until there's no liquid left, add some cream and seasoning and fill your vol-au-vents with this mixture and a poached egg then drizzle with albufera sauce (reduced chicken stock, cream, lemon juice and brunoise of red pepper). I think this is one that I'll be cooking over and over again once I get home.

Big exciting day tomorrow. You know my favourite shop - kitchen shop heaven in Moutiers? - well tomorrow, J (who's lived here for more than three years and knows all the really cool places to go) is taking H (our Australian friend) and I to kitchen shop nirvana - more than four kitchen shops even bigger than the one in Moutiers on the same street. I shall be like a kid in a sweetie shop!

Quiche Lorraine

After fish we moved on to chicken and poularde pochée sauce suprême (poached chicken with sauce suprême) last week, and in our practical we had to truss a chicken after we'd burned off all the tiny feathers with a chef's torch - which was quite scary. We've all been taught how to correctly pass a knife to someone (yes?), but few in our class had logically transposed that rule to the blow torch, so when I turned round to accept it from a Chinese girl with singed eyebrows, the blue flame licked all the hairs off my arm.

As I looked down the marble-topped work station at the poulardes flambées (the chickens on fire), the smell of burning hair in my nostrils, I realised just how dangerous a place a kitchen full of 14 wannabe chefs can be.

This week it's pastry and some of you will know that I'm a wee bit scared of pastry - but not as scared as I am of getting third degree burns from holding a hot tray of Quiches Lorraines whilst waiting for someone to shimmy past me as if they were moving from their office chair to the coffee machine.

The cooking's the easy part - so far.

filets de limande bercy

Where to start? It's all a bit mental - and I have so little time to write.

There are 44 of us in basic cuisine from over 15 countries (you can tell who's just jetted in from California or Brazil or Taiwan because they're the ones with creased faces, like old maps that have been folded and refolded a thousand times, from jet lag) and after three days we're all starting to find our own little clique. I'm in with an Australian and a Canadian - and surprisingly, I'm the only Brit.

Yesterday I was in school from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m., caught the Métro home, had a quick chat with BB on Skype, then went to bed. The French have an expression: "Métro, boulot, dodo" (commute, work, sleep) and that pretty much sums up yesterday and how many of my days are going to be for the next few weeks.

We've been given a full set of Wüsthof kitchen knives (dangerously sharp) and the first practical lesson yesterday was learning different ways to cut vegetables without cutting your fingers off. So, there was mirepoix - cutting the veg into 1 cm cubes; brunoise - 2 mm cubes;  julienne - very thin strips, 1 mm thick and 5 cm long; and paysanne - 1 cm triangles. The recipe we had to create was rustic vegetable soup using the paysanne technique - which I thought was a bit ironic. I can't imagine Mini-B's Mum spending an hour cutting veg into tiny triangles for soup - or BB noticing for that matter.

Anyway, Chef said my soup was "très bien" (very good) and I was able to hold up 10 whole fingers when BB asked to see them on Skype.

Today's lesson was on stocks and how to fillet fish, so in our practical we made filets de limande bercy (lemon sole fillets in white wine sauce) using fish stock (after filleting our own fish of course). I'm afraid the recipes are LCB copyright and we're not allowed to reproduce them but this is a common French recipe which involves poaching lemon sole fillets in white wine and fish stock with some chopped shallots and then reducing the sauce and adding butter and parsley.

There are so many things to remember - what to wear in which classes, what to take to practicals and we're all battling for space in the tiny locker rooms - but I'm loving it. Most of the photos will be taken using a flash so they won't be up to the usual standard. Must dash to school now. Later.

lessons

These are the lessons I've learned so far, after three days in Paris:

Some Metro stations require you to insert your ticket again to exit - so hold on to it. On Sunday, when I went to wave BB off at Gare de Lyon (sniffle), I threw my ticket away before the exit barrier and then had to rummage around in the bin like a plankton to retrieve it - which was rather embarrassing.

Don't walk around staring up at buildings admiring the architecture. It's true what they say about Paris and dog merde! Keep your eyes on the ground.

When viewing apartments for the first time, if the landlord says, "it's very quiet here", he is lying. I have a sideways neighbour who plays the piano (well) which is acceptable, but an upstairs neighbour who clops around in hobnailed boots on bare wooden floors which isn't. But I've found a solution - leave the extractor fan on in the bathroom to create white noise (which I'm used to at home with the sound of the river) and drown out everything else. Sorted.

I have my first lesson tomorrow morning. My school bag is packed (with a tarte tatin for the teacher!), my uniform ironed - and I'm just a little bit nervous.