Intermediate Week Four

Only four weeks into the new term the exhaustion has been hitting hard, but Monday was class-free--the perfect opportunity to take a day trip to some place like Omaha Beach or Strasbourg and enjoy the beautiful weather; however, by the time that I got out of bed my plans had changed to staying in my pajamas, catching up on some reading, and organizing class notes and recipes. I reasoned with myself that it was the best thing for my budget. Yeah, that's it--not laziness.  The metro was also under some sort of ISIS bomb threat, although I didn't learn of this until Friday (should I feel insulted that no family or friends sent me overly-panicked messages warning me to stay away from the metro?).

Tuesday

The warning light in my head went off when I saw that our cuisine demonstration and practicum were going to involve lobster. While the live crabs in basic cuisine may have taken me by surprise, I was just familiar enough with lobster to know that it's generally served very fresh--seafood restaurants don't keep those large tanks in public view simply for decoration. Chef Caals showed us two methods for preparation: tie up the live lobster and drop it into the boiling cooking liquid or shove a knife through its head and end things quickly. Neither option sounded particularly appealing, but I was leaning towards the latter. Caals additionally prepared a tomato and fennel tart, rice pilaf with raisins, and a fabulous chocolate cream soufflé with orange ice cream.

Tomato & fennel tart; Lobster & rice pilaf with raisins;
Chocolate cream soufflé & orange ice cream

Practicum followed after lunch. Korean lady chef had gone into the room next door while we began to select our victims. Using my tongs, I carefully picked up my lobster. Although the claws were shut with rubber bands, it suddenly arched its back and hit my arm with its flailing tail and arms, causing me to emit a scream that sent two chefs running into the room. My preferred method of slaughter didn't matter in the end, either, because our chef wanted us to tie up the lobster, rip out its claws, and plunge its squirming torso into the boiling water. The chef only shook her head as I closed my eyes and twisted off each arm, apologizing profusely in the process.

The lobster ended up being the only thing that was done well--the rice was undercooked and I forgot to add the raisins, and my sauce had too much coral and tomalley (green stuff that you scrape out of the lobster's head and use as a thickening agent). It was, however, one of the faster and simpler dishes that we had prepared and I found myself hoping that I would get it on the final exam.

Wednesday

Our cuisine demonstration was the first of a two-part lesson on making consommé and aspic jelly. Chef Poupard began by making an aspic-coated chicken terrine with pan-fried foie gras. He moved on to the dish that we would be making in our practicum that evening--a chicken ballotine. It involved deboning a chicken but leaving all of its skin in one piece with the meat still attached, and then filling that chicken with a blend of pork fatback, pork shoulder, diced ham, pistachios, and foie gras mousse before rolling it up into a thick log and poaching it in a court bouillon. He finished the demo by making white sausage... because the French can't get enough of blended and poached meats. It was the only dish that we actually sampled--the other two would be served cold the next day.

White sausage with apples

Chef Cotte prepared three-chocolate Bavarois in the next demonstration. The bottom consisted of a ladyfinger sponge cake imbibed with chocolate syrup. The next four layers were dark chocolate, milk chocolate, and white chocolate Bavarian cream topped with dark chocolate ganache. Like the Opéra cake, we would have to draw some designs on our finished product (only with white chocolate). The cake was delicious, it seemed straightforward, and I was feeling more confident in my cornet drawing skills. It was my week to be the class assistant in pastry but even that didn't appear to be too worrisome for this recipe.

Chef's Bavarois

We calculated that we should be out of our cuisine practicum early that evening because we were preparing only the one item--the chicken ballotine--but when we reached the classroom the group before us was still frantically laboring. Even with me in the group we're one of the faster ones, though, so we weren't worried. As it turns out, deboning a chicken while keeping its skin all in one piece is much harder than it sounds, as is rolling up the ballotine. All of them were poaching after about 90 minutes, though, and we used the wait time to practice making Hollandaise sauce, the technical part of our intermediate cuisine final exam. At least some of us made Hollandaise--the school ran completely out of eggs.

After about an 45 minutes of poaching our ballotines the chef told us to take them off the stove and strain the cooking liquid. The internal temperatures were supposed to be 65°C but most of ours were around 45°C. We were also supposed to leave them refrigerated in the strained cooking liquid until our next practicum, but all of the kitchen refrigerators felt more like ovens thanks to the previous class's hot pots of ballotines. Grabbing both their pots and ours we began transferring them to the refrigerators next door where we collided with irate pastry students hurrying to finish their Bavarois. We did at least manage to finish a half-hour earlier than the first group.

Thursday

The pastry practicum to make the Bavarois was first thing in the morning. My fellow assistant Dao and I arrived early to begin gathering the ingredients but the chef was missing and the supply closet was locked. The one ingredient that we could get, the eggs, were still out of stock because the morning shipment had not yet arrived. We found just enough for everyone to do their ladyfinger sponge. About three minutes before the start of class Chef Jordan arrived. My stomach twisted in a knot--we had him only for one or two demonstrations and a theory class in basic, but we heard horror stories from other students who had him in practicals.

While Dao and I went with the chef to get ingredients the other students began their ladyfinger sponge. We were finally able to join them but before I could even measure out my ingredients the chef told me that the eggs had arrived and sent me to get them right then... from the basement kitchen. We were on the third floor (or fourth floor for my American friends). I descended the four flights of stairs two steps at a time, grabbed the first box that I saw, and ascended a little more slowly. Panting, I finally began my batter by the time that most of the class had finished with the chef yelling at me to hurry up and get mine into the oven. Things went only downhill from there.

In demonstration, Cotte instructed us to melt the three chocolates simply by pouring the hot Bavarian cream mixture over them. Because he was working with about four times the recipe, though, it worked quite well for him. The small amount of cream that we were using hardly warmed the chocolate. We were soon jockeying for positions at the stoves to heat up our bowls. Jordan stood by with his notepad, jotting notes and yelling at us to hurry because we were already late.

When it came time to add the last layer of ganache I knew that I was in trouble. Only after I began to pour it over the top did I realize that it was too thick and not heated enough--it began to coagulate before it spread evenly to the edges and my attempts to smooth it out only made it look worse. Out of my peripheral vision I could see Jordan staring at me, but I finally gave up and moved on to my white chocolate decoration. Everyone was finished and lining up to show him his or her cake, so I just did some quick shaky swirls knowing full-well that it didn't matter because my ganache looked so horrendous.

I stood at the back of the line of students and listened to him harshly critique each one, so when my turn finally came I preempted his remarks by saying, "My ganache is screwed up--it wasn't warm enough." He agreed, pointed out some other problems with my cake, and then gathered the whole group together. He began his speech with, "Everyone today failed--I gave you all zeros--except him. He's the only one who passed." He pointed to the rather boyish girl on his right as little whispers of "she" went around the room, although nobody dared to correct him out loud.

He then proceeded to tell us that our first mistake was not melting our chocolate before adding the cream even if the chef didn't do it in demonstration. He made a few other points that might have been helpful while we were actually in the process of making our cakes but he insisted that the fault for not knowing was ours because we don't ask questions during the demonstration. Not that he was in the demonstration ("I know--I've been in the demos before and you don't ask questions!") and not that we knew what questions to ask.

The majority of cakes looked really good to me (except mine) and while I appreciate discipline and honest assessments in the classroom I couldn't for the life of me figure out how every other cake but one was deserving of failure. My panic level rose when he boasted that he failed three intermediate students on the final exam last semester over that cake--a frightening statistic when you consider that only about seven students would have received that recipe. We left class a little shell-shocked with one Asian girl completely in tears and me praying that I don't get that cake or Chef Jordan on the exam.

Dao and I grabbed a quick lunch at a cheap Chinese place and returned to our afternoon cuisine demonstration with Chef Vaca. He unmolded Chef Poupard's terrine from Friday, sliced up the ballotine, clarified the cooking liquid, and made a sea bream and tomato jelly terrine... because who doesn't like jellified meats, fish, and vegetables? The final dishes were quite pretty, though, demonstrating once again that presentation is often more important than taste in French cuisine.

Ballotine on chicken jelly; Aspic-coated chicken terrine;
Sea bream terrine

Friday

Intermediate cuisine focuses heavily on chocolates, which might sound like a good thing but is actually quite stressful. A few chefs had already given demonstrations on tempering chocolates but up to this point we had never actually done it ourselves. To perfectly temper dark chocolate--get it to the stage where it dries with a glossy, smooth surface--one must melt it to a temperature of 45°-50°C, bring it down to a temperature of 27°C (we were to use the tabling method--spreading it out thinly on a counter), and bring it back up to 31°-32°C. Milk and white chocolates have a whole different set of rules. Chef Cotte made truffles, coffee creams, candied oranges, and mendiants (mixed fruit and nut chocolates); we would have to make only the first two.

Truffles, coffee creams, mendiants, and orangettes

That afternoon we made our consommé clarification/chicken jelly and the white sausage (from Wednesday's demonstration). The clarification went well but I had a rough start to the sausage--the casing slipped off of the piping tip while I was trying to fill it up, creating a pink sea of meat mush all over my work space, but once I got the hang of it the process was almost enjoyable. After tying off the sausage links and dumping it into the poaching liquid I began decorating my chicken jelly as a base for a slice of ballotine. My first attempt at a tomato rose wasn't terrible and I made some semblance of a stem using leeks. The chef wasn't too impressed but he thought that everything tasted fine. When it came time to plate my sausage, though, I found that all of the casings had exploded, leaving me with a pot full only of mushy sausage innards; however, we were running so late and the chef was in such a hurry that I don't think he even realized that he didn't evaluate the sausage.

We had to make a dash from class to the locker rooms to drop off our knife kits, aprons, and hats in order to make it to the next cuisine demonstration on time. Student services were doing a uniform check at the door and, not having time to put on a clean jacket, I held my notebook strategically to cover up the stains from the last practicum. Finding a spot under the air conditioning that was actually working for once, I fanned myself as Chef Singer gave us a demonstration on cuisine from the region of Alsace.

Back in the summer of 2000 while staying in Nice I had made a weekend trip to Strasbourg and found the area to be quite charming. It's as much German as it is French (if not more so) and I looked forward to this lesson. The chef made a Flammenküche (a sort of pizza with cream, onion, and bacon), Alsatian-style sauerkraut with sausages and potatoes, and trout stuffed with mushrooms. Unfortunately, he was running late and I had to request to leave early because I was the assistant in pastry, so I never was able to get photos or, sadly, do the tasting.

A new chef was leading our practicum, an easy-going little man who gained instant popularity simply for not being Jordan. He really was very kind and helpful, though, and we soon had 14 puddles of dark chocolate being smeared all over the tables. The chefs encourage us not to test our chocolate with thermometers but rather to learn by touch. My touch apparently needs a little more practice because I overheated the chocolate, causing the cocoa butter to split. It still technically "worked" but my candies all came out dull with traces of light swirls in them. They worked in the sense that it didn't stop me from eating them.

Saturday

We had only our cuisine practicum in the morning. Chef Cotte took a break from his pastry duties and joined us in the kitchen while we made the stuffed trout. Like the red mullet, we serve this fish whole (i.e., head and tail attached) meaning that we have to remove the bones and innards while keeping the form of the fish. Cutting cleanly down the back to the central bone was a bit difficult, but once I found it the rest was easy. The hardest part was, as always, removing the pin bones with fish tweezers. For some reason it takes me a thousand times longer than my classmates and I still missed several as I would discover at lunch later. Cotte was shouting out reminders that I needed to hurry and that I was the last person, but in the end he declared that my stuffing for the fish was "so good" and gave me a high-five.

Having a cough and runny nose, I stayed home the rest of the day and on into Sunday, opting to listen to SermonAudio rather than go to church. Before I left Greenville to come to Paris, Pastor Conley was in the middle of a series on David. I had really enjoyed those messages and decided to start catching up, beginning with the first message that I missed on June 22--"Distress-Driven to the Lord." The passage was I Samuel 30:1-10 when David triumphantly returns to Ziklag only to discover that the Amalekites had plundered the city and taken all of the inhabitants captive. For the last few chapters we see no indication that David has been asking for the Lord's guidance in any decisions, but now as his own men are ready to turn on him he finally turns to the Lord

Conley makes three points: 1) Let your distress drive you to remember God, 2) let your distress drive you to ask God, and 3) let your distress drive you to obey God. I was for about the millionth time reminded that in every decision, no matter how big or how small it may seem, no matter how sure I feel of how I should respond, my first step should always be to bring it before God. That way, when things don't work out the way that I hoped or expected, when I fail, or when I succeed I can rest in the knowledge that God was directing me and that He will do only what is best for me.

Intermediate Week Three

Ah, the last week of summer. Normally the promise of autumn sends me into uncontrolled giddiness, but in Paris very few changes occur between one season and the next. Our temperatures are dropping back down into the sixties after an unusually warm week, but we had cooler days in July and August. Instead of the changing colors of foliage and the smell of burning leaves while I'm walking around the neighborhood, the only indication I find that summer is coming to a close is the sight of fall fashions in shop windows.

For the first time in years I'll miss attending the Apple Harvest Festival in Waynesville, NC, driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway, eating a Bojangle's picnic with family at the Carl Sandburg home, baking countless apple crisps/apple dumplings/apple cakes/apple bread, and spending hours each weekend raking leaves. Actually, "miss" isn't the best verb for that last activity, although even that memory makes me a little nostalgic after a few months of living in the concrete jungle.

To combat my best-season-of-the-year blues, I've started researching autumn in France--where to find the best color, when to expect leaves to peak, what activities are available--and discovered that while there are some recommended locations (e.g., Strasbourg, the Loire Valley), I shouldn't expect anything too spectacular because they don't have maple trees.  WHAT??  As if that weren't bad enough, people here stare at me like I have monkeys coming out of my ears when I talk about the idea of visiting an apple orchard. You'd think that I was suggesting we go harvest our own grain from somebody's farm.

My last hope is that while the trees in my favorite mountain spots will be bare, South Carolina will still have some color when I arrive in mid-November. Browsing through my camera photos I found these shots that I took while walking in my old neighborhood on November 10th--about two weeks before I moved from my house (sniff, sniff). I can almost smell the smoke coming from chimneys and hear the leaves crunching under my feet. [Oh, yeah--don't expect any smoke to be coming out of Paris chimneys.  It's not exactly illegal but most fireplaces are now non-functional, fires are highly regulated, and wood costs of fortune.]

November 10, 2013 in Greenville--miracles CAN happen

Also November 10th--favorite tree in front of my favorite house

Back to summer, though (it's not officially over until 10:29 PM EDT on September 22), this week was one of the most uncomfortably warm ones that we've had since I arrived in Paris. Admittedly, the mid-eighties aren't terrible, but changing in a locker room with no air conditioning after sweating it out in a cuisine practicum reminds me of my high school P.E. days when I'd have to get into my street clothes after running the mile, except back then we had showers AND air conditioning.

Monday

Chef Poupard (a.k.a., Map Chef) gave us a long talk on the southwest Landes region of France before making roasted squab (pigeon) salad, roasted duckling with Roman-style gnocchi, and stewed prunes on hazelnut shortbread.  The pigeon salad was particularly... unusual. It tasted fine, but chef plated the leg by snipping off all of the talons but one, and then burning that talon with a torch. The end result looked positively sinister.  I could almost hear it cackling, "I'll get you, my pretty (and your little dog, too)!"

Sinister squab salad; Roasted duck; Stewed prunes with hazelnut shortbread

After class and a brief lunch break, we went back into the demonstration room where Mark Singer, the new executive chef, awaited us for our first intermediate cuisine theory class on food safety/storage.  Normally theory classes last only an hour and we all looked forward to getting out early in the afternoon, but this chef, much like in our cuisine practicum with him, prolonged it to almost three hours by forming every sentence as a question (e.g., "How long can we store fresh eggs?" "What foods can we freeze?" "What containers can we not use for storage?") even though it was our first time learning these things and we weren't expected to know the answers yet; thus the point of the theory class. Nonetheless I learned quite a lot about food storage regulations--enough to make me think that I never want to run a restaurant.

Tuesday

We joined the Korean lady chef in the morning to make our roasted duckling and Roman-style gnocchi. It didn't rank as one of my favorite dishes--the duckling was a whole lot of work for a tiny bit of meat that wasn't anything to write home about. I did, however, like the pan-fried gnocchi with "bacon" and black trumpet mushrooms, even if my dough did have lumps of semolina in it.

I shoved down some of the duckling for lunch and then went to Chef Caals' demonstration on oven-roasted vegetable roulade with St-Maure goat's cheese, stuffed guinea fowl pie, and pineapple ravioli with mascarpone, pineapple sorbet, and honey sauce. The salad was excellent although I noticed several of the Asian students turning up their noses to the beets and goat cheese (Aisans don't really do cheese).

The guinea fowl pie is made by grinding up the leg meat of the bird with chicken livers, pork shoulder, and pork fatback and layering the forcemeat in a pie shell with potatoes and the breasts of the bird. It would have been much better with some carrots, celery, onions, and peas, but the French just aren't into vegetables. The pineapple ravioli was just strange--I love cilantro but it should never, ever be in a dessert.

Vegetable roulade with goat's cheese; Guinea fowl pie; Pineapple ravioli

In the pastry demonstration immediately afterwards, Chef Cotte made macarons with anise-flavored pastry cream and raspberries, caramel crème brûlée, and dark chocolate fondant with bees' nests and white chocolate ice cream. French macarons should not be confused with American macaroons, those little coconut clusters dipped in chocolate. Macarons are light-as-air meringue-based cookies that sandwich flavored pastry cream. Normally I love them, and my favorite flavors are coffee, salted caramel, and lemon, but anise would be the last flavor on the planet that I would choose. I would sooner take cilantro-flavored cream if such a thing existed (and knowing the French, it probably does). The other two desserts were quite nice, though, and the anise flavor was just light enough not to be too offensive.

Macarons; Crème brûlée; Dark chocolate fondant

Wednesday

The 6:30 PM cuisine practicum was our only class for the day, so like the new and improved fastidious student that I have become I spent some time typing up and reviewing the recipes from the prior day's demonstrations (in spite of the fact that it doesn't seem to be helping). The guinea fowl pie seemed simple in theory but as much as I contemplated the best order in which to proceed I couldn't bring it together in my head. We would need to prepare the potatoes, clean the fowl, separate the meat, grind the forcemeat, and make a pie crust, leaving enough time to get it assembled and in the oven with about an hour to bake. Sometime in there we had to get the jus started because it also needed about an hour to cook.

We had my new favorite chef again--the French version of Alan Rickman. I was struggling with cleaning my fowl--it was full of fat and not coming apart as nicely as in the demonstration--and falling behind my classmates as usual, but I finally assembled my pie and got it in the oven. It was then that I noticed the bowl of breadcrumbs on the counter and realized that I had forgotten to mix them into my forcemeat. It shouldn't have been a problem--this was the only cuisine recipe that the chef would not be tasting because cutting into the pie would be too messy (it has to rest for a long time)--but I exclaimed, "Oh, rats!" just as the chef walked by me.

He said, "What's wrong?" I hesitated, then mumbled, "Uh, nothing, I just forgot something..." my voice trailing off. He finished for me: "The breadcrumbs? You shouldn't have told me--I never would have known!" He was laughing, though, so I laughed as well and replied, "I tried not to tell! Forget it--I remembered the  breadcrumbs."  My jus ended up being too salty as well and for all I know the chef gave me a failing grade on that practicum, but he's still my favorite.

Thursday

Before ever starting at Le Cordon Bleu I had been looking forward to the day that we made macarons, and even with the anise flavoring I was still excited. Things seemed to be going well until I mixed my pastry cream. At first I thought that it was fine, but then Chef Walter came around and stuck his finger in it, asking what the little lumps were. Until then I hadn't noticed them, but they appeared to be bits of cornstarch. He became unusually upset, yelling with spittle flying in my face as I refrained from wiping it off that I had put all of my whipped cream into the egg mixture at once rather than how he and the Chef Cotte had demonstrated TWO TIMES--whisking in a little cream briskly and then gently folding in the rest of the cream... except that was exactly the way that I had done it. Trying not to sound belligerent I told him as much, to which he quickly calmed down, shrugged, and said that maybe I had just overcooked it.

Normally we don't plate dishes in pastry practicums, but we had to plate one of our macarons as if we were serving it in a restaurant. Following Chef Cotte's advice in the demo to be very generous with the raspberry coulis, I made sure that it was running gently down the sides of the macaron as he had done, but Chef Walter is a minimalist and said that it was too much--that we should use only a small amount. By now I had accepted that my dessert was already pretty screwed up so I didn't try to explain my reasoning to him.

Class macarons

Friday

Chef Cotte was with us in the pastry demonstration again, this time making the infamous Opéra cake. It's made with a thin Joconde biscuit sponge cake that's covered in chocolate glaze, flipped over and imbibed with coffee syrup, covered in buttercream frosting and another layer of cake, imbibed and covered in chocolate ganache, covered with a last layer of cake and imbibed, frosted with the rest of the buttercream, and finally coated in the chocolate glaze. The taste is similar to a tiramisu with extra chocolate and less cream.  Complex as all the parts to the assembly were, we knew that the biggest challenge would be the final decoration. Apparently a cake can't be referred to as "Opéra" unless it has the word written on it in fancy letters (probably another French law).

Opéra

After a quick lunch we went to our practicum to make the Opéra. A new-to-us chef was in charge (we had seen him around the school in basic but never in our classes). He made all of us leave the room because we came in before him (some chefs expect us to do it; others threaten us with zeros). When he let us enter again he demanded complete silence for the duration of the class unless we were talking to him. At first I was more than a little terrified of the angry little man, but in an odd way I kind of liked him. He was very helpful when I messed things up (which I was doing quite a lot in my state of panic) even though he would roll his eyes each time and say, "Please don't make me cry today." He was eventually calling us terroristes which is almost a term of endearment.

The cake ended up taking almost all three hours and angry chef had to leave while we were in the process of writing "Opéra," so Chef Walter took over and did the final evaluation. Although I had practiced writing at home for days with Nutella on parchment paper, I realized as soon as the chocolate hit the cake that I had cut my cone tip too big, giving the writing a sort of cartoonish, crowded look rather than something elegant and sophisticated.  Chef Walter agreed.

Gilbert & Sullivan, perhaps

Those of us in the Grand Diplome program had to run out of class to get to our cuisine demonstration in time, hoping that nobody was checking uniforms since most of us were covered in all parts of the Opéra cake. Chef Poupard wasn't concerned, though, focusing more on his map and everything about the Bordelais region of France. He made for us Arcachon oysters with leeks and chipolata sausages, Bordeaux-style duck breast with fondant potato rounds, pan-fried cep mushrooms and bacon, and Bordeaux cannelés.  The breasts came from foie gras-fattened ducks which brought on about a 45-minute class discussion on the ethics of foie gras. Poupard prepared the main course in about 30 minutes, though, which made us pretty hopeful about repeating it in our practical the next morning.

Oysters & leeks with chipolata sausage; Duck breast; Bordeaux cannelées

Saturday

The cuisine practicum began at 8:30 the next morning. It didn't involve cleaning any animals--we only had to trim the breast--and I knew that the majority of my time would be spent on rounding the potatoes. Each individual slice had to be turned into a perfect circle and each circle had to have the top and bottom edges rounded out. I was taking a particularly long time--20 rounds took about 30 minutes to complete. The cep mushrooms were only a little easier. In demo Poupard had washed them, but some chefs find washing mushrooms to be highly offensive and our chef wanted them only brushed off and peeled entirely, both the stems and the caps.

This chef was also someone whom we never had and he spoke no English at all. He reminded me a bit of a pirate, possibly due to his scraggly looks and the little hoop earring that he somehow got away with wearing, but he was pleasant enough. Most importantly he liked everything about my dish but the presentation (of course) and declared my rounded potatoes to be perfect, even suggesting that people get a photo of them for future reference (being the slowest isn't always a bad thing). We all finished in record time and by 10:00 AM I was headed back home to begin the weekend.

After lunch and an unplanned (but not unexpected) nap, I sat down to finish my internship application.  Early in the week I bit the bullet and bought health insurance (the one document that I was missing to qualify for the internship) through Cigna, and over the next several days I had been struggling with them to get my proof of insurance form. With everything finally in hand I was able to proceed.

Apart from the proof of insurance, the application required a copy of my passport, student visa, and residency permit along with a CV and cover letter written in French. It contained a series of essay-type questions as well that seemed to ask the same question in multiple ways: Did I think an internship was a good way to finish my education and why? What is the goal of an internship? What do I hope to get out of an internship?

The last questions that I needed to answer were with regard to where I wanted to do my internships. All along I had assumed that I would be doing them in Paris, but when I realized that I could go anywhere in France I suddenly knew that I wanted to try other cities.  Aside from the fact that pretty much every other city has a lower cost of living, here was a perfect opportunity to experience more of the country.  Plus, let's face it--Paris and I haven't exactly been best friends.

After a bit of research I finally decided that I would request to do my cuisine internship during April and May in Montpellier in the south of France and my patisserie internship during June and July in Lyon or Grenbole in the east close to the Alps and Switzerland. It wasn't incredibly scientific--I figured that I should put down cuisine first because it's the one that I'm most likely to pass, Montpellier should be pleasant in the spring, and I would love to be by the coast for a while. Lyon will be nice for the summer months and it is supposed to have some fabulous restaurants, plus I've always wanted to see the Alps.

My excitement and hope is back up for the internships. Already I've begun looking at apartments to rent and activities in those areas. The restaurants and patisseries that I chose have great reviews and a lot of them are open only Tuesdays through Saturdays, so although I'll be working many long hours I'll be guaranteed some days off. It's still possible that I won't qualify for one or both, but it feels really good just to have a plan.

Intermediate Week Two

My first two weeks of trying to be a more conscientious student have proved to be... unsuccessful. Yes, I've been faithfully typing out and studying my recipes after each class but somehow that hasn't translated to better performance in the kitchen.

The one positive change that I've noticed, though, is that cleaning fish, birds, and other dead animals doesn't bother me half as much as it used to.  While I wouldn't go so far as to say that I enjoy it, little things get me excited such as successfully ripping the tendons out of a chickens's legs through its "knees" or getting out all of its innards through the tail with one hand sweep of the cavity. I actually gave a gasp of delight when a chef showed me how to gut a fish just by pulling the gills.  Okay, maybe this isn't a positive change - maybe this is how most serial killers get started - but it certainly makes life easier these days.

Monday

Our only task for the morning was to make the pan-roasted guinea fowl and "half-moon" cut vegetables from Friday's demonstration.  The Korean lady was our chef, freshly back from her vacation in Thailand.  My bird was a good bit under-cooked, but only because the chef herself had advised me to take it out of the oven (I didn't point this fact out to her).

Tuesday

My schedule was free from Monday morning's class until Tuesday evening's class and I used my time to clean the apartment and read before heading to school. Chef Vaca, also back from vacation, led a demonstration on terrine made from langoustines (scampi) and lamb sweetbreads which, as it turns out, aren't sweet or breads at all but the thymus or throat of a lamb (I actually thought that "sweetbread" referred to the brain, so you can imagine my relief... not that we probably won't have to cross that bridge eventually).

For the main course he made red mullets served inexplicably with the head and tail still attached - because who doesn't want his dinner to look partially alive? - and stuffed with a black olive tapenade next to a savory onion royal custard (think onion-flavored flan). The fish wasn't too bad, but the custard was horrific. Aside from the fact that it was incredibly bland (Vaca even admitted that it needed more salt), it had cooled by the time that we were able to taste it which only made its custard-y texture more repulsive.  Dessert was nice at least: homemade ice cream served over poached pears and chocolate sauce.

Langoustine & lamb sweetbread terrine; Red mullet with black olive
tapenade and onion custard; Pears Belle-Hélène

Wednesday

Wednesday picked up the slack from the previous two days and we were faced for the first time with two cuisine practicums on the same day. The morning began with a pastry demonstration, though, in which Chef Tranchant instructed us on how to make the Jamaica, a recipe so complex that the ingredients took up two pages. It had a sponge cake base (similar to chocolate ladyfingers) topped with coconut mousse, poached pineapples, mango-passion fruit mousse, and a passion fruit glaze.

Jamaica

After lunch we made our way to the first cuisine practicum to make the stuffed red mullet.  Chef Poupard was in charge, but another chef was with him - an American expat named Mark Singer who recently retired from Le Dodin restaurant (thanks, Google!). As in most practicums we weren't introduced to the chef and I assumed that he was in training. That assumption began to change, though, when he would stand next to me asking in a bored voice questions that I was never sure how to answer such as, "Would you eat a fish that looked like that?" or "Stop what you're about to do. What should your next logical step should be?"

He eventually followed one of his critiques sarcastically with, "But what do I know? I'm new here. I'm only the executive chef." I never even knew Le Cordon Bleu had an executive chef, but as it turned out he was the new one. Pointing to the classmate across from me, his final question was, "Why is your fish fuller than his?" After throwing out three or four guesses involving every part of the fish preparation that I could remember, I finally said, "Because his fish baked longer?" As it turned out, it was the chef's confusing way of telling me that my neighbor's fish was overcooked and mine was not.

One ongoing issue that always makes me a little crazy is that some students still don't understand that there are eight of us in our practicum, meaning that all ingredients need to be divided equally eight ways even if it's less than what the recipe calls for. On  many occasions things run out before the slower students (I) can get to them, requiring that we have to "borrow" from our classmates.  In this instance the black olives were gone before two or three of us got to them and they were already made into the tapenade. As a solution, we combined all of the tapenades into one and divided it among ourselves.  This made the presentation of our final plates particularly entertaining because the chefs would evaluate each one differently (too much garlic, not enough salt, just right, etc.) not realizing that they were all from the same batch.  Of course, when Poupard tried my tapenade he bit into a lemon seed, but protesting that I didn't actually make it seemed unwise.

Smelling of sweat and fish we joined the rest of our class in the cuisine demonstration with Chef Caals. This lesson focused on the cuisine from the Burgundy region of France where they are perhaps best known for their snails. Not to disappoint, Caals made tasty puff pastries filled with escargot and a mushroom mixture.  The main course was a braised chicken and savory crapiaux (flapjacks). For dessert he made gingerbread and gingerbread ice cream, causing the whole room to smell like Christmas and making me deliriously happy.

Chicken & "crapiaux;" Puff pastry & snails; Gingerbread

The second cuisine practicum immediately followed the demonstration and another chef, an older gentleman whom I had never seen before, led the charge. He spoke no English and gave several passionate lectures to us in French even though only two of us had even a basic grasp of what he was saying, so mostly we just nodded and said, "Oui, Chef," a lot (which doesn't always work - he gave me a rather wild-eyed stare at one point). I wasn't even sure in the end if my dish was acceptable, although I'm fairly certain that he liked my sauce.

Thursday

Though complex, I felt that the Jamaica shouldn't be too difficult. It required that we cut long strips of the sponge cake the width of our elbow spatula to line the ring mold; however, what I hadn't counted on was that my spatula was a good bit wider than the ones provided in our knife kits (I bought a new one from Dehillerin after my school-issued one was stolen). When we added the second layer of mousse which was supposed to stand above the cake rim, I realized my mistake but could do little to fix it.  The good news is that Chef Olivier, the one who likes to fail me and nearly did, is on vacation for several weeks and Chef Tranchant is much more understanding.

Class Jamaicas - how they should look

My wide-spatula version

Class finished by 11:00 AM and our next class wasn't until 6:30 PM, so I went home and promptly fell asleep while trying to read.  We came back in the evening to a cuisine demonstration again with Chef Caals. He made a fabulous chicken salad with walnuts and Granny Smith apples, a not-so-fabulous sea bream fillet wrapped in lettuce with shrimp forcemeat and a side of Jerusalem artichokes, and little puff pastry tarts filled with Mirliton batter and apricots and topped with rosemary-infused sorbet.

Chicken salad; Stuffed sea bream; Apricot & rosemary Mirliton

Friday

The first class of the day was a pastry demonstration with Chef Tranchant at 12:30. In what I'm guessing was an effort to quell talking, the class translator called all fifty-something of us into the room one at a time and assigned us seats. I enjoyed the change, though - for the first time ever I was able to sit in the front row. Tranchant made what is probably my favorite dessert in all of our classes to date, the Fraisier - a Genoise sponge cake with a mousseline cream and lots of fresh strawberries and topped with Italian meringue.

Fraisiers

Our first intermediate pastry theory class immediately followed the demonstration.  Tranchant gave us a brief lesson on chocolate - where it comes from, how cocoa powder and cocoa butter are made, what the types of chocolate are - and then took us through the process of tempering chocolate for decorations, a skill that will likely end up as the technical portion of our final exam. He ended the class by showing us how to write with the chocolate, something that we'll be putting into practice next week on our Opera cakes.

From the theory class we headed to our evening cuisine practicum to make the stuffed sea bream fillets.  Another new and nameless chef was in charge, but he soon became my favorite chef ever.  Aside from the fact that his voice sounded like Alan Rickman with a French accent, he was incredibly laid-back and calm or as some might say, "chill." He peeled the garlic, ginger, and shallots, setting them aside in a bowl for everyone, and even when he was critical he was likable. When I finished way last because I forgot to boil my lettuce leaves and then overcooked them and had to do them again, he never yelled or told me to hurry and he stated that my fish was "perfect." To top it all off, while I was cleaning up my utensils he scrubbed down my stove for me. That's the joy of a new chef - he's not cranky, tired, and irritated with all of us yet.

Saturday

We had only one morning class before we were officially finished for the weekend.  Most of us were pretty excited about the Fraisier, stating that it was the one dessert that we wouldn't be giving away or storing in the freezer. This dessert was going really well for me, too - I had fallen behind because this particular kitchen had shared stoves and I had to wait for a spot, but once the batter was mixed and baked I assembled my cake quickly, becoming the the first person to finish the cream and strawberry layers. This was surely going to become my first big "nailed-it" day in pastry!

The chefs always make the Italian meringues for the entire class in the mixer but Chef William decided that I should learn how to do it. He pulled me over to test the syrup - it has to be 225 degrees Fahrenheit - but he wanted me to use my fingers instead of a thermometer.  I had done it before - it involves dipping your fingers in ice water, grabbing some of the boiling syrup, and dipping it back in the cold water to check the texture - but it terrifies me. My fears were well-founded, too, because I was burning the dickens out of my fingers although I tried to conceal my grimace of pain from the chef. But we made the meringue and it was time to finish our cakes.

My meringue went on smoothly, I torched the top beautifully - the chef was watching and even gave a little clap and "bravo" - and the jelly glaze was perfect, but when I removed the metal ring mold, the plastic lining that protects the cream came out with it, tearing up all of my edges.  The chef tried to help me hide the messy rim by putting a smaller piping tip over the one that I was using and starting a decorative edge, but when I took over the piping bag from him I made matters worse by forgetting about the second tip and knocking it out onto my cake multiple times, creating a sort of spastic edge.

Class Fraisiers

My post-apocalyptic Fraisier (but check out that center torching job!)

The most significant happening of the week came when I received an email from the school with a link to the application for an internship and a deadline of September 22. I already knew that it was coming this semester but hardly thought that it would be so soon. My heart sank a little when the document requirements included proof of health insurance, something that I had avoided up til now.  After finding some online insurance quotes and going back through my budget spreadsheets to run the numbers, the possibility of an internship still seemed feasible - tough, but feasible.

What consequently is not feasible anymore is extra travel, birthday and Christmas gifts, new clothes, vitamins, hair salons, groceries, or any other unnecessary spending. I'll have to move to another studio or rent a room when my lease ends in March - I'll need something cheaper and preferably within walking distance of wherever the school assigns me - and in the unlikely event that I can secure both cuisine and pastry internships I may have to move locations for each one. Upon the completion of the internship(s) I will come home quite literally penniless.  These are the best-case scenarios - I still don't have a backup plan if I don't pass my intermediate or superior levels.

When these ulcer-forming thoughts invade my mind I have to remind myself once again that God is still in control of everything. The Israelites wandered around in the wilderness for 40 years without their shoes and clothes wearing out; surely God can see me through another six to ten months in Paris and whatever follows after that. For now (assuming that I can get health insurance before the 22nd) I'll fill out the application and request both internships, praying while I wait that God will open or close the door as He sees fit and that I'll joyfully accept His decision either way... and maybe think of non-nefarious ways to earn a little extra cash.

Intermediate Week One

After last week's crybaby fest that once again made me sound like I was going through some sort of medieval torture device call "Paris," I decided that I should throw out a few other things about this city that I actually find kind of cool.

• Flour trucks.  I can't tell you how exciting it was to see flour being blown into a boulangerie on my way to school the other morning.  So much flour...

Eric Kayser getting a fill-up

• Walking. My mile-long walk to and from school can get a little monotonous at times, but on the rare occasions that I have a day off I find it pretty enjoyable just to take a stroll to some area that I haven't yet visited. This past Saturday I made my way down past the Eiffel Tower to the Champs-Elysée via avenue George V. Even someone who hates shopping as much as I do can't resist the thrill of gazing through the windows of places like Givenchy, Cartier, and Yves Saint Laurent, or stealing glances into the lobby of the Prince de Galles Hotel.
• Salted butter.  Yeah, I've already talked about butter probably a dozen times, but then I tried this Grand Fermage with sea salt butter - it actually has big chunks of salt in it - and I'm completely addicted. It's also really, really good with honey.  On a related note, baguettes last only a day around here before going stale.  Although I could eat one baguette per day, I try to limit myself; hence I discovered that you can slice up stale baguettes and saute them in butter (unsalted or clarified).  Of course, you still add the salted butter on top of that and it's merveilleux.

Tuesday

The week got off to a slow start - Monday was the basic students' orientation and we were asked to keep away from the school until Tuesday. Sauntering into Le Cordon Bleu that afternoon with the haughtiness that comes from having obtained veteran status (after only 10 weeks), we picked up new locker numbers, new recipe notebooks, and (for those of us who skipped graduation) our basic certificates and transcripts.

On the plus side, my locker is now located on the lower level and not in front of the door that opens to the Winter Garden, meaning that changing time requires less creativity.  On the down side the locker room is not air conditioned (but only two weeks of summer remain!) and the lockers are stacked three-high rather than two, requiring some strategic shoving and quick door slams to keep everything from tumbling out onto the heads of the two people below me.  Incidentally, it's a good time to remember to keep my knife bag zipped closed.

Chef Tranchant kicked off the new semester with a pastry demonstration, first offering a brief lecture on how we were now intermediate students and thus at a higher expectation level, which in demonstrations translates primarily not to leaving class in order to use the toilet... er, restroom, making it similar to the transition from K-5 to first grade.  He then proceeded to whip up an apricot streusel, almond cake, and Scottish cake.

Almond cake, apricot streusel, and Scottish cake

We proceeded from our pastry demonstration to our cuisine demonstration with Chef Bogen who once again seemed a bit "out of sorts," or as a fellow student put it, "high."  Intermediate cuisine focuses on French regional recipes, so Tuesday's lesson centered on the Basque region whose claim to fame is the Espelette pepper (not to be confused with an espadrille, although I referred to it as such a few times).  Bogen bumbled through salmon and watercress salad, sauteed Basque-style chicken with saffron rice, and a Gascon-style apple tart made from phyllo dough, slightly burned on the outside and not cooked well on the inside.

Sauteed chicken & saffron rice; watercress & salmon salad; apple tart

Wednesday

Our first practicum was in pastry making the streusel and almond cake.  It felt similar to our basic-level courses, or at least to how those courses felt towards the end of the term, but my puff pastry streusel crust was far from looking like I had advanced beyond basic (although it was in keeping with someone who got a 52% on her final exam).  During the down-time of waiting for our pastries to bake, Chef Tranchant had us practice making paper cones and writing/drawing with tempered chocolate on the backs of metal trays - another horrifying exhibition of my bleak artistic talents.

Tranchant is obsessed with a straight pastry line

That afternoon we moved on to our cuisine practicum with the visiting chef from Istanbul who was leaving us on Sunday. Admittedly, I wasn't terribly upset to see him go, but he was very relaxed and more easy-going than in our previous classes and it was almost endearing to hear him casually mention about three times that it was his last time with us before we finally caught on and told him how much he would be missed.

This cuisine practicum wasn't much different than our basic-level courses either - more like starting up where we left off last term. We had two new students in our little group of eight - Dao, a girl from Thailand who had completed her basic level there, and Brian, a boy from China who had finished his basic courses in 2012.  For a while it felt good to be the subject matter expert and help out the new kids, but they still finished before me and with better results.  My sauteed chicken was an unhealthy shade of pink when we cut into it although the chef proclaimed that it wasn't too bad - "I'm French so it would be fine, but an Englishman would send back his plate."  I just crinkled my nose and replied, "As would an American."

Thursday

What was different from our basic level is that we didn't ease into the new semester, with Thursday being the first 12-hour class day.  We began the morning with Chef Caals, back from his month-long vacation and, as one of the other chefs awkwardly put it, looking tan and fit.  He gave us a brief lecture on expectations for intermediate students as well which again emphasized not visiting the toilet in the middle of class. This demo was one of the few that was not region-specific and consisted of a shellfish soup with garlic glaze, Savoy cabbage stuffed with salmon, and wild strawberry gratin.  It wasn't one of my favorite dishes but appeared easy enough to prepare (always famous last words).

Stuffed Savoy cabbage; shellfish soup; strawberry gratin

Our cuisine practicum followed lunch.  Most of the time centered on chopping carrots, celery, onions, mushrooms, and ham into a fine brunoise and thinly slicing cabbage, but after that it was just a matter of wrapping up salmon and the stuffing in cabbage leaves before dropping them into some boiling water for about ten minutes. Unfortunately I forgot about this last step and didn't have boiling water ready, adding about another ten minutes to my time as I waited, but chef instructed us to boil only one of the two cabbages to save time.

As the last person to plate my dish, I finally called to Caals to come check it.  He cut open my cabbage and the salmon was raw - he didn't even bother tasting it. Confused as to how it could have been so under-cooked, I began packing away my food, grabbing the second cabbage to put in a box.  It was surprisingly hot for being uncooked, but then like Sherlock Holmes the realization dawned upon me that I had plated the wrong cabbage.  Calling the chef back over, I sheepishly explained my error. He returned with a smirk on his face, testing the cooked salmon and stating that it was okay but giving me a look that said I was quite possibly the biggest idiot in the school's history.

That afternoon we joined Chef Olivier, the one who likes to say, "If this were the exam you would fail," a lot (and almost did fail me on the exam), for a demonstration on passion fruit and raspberry tarts and lemon tarts.  The latter was actually one of my favorite pastries to date but not, unfortunately, one that we would be repeating in our practicum.

Lemon tart and the less enjoyable passion fruit & raspberry tart

In the evening we had our pastry practicum with Olivier again.  I was doing quite well until I messed up my tart crust while transferring it to the ring mold, which meant that I had to reshape it and stick it back into the freezer to harden up while the rest of the class proceeded with their tarts.  In the end it didn't matter, though, because the assistants had brought up raspberry jam instead of raspberry purée, and in a purely basic-level move all 14 of us ignorantly used it to make our raspberry coulis.  Olivier, bordering on a complete meltdown, ordered everyone to throw out their coulis and start over as he scribbled down the assistants' names while saying menacingly, "I want to remember you."

I actually found the situation to be quite humorous, possibly because it caught me up to the rest of the class, and Olivier eventually calmed down although he kept repeating, "Never in all my life has such a thing happened," and "You see the big bucket with 'raspberry jam' on it and you just use it without questioning?!?"  He threw in several, oh la las as well and when I asked, "But won't this make a good story to tell at home tonight?" he just rolled his eyes, replying, "I hope never to remember again."

Friday

As a reprieve from the previous day, Friday contained only one cuisine demonstration in the morning before we were finished with classes for the week.  Chef Poupard, the "map" chef, talked to us about the Normandy region for the first half hour of class (but not before a warning that as intermediate students we were not to leave class to use the toilet).  Just as he prepared to start making the food, a student raised her hand and said that Chef Bogen never gave us a regional talk in Tuesday's demo. Poupard, always delighted to discuss French regional cuisine, gave another half-hour talk on the Basque region while the rest of us shot death glares at the offending student.

Poupard, upon realizing that we were now over an hour into the class, began hurriedly throwing together fish stew, pan-roasted guinea fowl, and an apple tart with creamy caramel sauce.  The crayfish for the soup were alive which created a bit of trauma when the chef cooked them to death after pulling out their intestines by the tail (no, we won't be making these in practicum), and the demonstration was slightly chaotic and rushed, ending about an hour late, but he created an excellent meal. The apple tarts were especially amazing, making the wait quite worth it.

Pan-roasted guinea fowl; fish stew with dry cider; apple tart with creamy caramel

One positive outcome from this week is that I regained some of the old excitement from the first semester.  It started around the time that we received our recipe notebooks and I started flipping through the table of contents, or more specifically when I saw that we would be making baguettes and macaroons this term.  All of the recipes fill me with happy anticipation, though, even if the reality is that most of them will be a challenge and at times a catastrophe.  Sure, I still cringe a little when I see that we'll be cleaning a chicken or a fish but, to use a dental analogy, it's now more like a cavity filling than a root canal, and I sense/hope/pray that by November it will be more like brushing my teeth.

Interlude

Wow - Those ten days off went by really quickly. Our schedules for next semester finally appeared online like a reality punch right in the face. Although my experience is removed by a few years, the feeling is something akin to my college days in super-fast motion - jumping into the sophomore year feeling slightly less excited than in those naive freshman days when I thought that I was going to conquer the world only to discover that it was an uphill battle.

[In case any of you were wondering, I did pass both basic pastry and cuisine.  Ironically, I barely passed the pastry final exam (52%) although I thought that one was in the bag, and I did relatively well on the cuisine final (78%) even though I feared that I had failed.]

Proof

While I'm a bit more wary upon entering the intermediate stage, I do arrive with renewed hope. The good thing about a rather chaotic semester is that I learned several valuable lessons (aside from cooking and pastry) - how to study, how to prepare better for practicums and exams, how to manage my time - stuff that I was starting to figure out (mostly from my mistakes) late in game during the basic stage.  Thanks to a thoughtful friend from the States, I also have some contraband college-ruled spiral notebooks and cute little note cards on a ring to make flashcards.  Of course, during my college days I also believed that I would develop better habits with each new semester... but I'm older and mature now so it shouldn't be a problem, right??

Speaking of friends, my friend Leslie flew into town last Sunday bringing me the joy of a familiar face, fun times catching up and reminiscing over the good ol' days, a sightseeing companion, and perhaps best of all, the wonderful sound of a southern accent. Her introduction to Paris was delayed by a day thanks to some incompetent airline issues, so she arrived somewhat disheveled after two days in planes and airports and spending a night in New Jersey.

Leslie's introduction to the Paris metro after I met her at the airport wasn't much  better. The train started then quickly sped up while she wasn't holding onto anything, forcing her into, as she called it, a "Godzilla walk" down the aisle with nothing to grab onto before her upper body momentum won over her legs. Her forehead bouncing off of a seat somewhat broke her fall but her knee took most of the impact. She had a goose egg growing on her head and what appeared to be a second knee developing on her left leg, so we headed back to my studio where she could freshen up before her first introduction to a French restaurant and "customer service."

We tried a little place nearby that unbeknownst to us didn't serve lunch until sometime after 12:00 (it was around 11:30).  Nobody told us that they weren't serving lunch - they simply ignored us for about 15 minutes before we got up and moved down the street to another café.  The staff there was more welcoming in the sense that they brought us menus and eventually food.  From there we hopped the metro again to take Leslie to her hotel where the desk clerk, after explaining about the free "wee-fee," agreed to bring up an ice pack for Leslie's knee.  He appeared at the door a few minutes later with a bag of ice about the size of a golf ball, probably all of the ice on the entire premises (the French are ice Nazis).  I left Les to recover for the rest the afternoon and evening, hopeful that tomorrow would be more promising.

Monday morning I introduced Les to pain au chocolat at a little pastry shop near Notre Dame Cathedral before we did our tour. At some point during our breakfast the conversation wandered off into, "Just think, you're living in Paris!"  Replying that the fascination was wearing off - had worn off shortly after my arrival - I explained how the big city and even the amazing old historical sites get old to me while things like the Carolinas in the fall or road trips through the Blue Ridge Parkway (actually, the freedom to hop in the car and go anywhere whenever I feel like it) or just the pleasure of simple family gatherings never gets old. Before I knew it I was in tears which quickly changed to the two of laughing over the ridiculousness of my emotions and how splendidly Leslie's trip was going so far.  It was one of the best laughs that I've had in about three months.

Carl Sandburg's home last fall. Seriously, could it ever get old?

After touring Notre Dame we made our way through the Luxembourg Gardens despite the sporadic rain showers, but the cold, damp weather soon had us looking for a metro station.  As we were studying the map at a bus stop a little boy about ten or eleven years of age appeared beside me, asking if we would like some help.  My first inclination was to shoo him off and grasp my purse a little tighter, but he was completely adorable with rosy cheeks and a wavy brown mop of hair, more of an Oliver Twist than Artful Dodger character.  We still kept a tight hold on our purses, but when I told him that we were looking for the closest metro station he pointed in the general direction, then ran ahead of us in the rain, looking back to make sure that we were following. I began to fumble for my wallet to give him a euro for helping us, but he ran off with a wave and "Have a nice day!"  Seriously, if he were wearing an adoption sign I would have a son right now.

Medicis Fountain at Luxembourg Gardens

Later that evening we stopped off to buy a case of water and had dinner near Leslie's hotel at Quick, a fast food hamburger place. Towards the end of the meal a young man, heavily intoxicated, came in and stood by us, pointing across our table and slurring something in French (he seemed to want our drink cups for a refill or he might have been asking for a water bottle from the case).  Another guy came in and seemed to be trying to reason with him while Les and I exchanged nervous glances with each other.  Finally, the drunk and his friend left and we made our escape, Leslie going to her hotel and me heading to the metro.

While waiting for the train, a man standing next to me (he was from Sarajevo on business, as it turned out) asked in English if I needed help holding my case of water.  It was small and non-problematic so I smiled politely and said, "No thanks." Out of my peripheral vision I could see him still watching me and a moment later he asked, "Are you sure that you don't need help?"  I refused again, but not to be easily deterred, he was soon asking where I was from and if I lived alone and if I was in a hurry to get home. Without exactly lying I gave him the impression that I had a friend staying with me.  Still undeterred, he then asked my age and I, feeling quite confident that it would finally get rid of him (he looked to be about 32), said that I was 40.  He acted surprised but not discouraged, so I began to play up just how old I was ("Yep, 40! Feeling every day of it, too.  I'll be 41 in two months!").

Apparently a fan of older woman (and a little tipsy?), he continued talking to me after we boarded the train, trying to convince me to have dinner with him the next evening, to bring my friend for dinner, or to find a French boyfriend for my friend and we could tell him about American culture and he could teach us about Sarajevo culture, which he followed with an elbow nudge and wink-wink that completely creeped me out.  Finally as we neared his stop, he lamented over what bad timing it was that we had met at such an inconvenient time ("I hope if your friend had not been here you would've said, 'Yes'"), as if we were two star-crossed lovers.

Because the the night hadn't yet been bizarre/scary enough, when I finally reached my studio and stood punching in the gate code I heard shouts of "Madame! Madame!" behind me.  After the gate opened agonizingly slow I walked briskly through the courtyard to the lobby door and, unable to get out my key with the water bottles in my arm, began punching in the door code as speedily as the fat, heavy buttons would allow while the voice and footsteps quickly grew closer.  The thought crossed my mind that perhaps I had dropped something on my way and I finally dared to turn around. A man stood inside the gate babbling at me in French but, not wanting to take the time to try and understand what he was saying or asking, I just blurted out, "I don't speak French!" and finally got into the door, scurrying up to my studio and double bolting the locks.

On Tuesday morning Leslie and I boarded the train to Versailles. Some online research the day before warned that Tuesday could be busy because other points of interest such as the Louvre and Fountainebleu were closed, and indeed it was.  We stood in an entry line for almost two hours in the rain before joining the swell of people inside the palace where we pushed our way from room to room, making a game of "Versailles vs. Biltmore." By this point Leslie's injured knee was ready to call it a day although we still had an overwhelmingly vast expanse of gardens before us. Fortunately, we noticed a golf cart rental stand and soon we were zipping around the property at a brisk 10 mph, stopping to snap pictures of the Fountain of Apollo or to get yelled at by workers when we tried entering areas that required a special ticket.

Versailles (and the crowds)

View from the back of Versailles

Apollo's Fountain

Hungry and tired, we left the palace in search of a restaurant only to discover that most food service stops between 2 and 7 PM (it was 3 PM), but we finally found a tea room selling pre-made sandwiches from some bygone era and managed temporarily to assuage our hunger. Determined to find a good restaurant for dinner, I did some more research back at the apartment and discovered a pizza place close by that had rave reviews; however, when we got there a sign on the door said that it was closed until September 5 because many restaurants in Paris, in addition to not serving dinner until 7, close down for the month of August.  Research thrown out the window, we hit the first open restaurant that we passed. It wasn't too bad, and I had my first pizza with an egg on top because if there's one thing that the French like as much or more than butter, it is eggs.  Strangely, though, it works.

Wednesday was our day to visit the Louvre where another long line awaited us - probably all of the people who had visited Versailles the day before - but at least the rain was holding off.  Having been around the outside of the museum several times I knew that it was big, but the enormity of it didn't strike me until we started looking for the Mona Lisa after meandering through the first few wings. In our naivety we thought that maybe we had already passed the painting and missed it, but when we finally found the signs pointing the way to her (the one wing that we hadn't come close to) the location was fairly obvious just from the hoards of people surrounding her as if she were there in person.

Louvre

Thar' she blows

That afternoon Les and I popped into a few shops along my street to get some items for a picnic at the Eiffel Tower that evening.  From the boucherie we got chicken wings (they were actually labeled "chicken wings"), at Maison Gosselin we picked up some grapes and bananas, from Eric Kayser we grabbed a baguette and macaroons, and at the fromagerie I purchased two types of cheese, asking the clerk for something not too strong for my American friend (although I'm not sure that he understood).  Leslie lasted approximately one second in the fromagerie before making a quick exit - just long enough to understand why we refer to it as the "stinky cheese" store.

Walking from the studio to the Eiffel Tower with our purchases and a block of butter, we parked ourselves at a bench on the Champ de Mars in front of the tower.  The evening was overcast but dry and just cool enough to be comfortable in a hoodie - perfect weather for relaxing and people-watching (and there were a LOT of people to watch). Les learned firsthand about the magic of French butter although she left the cheese to me after braving a few bites.  Two policemen stopped by our bench, sending me into a momentary panic attack as I tried to think about what French law we were breaking, but they just began chatting with us in English about French cheese and butter before walking away in yet another random act of Parisian adorableness for the week.

Our picnic view

Packing up our dinner, we once again found ourselves in another endless line to get on the elevator going to the top of the Eiffel Tower. I managed to get through two bag security checks without the checkers seeing the two butter knives that I was brandishing in spite of the multiple signs forbidding any knives, and after cramming ourselves into the elevator we successfully reached the top.  The view was well worth the crowds and wait, though - not quite the amazing sunset that we hoped to catch thanks to the heavy clouds, but lovely nonetheless.

Bird's-eye view of Paris

Thursday morning we met at the Bastille to try Café des Phares which supposedly had the best croque madame sandwiches in Paris (according to one journalist's opinion).  They were indeed amazing - thin slices of ham atop country bread and coated in toasted gruyère cheese with, of course, a fried egg on top. The crispy duck fat fries on the side only added to the awesomeness.  Our happy little brunch was interrupted when the woman seated at the table next to us got into a fight with a man at a table in front of us before he stormed away, at which point about three tables began chattering angrily about the man who had left.  The French may stereotype Americans as being loud, but when they get into arguments in public it's quite a thing to witness.

Our view at the Bastille for brunch

The last Parisian monument that Leslie wanted to see was the Arc de Triomphe, so we took the metro over, getting a few pictures and avoiding a creepy clown whose only talent was whistling and twirling young children by the hand before their parents would snap a photo and give him some money to make him leave.  We relaxed at the studio that afternoon before having dinner at a café close to Leslie's hotel where I had another pizza... topped with an egg.

Arc de Triomphe (and my eyes)

Friday morning I accompanied Leslie back to the airport, feeling not only sad to see her go but also a little bummed that I wasn't getting on the plane as well. The reason isn't because I regret my decision to come to Le Cordon Bleu, but there is a lot to be said for going back to "normal" life - the comfort of home, a paycheck, a routine, familiar faces, restaurants that will serve you at all hours of the day - and my time in Paris often feels like a vacation that has gone on a little too long. But then the realization strikes me anew that I don't have a normal life to go back to - I quit my job and blew most of my savings - or even a house - it's all gone, minus a little 5x5 storage closet that's probably infested with spiders by now.

At times this thought causes me to weep for hours while I listen to Dolly Parton sing "Eagle When She Flies," but then I remind myself that I intentionally cut those ties for this very reason - because I predicted these days long before I ever came to Paris, and if I had made quitting a plausible option then I would have done it a hundred times over by now. It's as if a sort of Marty McFly or Bill and Ted saw future Kerry sitting on her sofa bed having a pity party and stuffing her face with leftover pastries, and they came back and warn me on that Father's Day Eve in June 2013 that if I paid for only one semester at a time or if I waited until I would have enough money to pay the tuition without selling my house, then I would have been on that plane with Leslie and ten years down the road still working as a data analyst and talking about how one day I'd finish that diploma.  Of course, God is the one who was actually controlling every step, but He does provide moments of clarity and foresight.

My only vision now of future Kerry extends only to about six months and it looks a lot like the last three months (and who knows for sure what will happen even tomorrow?). That said, I do actually look forward to the new semester being underway, not because I want to get it over with but because I'm ready to make changes and become a better student - ready to make it a more rewarding and less chaotic experience by the grace of God.  And yes, there will still be plenty of chaos, but just starting out with that expectation and awareness puts me a little more at ease.  Sometimes I even feel downright invigorated - 33% of the way finished!