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.]
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| November 10, 2013 in Greenville--miracles CAN happen |
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| 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)!"
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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).
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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