Thursday already,
and a not so fat free cooking day...
Practical 8.30, but first the cafe. Yes, the local drunk wanted to chat - I don't think so ! After two coffee's, quickly to the practical of the day. We are group A and had to cook today but Group B of the basic cuisine course went to the market. Don't know much about theit outing - we are going tomorrow with (a) chef and a translater.
The practical was about the meat-demo we did yesterday. It went actually quite good. New was the 'turning of vergetables'. We had to cut carrots in a special way - in theory this means only 7 cuts on a piece of carrot and it just looks nice. Bit difficult to explain. Basically it's just a small nicely cut carrot. Cook in water/butter (but of course!) /bit of sugar and salt. They looked great. They call this glazed carrots.
Same for really small onions. No cutting, but we had to make a nice glaze on those too.
The meat was 'not too fat' today - pork shoulder, lots of lard, another piece of pork, beef and whatever. Mix, blend and fry in goose fat... (cholesterol,cholesterol and more cholesterol production....)
Actually, everything was done is goose fat. The French way. Thank god we didn't have to make a butter/cream based sauce to go with our meat!
The jus for the dish was not too fat. It was 'only' made with goose fat and finely chopped vegetables. And a bit of butter...
End result: nice piece of meat. Our new chef Patrick (new, first class?) helped us a bit in class and gave us points for quality, presentation, vegetables, technique etc. I think I did pretty good today!
Then we had 4.5 hrs off. So, we (Erich, Sean, me) went to the cafe for a petit bierre (or two). After that with the metro to Louvre surroundings and walked for about an hour along the Seine river. Lunch in a lousy overpriced place and taxi back to the school. Just in time for the last demo of the day.
'Low fat' chicken nicely put on the plate for presentation.
The demo was all about plating up the paté we made earlier this week and chef Poupard also made a stuffed chicken dish (sort of low in fat...)
See you tomorrow !
Sj
