Turned veggies, filmcrew, stuffed trout & smokey lamb

Today is an easy day. And the menu looks sort of promising:

Yesterday's demo was about flammenkuche, truite farcie and choucroute. Yes, you guessed right: It's all about ze Alsace area. I only know this area from the wine (as one does!), and certainly not the food.

The first one, flamething, is a pizza, nothing more, nothing less, but light and tasty. The choucroute, sauerkraut, was a lot (and I mean a lot) of work. It looked good in the end...

We had to make the trout dish in practical. I kind of liked it.

We had to debone the suckers (2 each) from the the top of the fish (back) and take out the backbone. Easy peasy! Then fill it with mushroom stuffing (Duxelles), make your own sauce from ze bones AND TURN CARROTS and a mushroom! This time it was 'Vichy style'. Not a torpedo shap, but more like a humming top. Interesting....

Cris turned the mushroom for me - thank you!

Plating a fish on a plate goes like this : Tail (skin on tail-end) to the right handside and the belly of the fish always faces the customer. Sauce around the fish, never OVER the fish. Voila!

Then a loooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggg demo of Chef Thivet. I sort of fell asleep during class and eventually I went outside to get some fresh air. Sorry chef!

Dishes of this demo:

Carpaccio sardines (no sardines available - seabream as a replacement)

lamb (stuffed of course!)

nougat (mailto:#@@$! not for me, thank you)

The lamb dish was also the practical. We got a 1 kg very nice piece of lamb, with all the fat/bones etc still on it. After deboning and trimming there was a whopping 250 grams left on my plate - before even cooking it! So, to cut a long afternoon short - make sauce from bones, strain and reduce, cut balls with a melon-baller from potatoes and fry them, make mushroom garnish and prepare an onion/tomato garnish. Finally bake the lamb and serve rose. Et voila ! C'est tout.

The rest of the day: Filmcrew in class. This time they were really nice people. Not like the Korean filmcrew we had last year in our class. If I understood correctly, it will be a LCB (promo?) film.

And we had to make our class photo. Fully dressed up, without the badges/spoon and smiling like.... well, you get it!

Few people missing during the photo session - like China was late, D.from Paris didn't show and little C. was probably sleeping somewhere in the building. We had lots of photographs taken by others of our group, so Mr.BIG photographer will probably not be making much money from this group....

enough for now,
bonsoir and see you all later!
Sjoerd