Ballotine brick - France is 'appy!

This week, we made a ballotine. This is like deboning a whole (oh yeah) chicken, but leave it sort of whole - don't break or cut the skin. Then you stuff the thing with a pork and chicken filling and top it off with a nice roll of fois gras. "Close' the bird, roll it up in plastic, tie it firmly together and cook it in the consommee. To be served the day after making it. It's fantastic to eat this when you're on a diet!
I took a few slices from chef's ballotine home and gave it to my 80+ year old neighbour - she was very very pleased with it - mais c'est tres gentil! yes, I know...

When my brick of fat was ready the next day, I took it home and I contacted my landlady - and oh yes, she wanted the 1.5 kg thing.

This was a pretty rich brick; It tasted nice, but only a few slices, that's more than enough for me... And I'm not really on a diet.... I think!

Seems like the French LOVE these kind of dishes; Lots of fois gras, and they prefer their meat served pink (rose). Too pink, I'd say!

Bye for now,

Sjoerd

Ze schedule for this week and the next; not that bad!

Basically it's a very doable two weeks - starting at 8.30 in the morning until roughly 18.00 hrs.

Creativity and playing with aspic (gelatine)

Tuesday, we had a very special day - we had to play with aspic. (Gelatine)
After we had made a very nice consommee (that's a very clear clarified 'soup') we ruined the consommee by putting loads of gelatine sheets in it - horrible!

Consommee - before and after clarifying. Quite a difference.

But afterwards we got to play with it, because the casing for the saucages that we were supposed to make were not there - so it was playtime!
Interesting to see that some people in this world think you can actually plate a WHOLE tomato on a plate in aspic and put the ballotine on top - but chef Poupard corrected it and sliced the tomato thinly (2 mm thick) and put it on a plate.

Picture time! B-class, you did a SUPER plating of the aspic, it looked great. Very very creative.(by the way, I'm in A-class...)

Levi was champion 'playing with words' - VOILA! On a day like this, he would fit right into the Amsterdam/NY/Vancouver gay-scene. Oh-la-la!

The best plate of all, I think!

Chef Poupard destroying, I mean tasting the stuff.

The tomato slicer....

Judging Catharine's plate

Chef T's creation. Nice!

Visitor in class and the Spanish girls

Yesterday, we had a visitor in class. Cristina brought a very good friend from Mallorca to class - Carlos. He stayed for the choucroute, flammenkuche and nougat session. I think he liked being at the demo (not the food..?) and he also wanted to wear a LCB jacket, so I borrowed him one. Yes Carlos, you looked good in it - basic pastry for you next year??? (Later that day, we had a few drinks together and went out for dinner. Very nice evening with lots of laughs! thanks Carlos, it was good fun.)

The Spanisg girls in class - Cris & Monika.

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

fantastic LCB management

Today I received a very (useful) email from Le Cordon Bleu -
-----------------------------------
Dear Sjoerd,

Thank you for your interest in Le Cordon Bleu Paris. A little while ago you requested some information from us. Are you still are interested in attending Le Cordon Bleu? Please contact me at your earliest convenience. I look forward to hearing from you.
Thank you, etc etc
-----------------------------------
Since I'm in Intermediate right now, probably more than a 18 months AFTER I requested information about the LCB program, it seems a bit useless (to say the least) to me to even respond to this very sloppy administrative 'management'. What are they thinking - that I've never ever been to LCB in Paris before? I've paid twice already...
( I pass the admin office at least a dozen times a day - let's just call this typical French management) In one word: sloppy !

This also goes for emails with questions that are sent to LCB over the last few months - to some I still have had no reply. And I'm not the only one....
LCB - please do something about this!

sewers, smell, oysters, foie gras, bierre, vin et encore une bierre

weekend!
Monsieur Henk is here for a short visit. Saturday, Henk was on his own until 4 'o clock - we met near metro Etienne Marcel. Cristina joined us later because we wanted to buy some stuff at the kitchen shops at Rue Montmartre.
Last year we went to the bone collection of Paris (closed now!), and now we went to the sewers on Sunday morning. Musée des Égouts de Paris. Actually, it's quite interesting, there's a huge system under the city. And it smells a little bit underground..... in short: a nice tour. Then straight to the cafe...

more to come later ....

Having a few oysters. Nice.

At Rene's (and family) request, our Amsterdam market friends

They asked for pictures of........... me.......... OK then .........

enough ?

saturday - LOBSTER - we have to kill !

Lobster day - class starts at 12.30. Everything is ready, kill the bugger, chop it up and put it on the stove. Easy. All done in 1.5 hrs. Afterwards we had a few glasses of wine to go with the lobster. Well, somebody has to do it and live the life ! It might as well be me.... and the result of the dish was goooooooddddd !

As usual.....(joke)

Wine tasting.

Monsieur Liu with his interesting creation.

Catherine with cognac / fire

Cris with a friend!

It's dead - the knife went in and split the head in half...

Bruno Stril's result of the demo.

Chef's preparations on Friday evening.

update (in different parts) - where do I start?

Yes, where do I start? I'm 'a bit' behind with my blog. Last week was totally hectic but I survived. On Friday we had 4 (!) sessions... Today is Monday 23 November and I'm tired - and we had a very very very boring class today. I'll tell you later.

Let me start to tell you a bit about last Friday. Duckday! Pink duckbreasts with some sort of polenta and turned (oh yeah, here we go again) apples.

With a nice sauce that we made from ze bones. That was easy - especially the apples. Not a bad dish in practical. I didn't want to eat it because I was going out to dinner with Henk from Amsterdam tonight. So the duck found it's way pretty easy in the direction of one of the pastry/chocolate boys - Petri from Finland. He took it home.

Third/fourth class was a pie. With lots of meat and fat in in. Actually it wasn't that bad and chef Lesourd helped a bit. He played around with herbs, soy sauce and other stuff and produced a pretty desceny pie. I gave it to the plongeurs, sans le sauce. He didn't like that bit - but it was the best bit actually!

Monsieur Liu, China.






In the morning we also had a fire drill - again. So out we went into the infamous Rue Leon Delhomme, also known as dogshit-street. We made our way back in clean this time....

Pie day; a short impression of a crazy/funny/nice/interesting group....

Levi at chef's level!

My pie with a disease...

Damien from France, always good for a laugh!

Cris decorating the pie.

Last demo was a LOBSTER lesson. Nice! Absolutely not difficult to make and not that much fat/butter/cream in a dish. Tomorrow, Saturday, we'll prepare it ourselves.

Sjoerd

beaujolais nouveau 2009 - wine, cheese and paté - santé!

Les trois chèfs....

The big thing at the school today was the introduction of the beaujolais nouveau 2009.

In France, this is quite a big issue - but in reality it's just a huge marketing thing to promote the beaujolais nouveau wine. Le Cordon Bleu did a really nice job to introduce the wine and set up a big table with cheese, paté, bread, drinks etc etc. very, very nice! Thank you LCB. This was a very nice lunch!

In the picture are Levi, Damien, Mark and Cristina.

Long but good day - 3 sessions

It did go pretty good today. Normal routine - get up, wash, walk to school, croissant on the way, cafe for coffee, go to school, change and start in class.
And it's only 8 'o clock in the morning....

First a fish practical. Dourade (sea bream) wrapped in lettuce leaves with a Jerusalem artichoke puree on the side (with a fish sauce of course, nice, greasy and thick: in one word: RICH )
I'll skip the starter and dessert for now....
In practical we had to make it. It was quite a funny class; It seemed that a few people are making it into a race. They start real early with the practical (like 20 minutes before we are even supposed to be in class) and try to get out as quickly as possible - not my style. Let me put it right, some are really good, but we have 2.5 hours for a lesson, that's MORE than enough! We'll see if we can change it a bit.

C'est chef James et Rafael

Chef Terrien was supervising. Nice, relaxed man. And taking notes on his little handheld computer. He sees everything.
He just walks behind you and checkes the consistancy of the forcemeat, he'll check your sauce without even noticing, and he observes you from a distance. Oui chef, we know! I like chef T.

Poaching the sea bream in the stock reduction was OK and easy, although it was a challenge for others; I saw somebody poaching the fish in just water.... interesting... water has quite a taste and flavour...
All in all, I think I did well today. Fish was cooked, sauce was OK, puree was good.

my dish

The only thing today was that I wanted to move the sautee pan 1 minute after it got out of the oven...... 'mailto:'#$@@!& !!' without using my tea towel.

And this evening chef Patrick was playing with oysters, duck, cream and lots of butter in the demo. This demo was very relaxing; lots of laughter and fun!

C U later, Sjoerd