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