C'est une belle journée.... Je vais me coucher....

Belle. La vie est belle. Comme une aile. Q'on ne doit froisser
(Mylène Farmer- C'est une belle journée)

Intermediate Lesson 16- Île-de-France

We travel back to the Île-de-France region for this class, which is where Paris is located. Our handout for today says:

Paris and the the [sic] Île-de-France are symbols of gastronomical trandition, reflecting the magnificent work carried out by the master chefs such as Taillevent and Escoffier, not forgetting Carême and the young contemporary chefs of today.

So what dish are we making to honor this symbol of gastronomical tradition? Lamb chops. No actually... lamb stew. Seriously? And this is a dish that some mistress of Louis XVI invented. I think we could have done something a little better. Luckily this dish was freaking delicious.

 Pow Boom!

The dish contains a bunch of thick lamb chops seared for color, and then braised in a stock served with potatoes and onion for 35 minutes. We also served it with a weird leek cannelloni stuffed with mash potatoes. It was so good! I even caught a pastry chef from across the hall stealing my lamb. He said it was delicious and said he was really happy to have chosen my station to take food. I'll take that as a compliment.
 

We had the really cool and chill-lax Chef Gui (pronounced as Gee. Not his last name and short for Guillaume), or Gui-Gui (Gee-Gee) when we asked him if he had a nickname, for class today. He's actually huge enigma. Looking 100% Asian, he has a very french first and last name (starts with a T, and I never remember how to spell the whole thing). And he speaks English with a thick French accent. I though hearing Asians from Edinburgh speaking English with a Scottish accent was weird. Listening to Chef Gui talk blows my mind.

I'm glad we had Chef Gui, because although the daydreaming from this afternoon was gone, I was still pretty out this class. Luckily this class finished early at 8:40pm. Time to head home to lie down and sleep to do laundry, clean my room, write my blog, study and then sleep. It's been a very rough and bizarre 24 hours.

Quote from this class:

Demo Chef Caals: Legend has it that this lamb dish was created by the mistress of Louis XIV. She would use an oven temperature far lower than what we are using(190C), set the dish into the oven for slow cooking, and get naughty with the king while it braised. Frankly I think in reality she never knew how to cook.

A few minutes after we have forgotten this kind-of-weird historical faux-fact

Chef Caals: So put this into the oven for 30-35 minutes.

Male Student: Chef, how long would it take this to cook if we cooked it the way in Louis XIV's time?

Chef Caals: Well, how long do you need to make love?

Male Student: ou-phhh wtf.....

Chef Caals: Answer is I don't know. I really don't. Probably a very long time for it to cook.

Yeah, this conversation would never have happened in America....