Regional Cuisine: Brittany and Normandy (Choked on Artichokes)

The morning began in the library, as workers were cleaning out a backed-up grease trap in our classroom. The traps on the sinks collect all sorts of wonderful matter, then sit there and ferment. When opened to be cleaned, the smell is something like what you'd expect out of a sumo wrestler after eating an entire pig. An excellent start to the day!

Chef K gave a sketchy lecture on the regions of France from which we'd be cooking today. Britanny is known for fish, lamb, cabbage, and buckwheat, while Normandy is all about the cows and dairy -- we can blame them for camembert and brie. Pork and apples are their thing, too.

Today's recipes included Cotriade (peasant fish stew), Cotes de Porc Normade (pork chops with grilled apple rings in a cream sauce), Artiochauts a la Brettone (stewed artichokes), and Soufflés d'Alencon en Timbales (egg souffle in a mushroom cream sauce. In addition, as a class we prepped Confit de Canard (duck confit).

Today's group was Speedy, Chef Jr., and the infamous Dora the Explorer (Dirty Dave was absent). Not wanting Dora's lack of comprehensionto shape our day, I spoke up and organized us simply. I asked what everyone wanted to do. Speedy jumped on the pork, Dora asked for the "bouielle", Chef Jr. didn't care. After the lecture, Chef K altered some recipes and threw out the original soufflé recipe because she claimed it didn't work. So she handed out a new recipe, which had lots of ingredients, steps, and techniques involved. This "bouielle" was what Chef K described as the base for this new soufflé dish, simply whisking flour into cold milk before cooking to thicken.

When Dora requested the "bouielle", I asked her what recipe she was talking about (I knew but I wanted to see if she knew). She started shuffling her papers indeterminately for about ten seconds before I said, "Right. Dora, you're doing the artichokes. If you finish that, do the mise confit. If you finish that, talk to me. Chef Jr., you got the stew, I'll take the soufflé. Let's go."

The artichokes were a pretty straightforward recipe once you trimmed and washed them. Dora did that, then proceeded to take most of the class time mincing 8 oz of parsley and 24 shallots for the confit marinade. She never actually cooked the artichokes. Closer to the end of class, Chef Jr. jumped in on the artichokes and actually did the cooking -- after class I told him we need to let Dora hang from her own rope, because if we try to lift her up, we're going hang by the neck, too.

Being that the class is three groups but we have four stations, I found myself with a station all to myself and didn't interact with the group much. The soufflé involved cooking flour and cold milk like a roux, adding egg yolks and folding in egg whites. At this stage, I was supposed to fold in grated parm, too, but somehow missed it. Into little metal cups it went, then into the convection oven to rise and brown beautifully.

While that baked for 15 minutes, I chopped mushrooms in the robocoup to large pebbles, and cooked them to dry in oil with shallots. Added heavy cream, parsley, and tarragon to the mushrooms, and when the soufflés were depanned into a gratin dish, they were covered by the mushroom sauce, then placed in the oven again for 10 minutes to absorb the silky, very French sauce.

The whole class was a bit low-energy and chaotic. When I got to the stage to sauce the soufflés in the pan, I askedChef K if I should hold off an hour until 11, by which time we were to present all the food. She said no; let's go forward now, and she presented it to the class when it came out. There was no formal time to present food, it was all a bit slipshod.

Chef Jr. and Speedy had their recipes on lockdown, and Dora just bumbled her way through putting marinade on duck legs. Chef K pulled out a recipe from a fancy French cook book for me to play with, some sort of apple tart. The crust was a simple pastry shell, and the apples required 1.5 hours soaking in calvados (apple brandy) -- since that was all the time we had, I did the mise for the apples and put them in the fridge to soak overnight.

Tomorrow, some other part o' France.

ADDENDA:
After class, rocketed home, fixed some South Beach-diet friendly vittles for a few friends, then we drove up to Nyack with B to skip stones on the Hudson, eat pub food, and see Robyn Hitchcock a tiny river-side bar. A rare day and night where it feels like you have all the time in the world to just chill...

BREAKFAST: 6:45am, organic cornflakes with good milk, .5 bowl, hunger 3/5
I had gotten everything needed for a smoothie in the blender bowl, but when I went to blend, the blender died -- I suspect from the over-exertion on my thick hummus a few days ago. It totally sucked to have to toss those beautiful, organic, not-cheap ingredients, but it would of been nasty without that last step.

AM TASTINGS: 10:30am, apple calfouti, one souffle with cream sauce, 1 cookie, water, hunger 4/5
My soufflé was pretty tasty, despite skipping the cheese. Pastry sent up a plate of various cookies at the end of class that were impossible to pass up.

PM SNACK: 12:30pm, half an Italian cherry spritzer, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5
Spontaneously got this at the checkout at wholefoods. Organic, cane sugar, natural flavorings, 110 calories for the whole bottle. Unfortunately, it was overly sweet and tasted like a liquid lollipop, could only drink half.

PM SNACK: 1:30, tiny green salad with 2 grilled shrimp, hazelnut vinaigrette, .25 bowl, hunger 2/5
I made grilled shrimp n' salad for C & T, plated it real nice, too. Ate a little to be polite.

DINNER: 5pm, vegetable quesadia, small green salad, shrimp and linguine, chocolate cake, 1 beer, water, 2 bowls, hunger 4/5
Pub food up the Hudson in Nyack with B and friends. All the portions were pretty huge.

EVENING INDULGENCE: 7pm, 1 beer, 1 bowl
Out at a wonderful music concert, very small, very intimate. A beer tasted right in these surroundings, with wife and life-long friends.