And I thought 3 1/2 hours was tiring...

OK, so I heard you loud and clear. More photos. So...why no high-res photos today? Well, my dear readers, there is a simple answer. Before I left for France, I bought a replacement charger for my Canon SD400 battery. Cheap Jew that I am, I pass on the $50 original Canon charger for an aftermarket charger for something like $12. "Hey", I said to myself, it's Amazon that's selling the replacement charger - it's not like I'm buying from some unknown vendor in Hong Kong or something. Amazon is trustworthy...right?

So about 10 pictures into my trip...the camera goes dead. I go back to my apt and plug the battery into the charger. The next day, battery back in the camera, power it up and...nothing. Still no Lazarus trick. OK, feeling a sheepish at this point for cheaping out. But it was AM-A-ZON! Please! Well, here I am with a useless charger and the best thing that has come out of it is that I can use my favorite expression:

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Covers all manner of sins, don't you think? Anyway - back to school.

First day, Tuesday, was a short one, just 3 1/2 hours, focused on making stocks, jus, and sauces, for the most part. Wednesday, however...Wednesday was another story.

Wednesday packed in two full 4-hour sessions. Totally exhausting. I think I went to bed at 8:30PM that night.

WEDNESDAY AM

First, we get introduced to another chef, Chef David. Oh. My. God. He's right out of the movie Mostly Martha, only instead of being Italian, he's French. His English is mostly perfect even though he only started studying it 7 months ago. If you haven't seen Mostly Martha, turn off your damned computer, run over to the video store and rent it right now.

If you're on Netflix, scratch that, leave your computer on, fire up FireFox, go to www.netflix.com, search for Mostly Martha, click to rent it, then go to your queue and ask yourself why you've got all those other, non-cooking-related films there, then move Mostly Martha up to the top. If you still have a Netflix movie in your house, go over to your DVD player, press "Eject", stuff it in it's sleeve, put that in the Netflix return envelope, go to the front of your house, open the door, walk down the block, and put it in a mailbox...preferably one with a pickup before 9:30AM. Now close this blog, wait 3 days, go to your mailbox, get the Mostly Martha DVD, go back to your DVD player, press "Eject" again, remove "The Little Mermaid" or "Bourne Supremacy" or "Mr. Bean" and pop in Mostly Martha. After 109 minutes, you can go back to your computer, fire up FireFox, type in mrfrancophile.blogspot.com and start again...

Here.

Whew. OK, so now we all know what I mean when I say that Chef David was just like Chef Mario. He prances into the room singing and joking - always a sly smile on his face. He makes over the top facial expressions and gestures and clearly loves...LOVES...what he does. Being around him, it's just impossible not to be infected by his good humor.

That is Chef David to the left. To his right, Rebecca, my fellow student from Australia, in full blushing-mode, snaps a picture of the vegetables that we will soon prep.

Throughout the whole process, we have all been furiously scribbling notes (or, in my case - geek alert - tapping them into my Treo) and snapping photos of different stages of prep so that we can remind ourselves what we are supposed to do and how we are supposed to do it. At the end of the 6-week program, there's a test where any of us doing the whole thing must make a menu on our own, with no help.

For the morning of my second day, we made a lamb shoulder, wrapped in a sheet of lacy abdomen fat and stuffed with a vegetable, meat, and bread stuffing. In addition, we prepared a ratatouille (yay Disney!) and a plate of blanched vegetables assembled into an artistic tower. Now I should note that when chef David made his absolutely beautiful vegetable sculpture, the vegetable were fresh off the stove, warm, and firm. By the time, 10 min later, that we got to start making our own sculptures, they were getting a little...shall I say...flaccid. Not a pretty sight. And not so easy to make stand up...er...erect.

So here's what I ended up with. Not terrible, but not parfait, as we dit dans la belle France.

To make the ratatouille, we all had to prepare the various vegetables as a brunoise (very finely diced) and I must say, it turned out pretty darned good. Once the lamb shoulder was done and our morning session was over, we divvied up the lamb and the ratatouille and packed them up in plastic containers, as well as our own vegetable creations and five of us decided to take them out to the Tuileries gardens (just off the end of the Louvre) down the street from the ecole (school) to have a little pique-nique. A couple of cans of Fanta Orange Soda rounded out our gourmet fare.

WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON

OK, We've been on our feet slicing, dicing, and making mounds and mounds of julienned veggies, but after a pleasant hour or so in the park, it's back to the grindstone...or at least the kitchen.

As we shifted over to Patisserie, David handed off the reins to Chef Didier. Chef Didier doesn't really have a command of l'Anglais, but we understood most of what he said, en Francais, and his assistant and translator, Manako, filled in the rest for us. Our afternoon goal was to learn how to make pastry creams, mousselines, and basic pate sucre (sweet pastry crust) as well as how to make a small French fruit cake and how to decorate a cake. Oh? Is that all? Do we really need 4 hours for just that? Puh-leeeze.

OK, so we take our flour, powdered sugar and butter and mix it in our bowls with our hands to form our crusts - just a 1/2 egg and our dough is done. Somehow, mine turned out extra-sticky (always the trouble-maker). After a little session in, as Sargeant Shultz would say "The Cooler", the dough is ready to be rolled out (again, per Chef Didier's specific rolling instructions) and formed with a ring into a perfectly-shaped tart shell. All of our shells were then filled with an almond pastry cream and baked to form the foundation for our tarts. The goal, at the end of the day, was to assemble a complete tart from the almond cream base with a decorated edge of Pistachio Mousseline (a creamier Pastry Cream suitable for decorating using a pastry bag - another first for me) and a range of fruit, including pineapple (ananas), Rambutan (like a Lychee), Apples, Mangos, Bananas, and Kiwi. Much of our time was spent learning how to cut all of these different types of fruit, all of which we coated with a sticky glazing syrup - mostly to give it a great shine.

When all was said and done, Chef Didier assembled the example tart and then we went off to assemble our own. You be the judge of how well I did (or didn't do)...that's mine on the right, his on the left (now granted, his had the better lighting and was already on a gold serving round which mine eventually did too...and the decorating tip slipped...and Dylan ate my homework!!!)