Here, Fishy Fishy Fishy

A gold star to anyone who gets the title quote!

OK, Sorry for falling behind on my blogging duties, so today I'll add 3 posts...

This week was a short week...just Tues - Thurs (boy, they have more vacations than the French! Oh...wait a minute...er...nevermind).

Weds was another Savory day. This time focusing on meals built around fish. The star of the show Weds was our lesson in the cleaning, cooking, and serving of a whole Turbot. This bottom-lying flatfish is similar to halibut or flounder in that it has its eyes on the top of its body and swims in a horizontal rather than vertical mode. In the US, us consumers are so used to just popping down to the market and buying a filet of this or a steak of that type of fish, that we rarely get the chance to buy a whole 15 or 20lb fish to clean, gut, cut up, cook and serve. It's a different story for restaurants, and I am in a cooking school for professional chefs, so I guess it makes sense that we learn butchery along with cookery.

Cookery? Not quite as romantic-sounding as "cuisine", but it seemed like a good word at the time.

For this meal, we cut up the turbot and learned to poach it in a pot of water, coarse salt, pepper, anise pods (these REALLY worked great), thyme, bay leaf and some milk. To accompany the Turbot, we learned to make both Bearnaise and Hollandaise sauces (which, when made completely by hand, apparently require the upper body strength of a baseball slugger). To keep ourselves busy, we also made a fish stock, a shellfish stock, and two vegetable sides - Petite Oignons aux Champignons (mushrooms), and steamed carrots, zucchini, and turnips.

Now, when I always made steamed vegetables at home, I'd just clean 'em up, drop 'em in a steamer, take 'em out, and plop them on the plate - sometimes with a little drizzle of something over them for flavor.

But steamed vegetables at the Ritz? Mais NON! That will not do, Monsieur Francophile!

I suppose that if you're eating at a Michelin-starred restaurant, your expectations will be higher for your steamed veggies. So we learned to turn our veggies. Peeling the carrots, baby zucchini, and turnips and cutting them into 2-inch pieces and then those into thirds, you use your paring knife to shape each piece into a lovely little tapered and rounded torpedo. Time consuming, but at the end, you have not just just "steamed veggies" but rather "torpilles des légumes, cuites à la vapeur". Damn, skippy...that does sound (and look) a lot more appetizing. (Sorry, no good pix)

Making the two sauces mostly required a lot of non-stop fast whisking. For chef David, it was aucun problème , mais pour moi...le ouch (c'est moi, a gauche).

Nevertheless, the results were worth the effort.

After class, we got to take the results home with us (not a bad little dinner, at all). After getting back to my apartment, however, I checked e-mail and, lo and behold, there was an e-mail from Iana giving me the contact information for her cousin Pierre (and his main squeeze Sophie) who live in Paris and with whom I had gotten along famously in SF when they were in for Michael and Iana's wedding. So I called Sophie to say hello.

Sophie is a real go-getter...as they said in the movie Spinal Tap, she's turned up to 11.

It was 7:30PM when I called and she says "I'm going to a Brazilian friend's house for drinks tonight...can you meet me at 8:30PM? After that we can get some dinner at Chez l'Ami Jean." (the Paris restaurant we realized that we both loved when we met in the US). Pierre had actually scored a prep-chef job for a week just for fun.



Wow. Well. OK, forget the Turbot. It's Parisien nightlife time, mon ami!

I meet Sophie over at Blvd Victor Hugo for drinks at her friend's apt - nice little social scene, but definitely reminded me about how far my command of French needs to go to follow along with their rapide speech. From the party, we left with a couple of other Brazilian friends to go to l'Ami Jean. Getting in to the restaurant at 10:45PM or so, I suppose I realized that I had a late night ahead of me...thank Krishna I didn't have class until 10AM the next day (as if I ever did).

It really was a blast. Good food, good wine...all I was missing was my sweetie, back in Cal-i-forn-eye-a. Wish she coulda been there with me, but as a taste of my upcoming month to come, I look eagerly forward to the rest of my stay.