Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

Cycling to Gastronomicom is becoming something of an obstacle course. A roundabout nearby is being remodelled and yesterday I chose to go a longer way on a cycle path to avoid cycling against oncoming traffic in a contraflow. Only to find the cycle path had been dug up and I needed to slalom around piles of grit. Today I find that people cutting the hedges of the residence have left their truck on the cycle path right by the gate making it difficult to get out. I manage and they agree to move the truck, but why leave it there in the first place? Fortunately yesterday’s wind has died down and I make the trip with no AE from my V(*).

With that rant over, time for the end of dessert and fish week. We start, as per usual, with desserts and, for some reason, chef has decided that we should pair a rum baba with rice pudding. He has his reasons (kill two birds with one stone) and, true, his rice pudding is far from the stuff served up for my school dinners in the ’70s, but still. Fortunately, N. adores rice pudding even more than she does pears, it seems. So we destarch our pudding rice (boil for 3 minutes in water) then cook it slowly in milk and sugar with a vanilla pod for an hour or so. During that time we make “cigarettes” to decorate the frozen nougat. Nothing like the 70s sweet shop special that I remember well, more like a brandy snap. We add egg white and flour to creamed butter and sugar, spread circles of this on a silpat sheet and, after baking for 4-5 minutes, roll it round a butchers steel. I feel honoured to be asked to help chef demonstrate this until I start burning my finger tips.

But at least we have silpat. Before that existed all we do today on silpat was baked on buttered baking sheets which led to vastly more opportunities to burn finger tips and more laborious cleaning. Yay for progress!

After this we soak and plate (or, rather, glass) the babas. Mine wasn’t bad (I got the requisite two circles of chantilly even if the outer one touched the glass a little) and the baba, at least, tasted good. I guess our rice pudding did, too, as N. ate it all.

Then another exercise in plating. If you remember, chef had prepared frozen nougat domes earlier in the week and we now had to plate these elegantly. My plating was OK apart from my inability to create elegant and small drops of coulis on the plate. That’s why there are so many. I should, though, have taken a picture of my chopping board to show I can do it when there’s no annoying plate rim in the way.

Plating was also my downfall in the afternoon when we had to prepare Marbré de lieu jaune au paprika, fondue de poireau, pommes boulangères, sauce poivron rouge. I start off by skinning a fillet of pollack perfectly (it must be true as K. said so), portioning it pretty well, cutting our portion up, coating the strips in paprika and, as we find later, managing to roll them all up tightly in cling film for cooking in a water bath (OK, the ballotine was then vacuum sealed in a bag, but my rolling and tying was up to scratch.) K. then has fun charring the skin of a red pepper whilst I prepare mini-pans of potato slices and onion for the pommes boulangères. K. entirely approves of my decision to use a mandoline to slice the potatoes rather than trust my knife skills. I avoid disaster when I realise after a couple of minutes that I forgot to add chicken stock before putting the pans in the oven. Apparently some teams this morning made the same mistake but didn´t then wonder why they had a tray of stock sitting in front of them…

I then julienne the dark green ends of some leeks. And then 3x that quantity as we didn´t take enough. These are dried with corn starch (never flour things you are going to deep fry, folks!) and K. deep fries them. I don´t think either of us consider that these add anything to the dish apart from height—and not that much for us in any case. So, on to the red pepper sauce which, apart from me splattering K.’s folder when blending it (her back is turned and it is wiped before she comes back to the bench…), also goes well. Class votes that we copy chef’s plating rather than coming up with something ourselves and I do a respectable job apart from again showing I have no finesse when it comes to blobs and swirls:

For reasons I don´t understand, many people don´t like this so I end up with enough for a copious dinner plus enough pommes boulangères to accompany a tranche de gigot for my Easter Sunday meal.

No goûter today (I ate the rum baba and nougat in class), but I do my weekend shopping early (rain is predicted for tomorrow) and enjoy an aperitif watching the clouds roll in…

(*) Vélo à Assistance Electrique—an electric bike