A dream job

When I returned to school this afternoon after spending the day cooking with Chef Dorette Snover and six students, one of my advisees asked me how it went and what we made.  This young man loves to cook, too.  After I told him a bit about the day, he looked at me and said "Just think, you get paid to do this."  He is so right.  Do I have the dream job or what? 
For the fourth year, my school has supported a two-day cooking seminar at C'est si Bon! cooking school.  I offered it to eighth graders only this year.  They had to get their teachers' approval and apply for one of the spots.  Today was day one.
We arrived at C'est si Bon! around 9:00 am.

Spring in North Carolina is incredibly beautiful.  Rhododendrons, the purple flowers, are one of my favorites.  The county where I was born and raised, Mitchell, is famous for its June Rhododendron Festival.  They even used to crown a queen.  Maybe they still do.  The bushes bloom here in early May. 
Dorette's husband, Rich, gave the kids a tour of the garden in back of the cooking school.  We returned to it later to pick salad greens and herbs.

After getting acquainted, Dorette gave a lesson on chopping onions.  Seems like a simple enough task, but I always hated chopping onions until Dorette gave me my first lesson.  Slice off the non-root end, slice the onion in half, slicing through the root end.  Take off the outer, brown skin.  Lay the half down flat.  With a sharp knife, make vertical cuts toward the root end, but not all the way to the root.  Then make horizontal cuts, maybe two or three.  Then slice.  Make extra cuts as you get to the root end so that your pieces are relatively uniform.  This is obviously easier to demonstrate than to describe.  And maybe everyone except me is in on the secret!  The students were impressed.

The girls divided themselves into two "teams" and set about their work.  We explained the importance of cleaning up after themselves, keeping their work stations neat, composting every possible scrap, and we set a goal-- seated with the first course at noon.   I am always quick to point out that Dorette is the chef, I am the assistant.  Today's great revelation-- my confidence level has tremendously improved.  I do not feel quite so awkward in the kitchen or in Dorette's presence.  Go me!
Here is what was in store for today--

The cauliflower soup was our first course.  The cauliflower and potatoes were cooked just right-- a bit of a crunch left, not mushy at all.  From this...

to this...

Chives were added, as well as a slice of garlic and olive oil topped toast.  And a dollop of crème fraîche.  This would make a wonderful dinner soup all by itself.
The second course was ham and cheese crêpes made from buckwheat flour.  Most people are familiar with dessert crêpes.  Main dish crêpes are so good and there are so many ways to fill them.  There is a little crêperie in Chantilly, France with the most wonderful spinach crêpes...  I digress.

Once again, herbs from Dorette's garden are visible in the filling.  She emphasizes the importance of fresh ingredients and what a difference they make in the taste of dishes.  I have become such a believer.  It is how I grew up... we always had a garden and both sets of my grandparents had gardens.  We ate what came from the garden and canned what was left over for the winter months.
Our next course was a beet root salad.  I'd never seen orange beets.  They are so colorful.

They were boiled, peeled and sliced for the salads.  Salad greens were picked, washed and arranged on plates.  The beets, now yellow, were added.  Goat cheese was placed on top of the beets and then vinaigrette was drizzled over it all.  (This was my favorite dish!)

Adding arugula gave it an interesting taste.
By this time, the girls were getting full.  We are used to eating in about 20 minutes in our classrooms.  Taking 1 1/2 - 2 hours for lunch is an unheard of luxury in American schools.
But, wonder of wonders, they bounced right back and made an amazing recovery just in time for dessert!  A Far Breton had been mixed up and baked in the oven.  We used blackberries, cooking them down a bit.

We had some left over after adding it to the cake batter and used it to top our cake, along with a bit of crème fraîche.

I really love blackberries and perhaps was a bit greedy...  Moi?  Une petite gourmande?  Guilty as charged.
We drank several pitchers of water flavored with lemon balm picked from the garden.  The temperature hit 90 today and the water was perfect.

It was a delicious day.  And I get to do it again tomorrow...  and yes, I do get paid to do this.
Stay tuned for day two.

Far Breton
(from the C'est si Bon! kitchen)

A far is a custardy pudding cake, similar to a clafouti but with a dense, smooth, flan-like texture.  This is the signature pastry of Brittany, served for breakfast as well as dessert.

8 servings

2 cups whole milk
3 large eggs
1/2 c. sugar
5 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1/4 tsp vanilla extract
1/8 tsp salt
3/4 c. all-purpose flour

1 c. fruit-- prunes, blackberries, cherries, for example
1/2 c. water
1/4 c. armagnac or other brandy

powdered sugar
crème fraîche, optional

Combine milk, eggs, 1/2 cup sugar, butter, vanilla and salt.  Blend in mixer, with a whisk or in a blender for 1 mnute.  Add flour and blend until smooth.  Cover and chill for at least 1 hour and up to 1 day.
Combine fruit and 1/2 cup water in small heavy saucepan.  Cook over medium heat until fruit is softened and water has almost evaporated, stirring occasionally, about 10 minutes.  Turn off heat.  Pour brandy over fruit.  Using a long match, ignite the brandy.  Let flames burn off, shaking pan occasionally.  Transfer fruit to small bowl.  Cool completely.  (Can be made 1 day ahead.  Cover and let stand at room temperature.)
Position rack in center of oven and preheat to 375F.  Butter an 8-inch cake pan with 2-inch high sides.  Line bottom with parchment paper.  Butter the paper.  Dust pan with flour, shaking out excess.  Place pan on baking sheet.
Reblend batter until smooth.  Pour into prepared pan. Drop fruit into batter, distributing evenly.  Bake cake on baking sheet until sides are puffed and brown and knife inserted into center comes out clean, about 1 hour.  Cool cake completely in pan on rack.
Place piece of parchment paper on flat plate.  Sift powdered sugar onto paper.  Run knife around cake in pan to loosen.  Invert pan onto paper, releasing cake.  Remove pan.  Peel off paper.  Place serving plate over cake and invert.  Dust top of cake with additional powdered sugar.  Extra fruit and/or crème fraîche may be added.

Bon appétit, C'est si Bon and my chefs!

Wine and whine

My very good friend and colleague, Arles Lucy, invited me over for Wine and Whine after school today.  Truth be told, we have very little to whine about, so we just had a glass of rosé and some great cheeses and caught up.  We are so busy during our days at school that we have very little time to just talk.  We named our sessions Wine and Whine and we act as if we do it all the time, but, once again, truth be told, we haven't sat on her back porch since this time last year.  We laughed as we realized that because, in our own heads, we think we do this all the time.  And you want to know why?  Because we have such wonderful shared memories.
Arles Lucy and I have taught together for quite a few years.  She is our art teacher.  She is a Southern girl, like me.  She is from Virginia, I am from North Carolina.   After I came back from my two week stay in Arles in 2005, I talked about it constantly and was even asked to tell the middle school faculty about my trip.  Since I received summer grant money to go to walk in Van Gogh's footsteps and take cooking lessons, they had to put up with my iPhoto slideshow at a faculty meeting.  She got the idea that maybe I should take adults on a trip to Provence.  I decided to offer the trip through our Academy Nights program, we found our traveling buddies and off we went in the summer of 2006.  Here we are with Gordes in the background.

The trip really was a perfect one.  Everything fell into place and we have all remained very good friends.  We even had a reunion trip in 2008.
But Arles Lucy holds a very special place in my heart.  She and I have been roommates on our trips.  She is my confidante and a true friend.  There is a very good chance that she will not like the photos that I am going to post of her, but I am willing to take that chance (and hope that she is really busy the next few days and she won't have time to look at the blog!).
Here she is at Giverny-- we took a day trip there and packed a picnic with us.  It was a perfect day.  She was even asked to photograph a proposal.

Arles Lucy is an artist, too, and I know she wanted to take Monet's little boat out so that she could paint his waterlilies.

We had lots of picnics in Provence with Chef Érick during our cooking week in Arles.

We even had one at the Abbaye de Sénanque...

Chef Érick stopped the car one day and she jumped out of the car.  She hopped over the ditch so that I could take her photo with the tournesols.  I should've done it, too, instead of staying on the other side.  But I did get this great photo!

We saw lavender, just cut from the fields, being unloaded at Florame in St. Rémy de Provence.

We roamed the streets of Arles...

We visited a winery in Séguret (and wrecked havoc with the locks at the winemaker's house) and looked out at amazing Provençal vistas...

We had an amazing lunch in Vence at La Table d'Amis de Jacques Maximin.

We've had some wonderful times, but we always go back to this trip.  It cemented our friendship.
Here's to many more Wine and Whine afternoons, Arles Lucy!
She doesn't like chèvre, but she always buys some just for me!

And she always has beautiful napkins, too.

Bon appétit, mon amie!

Another lovely blog

Oui, I have found another one with incredible photos.

http://manon21.blogspot.com

There just isn't enough time in one day to fit in all the reading I want to do... in English or French.  There are just so many interesting things out there to read about, so many photos to gaze at longingly, so many recipes to try...  but summer time is fast approaching.

Bon appétit à Manon21!

Cooking and confessing

I've had a wonderful week of cooking.  I made these chocolate chip cookies- about 6 dozen or so of them Saturday afternoon.  High school-age son just snagged a bag of them to take to share with his AP US History study group that is meeting today.  I will take some as a thank you gift for one of my students.  He made baguettes this week and brought me two of them.

They were délicieux!  It was not easy for me to share this with my eaters, but I did.  Okay, only one of them.  The other one was all mine and went to school with me with some cheese for my lunch.  Instant sandwich au fromage.
The same family also gave me their share of seafood from Walking Fish CSF, a community supported fishery.  I picked up two live softshell crabs and about a dozen clams at Duke Gardens.  I asked advice from Salamanzar, my favorite wine guru from Wine Authorities, on how to prepare the crabs.  Cut off their heads, remove the gills and cook them up.  I ended up giving them to him, actually.  I didn't have time to prepare them and I couldn't stand the thought of them going to waste.  I was sure that the family who gave them to me would approve since they love WA, too.
I knew that I could quickly prepare the clams.  I cooked palourdes for the first time in Arles and have wanted to make this dish since I got home (already 16 months ago).

I had a bag of spinach from Brinkley Farms that I got at the Durham Farmers' Market.  I sauteed the spinach in olive oil, removed it from the pan and put it in my tian, an earthenware dish that I brought back from Arles after my sabbatical.  It made the trip home in my carry-on bag so it wouldn't get broken!  Then I put some water and white wine in the pan and added the clams.  I covered them and waited to hear the sound of them popping open.  I added a little fresh nutmeg to the spinach and stirred it up before adding the clams.  The un-ex and I just ate it straight from the tian.
Saturday morning, I made the nutella brownies from my previous post.  Really good when you need a chocolate fix.

Today I heated up my cast iron grill that fits over the gas burners on my stove.  Señor brought his to school the other day to use with his cooking club and we discussed the merits and ease of this wonderful truc.  I wanted to get a head start on dinner and I grilled some chicken breasts with a few herbes de Provence sprinkled on them.

While the grill was still hot, I decided to cook some sausages.  Not just any old grocery store sausages either.  These came from "Pork Knox" at Wine Authorities.  We tasted the Giacomo Garlic Spinach Chicken sausages last week with Italian wines at WA's Saturday tasting.  By the time the BFF and I got there, they'd already sold out.  40 pounds in about that many minutes... all gone.  We didn't miss out this week when another shipment came in.

Très bon for lunch today.
I kept at it and decided to caramelize some onions before they needed to be thrown out.  That would be a sin (and not a cute one, faithful readers).  I pulled out my stainless steel pan, heated up some olive oil and tossed in the sliced onions.  I snipped a few sprigs of thyme from my back deck herb garden and just let them brown nicely.  I added in some mushrooms that I had sauteed earlier in the week and then put the mixture into a pastry shell and baked it at 400F for about 20 minutes.
Voilà!  My second course.

But before I finish this post, I must confess to last night's adventure in eating.  The BFF's husband, Daddy-O (he is a musician in his spare time, having played with the Castaways back in the '70's and '80's and now with The Fabulous Hot Dog Daddy-Os), will celebrate his birthday soon so she gave him tickets to a concert at Koka Booth Amphitheatre in Cary to hear Dave Mason and Cheap Trick.  The un-ex and I got to tag along.

The BFF was trying to snap photos with my little camera when some guy took it from her and headed up into the VIP section and got this picture.  It was a great concert!
After it was over, we were all starving.  Other than bake brownies and cookies, I had not done much cooking.  So, at 11:00 pm when you are really hungry, what do you do?  We found the closest Waffle House and Erica, our waitress, took care of us.

Two eggs over easy, grits, bacon and wheat toast.  Daddy-O was the only one to order a waffle.  But he shared.

Bon appétit et bon (almost) anniversaire, Daddy-O!

France & All Things French

Oui, I have an official business card.  It is quite lovely, with my lavender photo taken at the Abbaye de Sénanque.  I feel kind of silly having them, but they come in handy sometimes.  It makes me seem more legitimate when I approach someone and ask if I can write about them.  I felt like a stalker the first time I approached Brian in the OnlyBurger truck.  That's why I got the cards made up.  Anyway, I have declared my love for France & All Things French in print.  I just cannot help myself.  I am incredibly lucky, too, because I spend my days surrounded by French stuff.  And I have collected a lot of stuff in my 30 years of teaching and in during the course of my 36 year love affair with France.
Here is part of the collection...
I have this huge poster from the Arles Féria du Riz celebration.  I have another one, too, but it needs to be laminated for protection.  They both do.  Chef Érick gave them to me.  I don't think they are making the huge ones anymore...  I didn't see any around town for the Féria de Pâques when I was in Arles in March.  Dommage.

I have several pictures and postcards on a bulletin board.  I think this was me in a previous life.  Cute hat, n'est-ce pas?

And I think that this will be me in a future life.  I want to come back as either an artist or a cat.  This kind of combines the two.  And dressed in the chic striped fisherman's sweater.  Stripes are always fashionable in France.  I cannot believe that I do not already own one of those shirts.  Several of the girlies bought them while we were in France.

These trinkets sit on a shelf.  I have the chefs from Ratatouille, various Eiffel Towers, Idéfix (or Dogmatix in English), Astérix le Gaulois' loyal dog, purchased at Parc Astérix one June day when I went there with my friend Ghislaine, her sister and nieces and college-age son when he was 10 years old, and Footix (see a theme here with names?), the mascot from the World Cup 1998 held in France.  France won, you know.

This is a piece of art made by a former student after we returned from our trip to Paris.  Is this brainwashing?  Non! Who wouldn't fall in love with the City of Lights?

I have a rather large collection of books.  These are some of my own French textbooks I saved.  The green and orange ones are from high school, I think.

These are new additions to my cookbook collection.  I just bought them at the DA Used Book Fair and haven't taken them home yet.  I mostly just gaze longingly at the photos of Provence and think about the things I would eat if I were there.  Or what I did eat while living there.  Or what I will eat on my next visit.

A bumper sticker purchased in a Paris souvenir shop.

A button from a French teachers' meeting.

A lovely poster of the Louvre pyramids all lit up.  We recreated this photo during the daytime a couple of years ago.

This map of France hangs next to the Louvre poster.  I love it and have had it since I first started teaching.  I inherited it from whomever was the French teacher before me.  The geography of France hasn't changed in 30 years, you know.

This is what I wore to school on Friday, my Eiffel Tower tee-shirt.  Guess I became part of the room decoration, too.  Somedays that's what I feel like... that and the teacher in the old Charlie Brown cartoon specials.  The one that whenever she speaks it comes out as "Waaa-waaa-waaa."  Teaching middle school in the spring can be a challenge.  My students bodies are there, but their minds are elsewhere.

This is a small part of my ever-growing CD collection.  Yannick Noah has a new one coming out this summer.  I've listened to Angela, a single from it.

I love guidebooks, too.  I crossed off a couple more "have-to sees" from the latest Frommer's Paris book in March.  Chef Érick is written up in Rick Steves.

I use this Monoprix bag to carry my lunch to school every day.  Well, this one or one of the many different colors I have.  They only cost 80 centimes and they are so practical.

In addition to the textbooks, I have a couple of shelves filled with French novels.  These are from my college and graduate school days.  I never finished the master's degree, but I took classes at UNC-Chapel Hill, UNC-Greensboro, and NC State.  I participated in a French seminar one summer and also studied in Québec.  Then babies came along and I decided that literature and poetry just weren't my thing.  I want a master's in French culture and the art of French living.  My sabbatical was the best course in that!  Les Misérables by Victor Hugo is my all-time favorite novel.  I love Jean Valjean. What a hero.  I visited Hugo's home in Paris with Ghislaine one sunny spring day.

I have this very pretty box where I stash my French magazines.   It was a gift from a student.  I am so easy to buy gifts for... I love everything and anything French.

I brought this home from my last trip.  While walking down Rue St. Dominique one night, I found it lying on the sidewalk, all dirty from being stepped on by Parisians on their way home from work.  It advertises sales in the 7e arrondissement, my favorite neighborhood.

This is a beautiful postcard of an outdoor market in Provence.  Saturdays in Arles....

And last, but not least, the stuff on my desk.  My little calendar of Provence with my dream cabanon set in the middle of a lavender field, a jar of Nutella, a model of the Eiffel Tower put together by one of my 7th graders, a thank you card from one of the girlies after this year's trip, lavender oil from the Abbaye de Sénanque, olive oil handcream (I am going to need more soon because the girlies have discovered it and come in to "borrow" some now!), and my Notre Dame gargoyle who is there to protect me from evil spirits.

I found this Nutella brownie recipe at bakebakebake.  Great photos of the brownies!

Absolutely the Best Nutella Brownies

Microwave 1 stick butter and 1/2 c. cocoa powder for 1 minute.  Whisk like mad.  When it's nice and smooth, add 3/4 c. sugar, 1/2 c. Nutella and 3 oz. melted dark chocolate.  Whisk in 2 eggs.  Sift together 1/2 c. flour and 1/2 tsp. salt.  Dump the flour mixture over the chocolate mixture and fold gently with a rubber spatula.  Fold in chocolate chips, chocolate chunks and/or nuts, if desired.  Pour into an 8x8-inch  pan. Bake at 350F for 20-25 minutes.  Cool and slice into bars.  Enjoy!

Bon appétit, to my classroom and all my junk!