Living outside our comfort zone for a year: Mon cours de cuisine

In order to improve my French language skills even more, I signed up for a cooking class. It is the school, Accent Français, that offers this and it's another 70€ for the course. Hmmmm, sounds a bit expensive??? Well, I'm here to tell you, it was well worth it. Met 6 other women: Australia, Brazilian (2) Swedish, Canadian (living in NY state), and an American. One of the Brazilian women is 54 and the Swedish woman is about my age. I haven't seen her as she is a level above , so likely in another building. Anyway, we arrived at 3:45 pm, began to prepare, cook, etc and at 6pm, sat down to dinner.

The "kids" didn't drink any wine, so Birgitta from Sweden, and Nanci from Portugal did our best.

I was picked to start frying the paupiettes de veau in clarified butter. I have seen these little bundles in the boucherie, but didn't know what they were or how to cook them and now I know. The bundle is made up of a thin layer of veal, wrapped around ground veal and then there is a layer of fat encircling it. The fatty part is removed for eating. So below is the picture of the paupiettes that I have fried and now lardons have been added as well as some dry white wine and veal stock. Bake for 30 minutes.

Et voilà

The centre piece is polenta which we made, cooled and then I cut with a scone cutter (similar) and then it was fried in butter, with the paupiettes to rewarm them just before we plated them.

Desert was fun. The original menu on the school program said "Le sabayon gratiné aux legumes". I thought that very weird and in fact, it was a typo, as it was gratiné aux agrumes.......citrus fruit. The chef taught us how to take each segment from the orange by cutting each one separately, so I showed him how my mom had taught me. He nodded and said, "but this is the way to do it". And then I watched him a couple of minutes later helping someone and he was using mom's method. Love it!

And then......