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4月19日 Le SouffleI've never had, nor ever will have, so many souffles in one night. Several friends and I went to Le Souffle earlier this week, a restaurant famous for, well... its souffles.
Almost all of us ordered their 3 courses souffle menu (for 30 euros) which has 2 savory and 1 sweet souffles. Here are what I've ordered:
Escargot Souffle...
Fish & Shrimp Souffle (I know... it's not easy to tell the difference from the first one)...
Coffee Souffle with Ice-cream...
All in all, I still like the sweet souffle best. The souffles aren't bad at all, but eating 3 of them (that's like about 6 egg whites) in a roll is definitely too much for a normal person. I think I've had my souffle quota for the next 3 months. If you ever go there, I suggest you order the other set menu which only one of the 3 courses is a souffle dish.  4月13日 PigeonsHaven't blogged for ages. That's just me, 3 mins of heat. I would also blame Facebook too, since it makes blogging-like activities too easy which is probably why it is so successful. Tonight I was reading an article about this young successful chef and then my friend B's blog... somehow the 衝動 of updating my blog has arised again. (I think the bottle of red wine I drank also has something to do with this...)
Last night I finally got to try this small French restaurant in Paris called Au Fils des Saisons. I've always wanted to try it out ever since I've read the many recommendations on the internet, such as this one from a LCB alumni. The resturant hides ltself in a little alley in the 3rd arrondisement. I would have just walked past it if I didn't have the address since there isn't even a restaurant sign outside! Luckily the food didn't disappoint me at all. For 35 euros, I got my 3-courses dinner with every dish made to nearly perfection. The style is traditional French, though the presentation is better than most traditional restaurants.
For the starter, I ordered scallops served with a bed of leeks. The perfectly seared scallops got my appetite all fired up...
For the main course, I had pigeons in cognac sauce with wild mushrooms. The birds were cooked just right in medium rare as how they should be...
And for dessert, I had mille feuilles in strawberry sauce...
I agreed with the other bloggers' comment that this is a one star restaurant but with price tag without the stars. Highly recommended to anyone.
Then tonight I was cooking quails for dinner at home. I bought them from Carrefour, a super marche here (kinda like a Walmart but in Paris), since they were on sale... 7 quails for 7 euros. After deboning them, the carsasses were used to make a red wine reduction sauce together with some aromatic veggies - onion/carrot/shallots - and veal stock made from Maggi instant veal stock powder. Butter was added to the sauce at the end so as to give it a glossy and smoother finish. The quails were simply pan-fried to medium rare seasoned with salt and pepper. I was quite happy with the result, especially the sauce which has achieved the right consistency. Although when I asked my landlady for feedback, as usual her comment was more critical than praises. Oh well, her negative perspective of almost everything is something that I've gotten quite used to... 2月18日 Taking a break from gwai lo cuisineI have no class today. I stayed home and tried to make Chinese dumplings from scratch - flour, water and the fillings. I learned this from some mainland China students at a church fellowship event a couple weeks ago. Here are the basic steps:
1) Mix flour and water (and a bit of salt) in a bowl. The ratio is roughly 2 cup flour to 1 cup water. Mix with your hand until all the flour has been incorporated into the dough. Let the dough rest for approx 20 mins. 2) The dough should feel pretty soft by now. Knead the dough for approx 10-15 mins for more elasticity. Between each kneading, you want to turn the dough 90 degrees. 3) Once the dough is more firm, roll the dough into stick and cut out little pieces with a knife... 4) Press each little piece into a circle and roll thin with a small rolling pin. To keep the shape of the skin circle, the trick is to rotate the skin 60-90 degrees between each roll. As long as the piece starts as a circle, it should remain circle but just grow bigger and bigger.
5) Now you can use the skin to wrap the prepared fillings to make the dumplings (or rivioli in French).
6) Cook the dumplings in boiling water and and here are final products...
The same dough can be used to make green onion oil pancake too:
Have fun!  2月16日 What went wrong??!That's a very common question that I ask myself whenever I bake something. No matter how careful (I thought) I've measured every ingredient or set the oven to the right temperature, something would go wrong and the finished product just wouldn't look right. Like in our practical class yesterday, my cheese souffle didn't rise (and everyone else's did even though they didn't seem know why either...). Or like the onion tart I made in one of my earlier practicals, the tart rise too much and created some 'holes' on the surface...
What bugs me is that most of the times I just couldn't figure out the reason. And all the chef could say is that "you must have done something wrong...". Well, yes, I know that. When I am cooking on a stove top, I could see exactly how things are going. And if problems occurred, I can try to fix it right there. But with baking, it's like a black box to me. I follow a bunch of preparation steps without much thinking and hope that it will turn out as the recipe has promised. Hmm... maybe I need to video tape the whole preparation process so I can investigate what went wrong.
 On a brighter note, I am getting better at making puff pastry by now. Showing off one of the dishes that I made with it...
Oh and I finally asked my classmate to take a picture of me in my school uniform...
2月1日 Three stars chef demoOnce every two weeks or so, there will be some guest chef demo taking place at our school. Usually chefs from some famous restaurants would be invited to show us how to cook some really complicated dishes. I went to such a demo a couple weeks ago with the guest chef working for a 3 stars Michelin restaurant called Ledoyen. Here is a picture of him and his assistance (and you can see what our classroom looks like too)...
One of the dishes he made was Truffle macaroni with a cream sauce. At first I thought, well, it's just a pasta dish with truffle and some cream... big deal. But when I saw what he meant by pasta... oh my gosh... the spagetti was cooked, laid out in parallel and sticking together to form kind of like a cardboard. These "spagetti cardboards" are then glued together using meat paste to form a little box, which was then filled with a sauce cooked with truffle, ham and cream. Finally these assembled boxes will be baked in the oven till ready, decorated and plate up. Here is the final product...
And here is another dessert - Chocolate and orange tarlet - made in the demo...
Now I can see why these restaurants are charging so much. And I'm happy to taste these dishes at the end of the demo for free! Yum yum...  1月19日 Stock, stock, and more stocks…The first week of lessons were all about stock making. We started off with learning veal stock, then fish stock, and finally chicken stock. Main part of the lessons was to show us how to handle the raw stuffs… like cleaning/filleting the fish and trussing the chicken. It’s interesting to see how flaming torch was used to burn off leftover feather from the chicken. An overkill but definitely fun thing to do. According to the chef, the restaurant industry is like the fashion industry, and traditional stock like the veal stock is pretty ‘out’ nowadays. Mainly it takes too much time to prepare and the sauces made with veal stock are usually quite heavy and hence not exactly the healthiest choice. But still we need to learn it since, like the fashion industry, what is ‘out’ now will become ‘in’ again in just a matter of time. When we were done with the stocks, we were shown how to use them to prepare the main dishes and their sauces - Filets de merlan Bercy & Poularde pochee sauce supreme, riz au gras...
1月14日 Chateau, chateau, and more chateau...Don't have class this Monday (i.e. today), so that means long weekend for me. Originally I was thinking about taking the train to the Dijon region by myself (I don't know what's there exept for Dijon mustard so I want to find out...). Then on Friday in school, I bumped into Ayako my Japanese classmate and her two friends. Apparently they were planning to visit Loire Valley where they would rent a car to visit those chateaus (castles?) spreading along the Loire river. I accepted their kind invitation and so I joined them for a fun two days train/driving trip in Loire Valley. It's winter time so many of the chateaus, especially those with wine tastings, are closed. Though we still managed to see some of the famous ones like the Chenoneau and Azay Le Rideau...
This is the first time I really hang out with Japanese friends, and it was a lot of fun and a great cultural learning experience for me. Thanks to the wonderful translation by Saya who is from LA, I was able to communicate with them without any problem. 1月10日 First day of classI had my first day of class last Friday and it went pretty well. The whole morning was student orientation so I got to meet everyone else including the pastry folks (I'm taking cuisine only). As expected, there are students from all over the world - USA, Canada, Australia, Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong (only me), Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Germany, France, etc. It's just like a mini United Nation, with USA being the biggest player as usual. In the afternoon we had our first demonstration class. Our chef professeur, while preparing the Potage cultivateur (Rustic vegetable soup), showed us the various way of cutting vegetable in French cooking - Mirepoix, Julienne, Paysanne, etc...
And here is the final product which we all got to taste...
I also got my equipments and uniforms. Oooh... I got so excited playing with my new equipment set after I got home (and putting labels on them so they won't get mixed up with others). Now I know where part of my tuition fee went.
Maybe I got over excited, I also experienced my first cut while playing with the set...
But guess it's better this happened at home than during my practical class! 1月3日 Here I am, finally…As a recap from my last blog update, yes, I did apply for Le Cordon Bleu. The application went through successfully. What happened then was a month of busy preparation… as I attempted to wrap things up at work before my last day, getting French visa, clear my HK tax, farewell lunches/dinners, packing, emptying out my rental apartment, as well as spending time with my parents who have come visited HK. I should later write some more blog entries about them so that I can remember what I’ve done in HK.
Thus three days ago, on New Year’s Eve, I’ve arrived in Paris. And as a personal tradition, just like the last time I flied to Paris, only I have made it successfully to the airport… and not my checked-in luggage. It didn’t make the flight connection and was still stuck in London. Fortunately it arrived on the next flight and got delivered to my place on the same day.
Boy, it’s pretty cold here in Paris… like 4 to 5 degrees Celsius. Good that I anticipated this and have come well-equipped with thick coats, scarf, mittens, etc. Thanks to Bonnie’s help, I am able to stay at her friend Carol’s place upon my arrival. Carol has been living in Paris for I believe over 30 years so she knows the city really well and has helped me to settle in. Like I have already gotten the monthly Metro pass yesterday and have experimented with commuting to the school via both subway and bus. And thanks to another friend who just finished studying at Le Cordon Bleu, I have even gotten a local SIM phone card from her. I like to think of the quote from the book Alchemist: “And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” Thank you, Lord.
These two days I have mainly been exploring and getting myself familiarized with the city. Even though cold, the sky has been pretty clear and so I’ve taken some pictures along the way…
Last night Carol (lady on the left) was cooking we had dinner at home together with her good friend. She made Confit de Canard and Pate de Salmon for us. Yummy!!
10月25日 Dream... oh yeah?Finally mailed out my application form for the culinary school today, with the application deadline being only 3 weeks away. Yeah, I know...
 but from what I heard, since this is a commercial school, as long as I have money to pay for tuition, getting admittance should not be a problem. I hope that's true la.Why applying so late? Besides my procasinating nature, I had been struggling for quite a while of whether this culinary thing is making any sense at all. Honestly I still haven't figured out a good answer for myself. Okay, I may actually like to cook for my friends and they tend to enjoy eating my food. But that doesn't really translate to I know I want to be a professional cook or I have the talent to be a chef. More than likely I don't. Especially after I have done apprenticeship at Chez Les Copains, I have seen how good those seasoned cooks are with their many years of experience. It's just another profession. And like programming, it takes years to become good at one.
And there are other things I worry and scare about too... Being alone living in a new city where I don't speak their language (solution: I've started to take Beginner French two weeks ago... and it's freaking hard!!). A year from now, I may realize I actually don't have much cooking potentials after using up a load of $$, and then I will have also lagged behind with my IT knowledge. Plus what am I going to do with all the furnitures in my current rental apartment? The list of negative yet practical reasonings could go on and on...
I guess nothing is certain. And nothing is sure win. I can play safe and being sensible at all time. But that won't guarantee a life of joy and fulfillment anyway. Looking back at the last few years, that fact that I somehow came back to HK, somehow came across a magazine which talked about Bonnie's restaurant, how she happened to be a Le Cordon Bleu graduate plus a Christian such that she willingly took me as her apprentice, how I ended up developed pretty good friendships with the restaurant crews, and somehow I am still single and have saved up some pretty good $$. Looking back at these dots, I suppose it doesn't really hurt, and actually worth giving it a year or two to see whether they will lead to something interesting. And I promise, after this crazy adventure, I will try to settle down and learn how to become a more responsible grown up.
 One part of the school application is to get my body measurements...
Turns out my 三圍 are: 23", 36", 32".
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