Travels, Valentine's, and Tarts!

The Garmons like to travel on the weekends, and I have just been so lucky to be invited each time!  This past Sunday, we went to Auvers-sur-Oise; just North/Northwest of Paris.  This little town was made famous because it was a little hang-out/escape from the city place of several artists (Van Gogh, Pissarro, etc.), but more notably, it is the place where Vincent Van Gogh killed himself.

Here we are walking up towards the church:

You may recognize this Van Gogh painting, and yes, it's the same church.

Here's a nice view of the rose window.

 I just love this view of the architecture:

A view from inside:

Van Gogh had admitted himself into an asylum in the south of France, but towards the end of his life, he moved to Auvers-sur-Oise to be near Dr. Gachet, recommended by a friend.  Van Gogh's last works of art are markedly more grey, dark, and agitated, mirroring not only his troubled mental state, but perhaps a slightly accurate view of the countryside there.  Here's a view up at the grey sky from a road walking up to the cemetery where Van Gogh is buried:

Apparently Van Gogh had had a different tomb stone, but vandals became such a problem that they replaced it with this small cement one.

I just love the idea of having plants grow over a person's grave--it's a little way to continue living on after death, in another organism.  How beautiful is that!

 There was also an Absinthe museum in the little town, but it was unfortunately closed for the winter season.

Here's another Van Gogh painting.  Look at it, and then at the following photo--it's the same stairway!

There's also a chateau in this town.  Here is a view of the gardens:

Now, I was all for seeing the chateau, because I think they're great and I love walking around inside and out.  But this was only a chateau on the outside--the inside was this stupid museum (and trust me, I'm not one to knock museums; I love them) that they had obviously spent a ton of money on.  But none of the actual inside of the chateau was preserved.  They tried to create this little "trip" through time in the 1800s, and talked about art and culture.  Okay so maybe it would have been cool if it had been advertised as a museum/video tour of the 1800s.  But as it was, we went to a chateau and bought tickets to go inside, and then were like what is this??  A simulated train ride with impressionist paintings flying by the "windows"? Weird.

Anyway, at least the outside was nice :)

------

Monday was great--we didn't have class until 2pm so I had all morning to run errands--and I signed the contract/lease for my apartment yay!  I officially have a place!  I have absolutely LOVED staying with the Garmons, but I'm sure they will enjoy having their beautiful place to themselves again before having more family visitors soon.

In class, we repeated several of last week's recipes to be sure that we could do them without so much supervision.  I think this is a great way to learn.  And I have noticed improvement in my work, so that is encouraging!

I didn't get out of class until about 8:15pm, and then was supposed to meet Ben for dinner.  We had some delicious sushi, which I haven't had since I left the US.  It was yummy, and I finished it off with some green tea ice cream!  We walked around for a while and then decided it was too cold for that so we stopped for some hot chocolate at my new favorite place (I need to look up what it's called because I forgot).

Anyway, it was a lovely evening, and when I returned to the Garmons, I found a little wrapped package on my bed.  It was these beautifully made chocolates from down the street that Marcie has seen me admire for a while.  She's so sweet!

-----

Tuesday we made orange tarts!  Yummmm

-------

And today, we made multi-fruit tarts, and chocolate tarts.

Here's my multi-fruit tart:

Here's Chef Averty decorating his chocolate tart.  See the large blob in the back?  That's a sheet of baked cocoa nibs, butter, and sugar that melt together to make a hard sheet that can be broken and used as decoration.  That's what he's placing around the top of his chocolate tart.

These are my petite chocolate tarts:

And this is Chef's multi-fruit tart.  Perfect, of course.

Friday/Saturday

Well, it was a long week of school, but it's so worth it because I have created many tasty things.  On Friday alone, we made a tart with almond creme and the poached pears from Thursday, an almond tart, and a Lindsor tart (tart with almond creme and raspberry preserves).

Here is Chef Averty spreading the almond creme into his sweet-dough shell:

Slicing the poached pears:

Arranging the pears in just the right way:

Here is my pear tart just before baking!

Chef demonstrating how to pipe the raspberry preserves into the pie shell:

Here are some of the pear tarts just after baking (mine's in the front):

 My 3 creations, glazed and finished:

Take home box!

But it was a very long week and we were all just so exhausted, that we decided to go out for a much needed drink after class.

So, Black Swan just came out in France this week and, since I hadn't seen it yet, I went to a movie theater in the Opera area.  The opera building is gorgeous, by the way, but the lighting wasn't great so I didn't get a picture.  The movie theater experience was ridiculous though.  I had bought tickets online beforehand, which was good, but there's only one little machine on the outside of the theater to retrieve the pre-paid tickets, and then you have to get BACK in a separate line and wait until just before the movie starts to get into the theater.  So, since it was Friday night, the line was incredulously long.  It actually spread down an entire block, past a restaurant and across a street.  I am not exaggerating.  Anyway, all that aside, it was a really good movie and it was worth the wait.

While waiting in line for the movie, I spied a McDonald's next door.  Now, typically that would have absolutely no meaning to me whatsoever, but I have to admit I have been a bit homesick for American foods lately.  Particularly beef and melty American-style cheese.  So, when we got out of the movie, a little after midnight, I made sure we stopped at McDonald's so I could get a bacon cheeseburger (called a Bacon Royal here).  I ate it ALL and even wiped the melted cheese off the cardboard box it came in.  SO unlike me!

After the burger devouring, I convinced Ben to walk with me to the Eiffel Tower, because it was so pretty and lit up with the moon in the background!

---------

I slept in this morning... until 8:20!  It's funny when sleeping in until 8:20 is a nice thing, when it was previously such a punishment.  But, I woke up to homemade omelets and biscuits with butter and jam!!  I think I'm over my egg allergy--I ate the entire omelet (full of panfried ham, onions, and melty velveeta cheese) without getting that usual tickly throat or upset stomach feeling.  Yay!  But with last night's cheeseburger and this morning's delicious cheesy omelet--I think I'm set with my American food fix for a while :)

Marcie and I walked to the Champs Elysees in the late morning.  I had no idea it was such a short walk from their flat.  And a beautiful walk!  At one point on our walk, we spotted superman and spiderman on  the balconies of a gorgeous building.  Funny combination.

Mmmmmm! The Arc de Triumph!

We stopped for lunch at a Chinese restaurant the Garmons are fond of.  And it's so cool inside!  As you walk in, the floor is transparent and there are a bunch of Koi swimming around under your feet.  Here is a view of the fish from our table:

It was really cool, and the food was delicious and plentiful.

First week of school

Wow.  It's only day 4 of classes and I have already learned a TON.  I absolutely love the school.  I am part of the Ecole Superieure de Cuisine Francaise--Ferrandi (a part of the larger school, Ecole Gregoire Ferrandi).  The program is extremely professional, and the pedagogy is set up exactly the way I prefer to learn.  The first day, we got fitted for our uniforms, the second day we were in the kitchen, the third day, we started making and working with dough, and today we made tarte aux pommes (apple tart), poached pears, and flan.  I have been waking up at 6am the past 2 days, and will again tomorrow morning.  But I think I'm suited for that sort of schedule, as I have much more energy and many more smiles than the majority of my classmates--although everyone is very excited about it all.

On day 3, we had fascinating lecture time as well as practical work in the kitchen.  I learned that there is more than one type of butter.  The special butter we use for pastry doughs is harder than normal butter.  A different ratio of fat to water, you may wonder?  No.  The main reason for the difference between butters is based on the diet of the cow.  For regular butter (here in France, I can't vouch for American butter-makers), the cows are fed green grass, and the butter is softer.  The special pastry butter is harder because the cows have been fed hay or straw, which allows for a different ratio of oleic and steric acids in the butter.  This makes for a much more pleasant pastry.  I found that fascinating.  I am a bit surprised, and pleasantly satisfied about the amount of food science we are learning.  It keeps me stimulated anyway, beyond learning the tasks of making certain recipes.  

My chef/professor, Chef Didier Averty, is fabulous.  You can just see the passion for what he does ooze out of him--he is just so happy while he gives demos even though he could obviously do it all with his eyes closed.  I can tell he's the perfect type of instructor for me because he teaches not only the scientific aspect of what we're doing, but since there are only 9 people in my class, I can get very specific instruction about every step of everything I'm doing.  He also is stern enough to push my ambition to a higher level, and yet funny enough to temper any hard-feelings that could come from that.  At one point, I had rolled out my dough into a square...somehow...and he just laughed and said I was cute and came over with his "magic wand" (the rolling pin) and made my square into a circle just by rolling it.  Amazing.  Then he proceeded to take me to the white-board to explain and diagram WHY it works to roll it in a certain way when you have anything other than a circle on your board.  

On day 3 (the first day we worked in the kitchen), we learned how to make pâte à foncer (a dough).  Making the dough is the first very important step--there are 6 simple ingredients:  flour, butter (the special straw-fed-cow butter), salt, sugar, egg yolk, and water.  And I have now memorized the ratio, as we have made it a couple times now.  There is such a rigid way that it has to be made, small particular steps that are so important in order to have the dough come out the right way.  The flour and butter are combined until they become crumbly and sand-like, spread out in a circle with a large empty hole in the middle.  In this hole, the egg, water, sugar, and salt are stirred up by the fingers until the crystals are about dissolved, then the flour-butter sand is carefully spread over the egg mixture (Chef Averty showed us this part during the demo, working his spread out fingers through the "sand" to incorporate the egg mixture like a cat in a litter box--very gently and careful and thorough).  The dough ball is then smeared against the granite slab to incorporate the ingredients and to oxygenate the dough (you can actually see the dough change slightly in color as the oxygen is incorporated).  I love food science!

Anyway, after the dough is made, it's chilled for a while.  Then it has to be rolled out into an exact circle, and placed correctly into the tart ring.  Tarts are the closest thing you can find to a pie here.  But, they're not cooked in a pie plate.  There's just a metal ring--with nothing at all on the bottom.  So, lining the ring is a real art.  You don't want the dough to slip out of the ring, so you line it with butter and can't have too much flour on top of the rolled out dough.  You also have to make sure it makes an exact 90 degree angle between the counter-top and the tart ring.  And then there's the whole process of pinching the edges.  Each time I rolled out the dough, lined the ring, and pinched the edges, he would come inspect it, compliment it, and dump it back out on the table and tell me to do it again.  Repetition is my favorite way to learn, so I really learned a lot from this exercise.  And it's a good thing I like repetition because we were in the kitchen from 7:45am until 1:00pm, just making these shells over and over.

Then we threw away all our practice dough, and made a whole new recipe.  Today (day 4), we used that recipe of dough and made 2 shells right off the bat.  Here are mine:

Close-up on my pâte à foncer shell

Some of my classmates working on their shells

This is chef demonstrating how to peel and core apples the right way.  You can see the large mirror above the table, so it's easy to observe what he's doing no matter where you are in the kitchen.

We lined the tart shells with apple sauce.  This is Chef Averty arranging his apple slices around the tart.

The outer-ring of apples goes in one direction, while the inner ring is arranged in the opposite direction

Chef's final product (before baking)

Then it was our turn.  We peeled, cored, and sliced the apples, and then arranged them into our own tarts.  This is my final product.  You can see there are some broken apple slices and it's not perfectly even, but I'm still proud of my first tarte aux pommes.

My final product (before baking)

Then we spread melted butter on the top to preserve the apples:

My tarte aux pommes with butter glaze

Martin (San Diego) and Marina (Serbia) displaying a tarte aux pommes

Tartes pre-oven

Chef putting the tartes into the oven

Tartes baking

Tartes after baking.  Mmmmm!

 After we made the tartes, we poached pears in a syrup that we made with fresh vanilla bean (we'll do something with them tomorrow), and then we made flan.  But it's not the flan you might be familiar with (the wiggly jello-mold-like dessert).  No, this is a custard baked in a sweet dough crust.  Mmmmm!  We're doing something with that tomorrow too.

But class went from 8am to 1:25pm today, and I had to RUN out of school (with my tarte aux pommes in a little box), because I had an appointment to visit an apartment on the other side of town (and I got it! And it's  so cute!).  But it really has been difficult to find an apartment, much more difficult than I had anticipated before coming here.  Example of this:  Ben called one listing for me, and the man said he already had 200 people call and try to visit the place.  200!  And this was true of most of the ads.  One apartment I visited was absolutely disgusting--I walked in and the lady was smoking a cigarette and she spoke French with an Arabic accent, so it was really difficult to understand her, but she took me to the kitchen and was explaining how the stove doesn't work at all, and there was just a dingy futon in the living room that is also the bed/bedroom.  Also, it was on the ground floor and the windows are right on the street, so it didn't feel like a very safe place.  But, all that aside, I'm happy to have a cute little place now.  I'll probably move in sometime in the next couple weeks.  Here's a view from my balcony into a pretty courtyard:

And after the apartment appointment, I had to go all the way back across town to set up a local bank account (I'm REALLY glad that I took some French in school, because all of this would be nearly impossible without it).  I ran so many errands today that I was rendered completely exhausted when I got home to the Garmons.  But I feel I was rewarded by my productivity, as we got to sample my tarte aux pommes after dinner!

It was really nice, not bad for a first try!  There was a really nice strong apple flavor (unlike many apple pies in the US), and the crust was so buttery and delicious!  A very good day :)