Chapitre 8: Cooking conquests, but only in french.

Bonjour once more friends!  My semester is quickly coming to a close.  I really feel like just yesterday I was gaping at only having a month left, now here I am looking at single digits.  I feel like I have about a billion things I could post here right now, between summaries of my experience, feelings about going home, final exams and papers, and my life here, but I'll settle on just one thing for this post.  I'm sorry for the delay in posts, I guess life's been catching up with me, but I promise to post at least once more before going home.  

Domestic Goddess?

Anyway, in this post I decided to share a little more about french food - specifically, the french food that I've been making!  That's right, I've been learning to cook here!  One of the hosts mothers for our program, who went to culinary school and loves cooking, offers a cooking class to the students each year.  Since I don't (didn't) really know how to cook (assuming pasta, brownie mixes and grilled cheese don't count) I figured that there's no time like a semester in France to start learning.  After all, as one of my professors is fond of mentioning, France is renowned worldwide for its delicious meals.  Although I've yet to discover the passion for cooking that some people seem to have, I've learned quite a bit and I've been quite proud of how my dishes have turned out, which is to say, they've all been better-than-edible.

meal in progress (my soup is on the back left burner)

But here's the thing [and I hope this doesn't make me sound like a pretentious student who's gone abroad and pretends to only know french when they get back] : I'm afraid I only know how to cook in french.  Of course I know I'll be able to look at a recipe and understand what its saying, but cooking is more than just a recipe.  Maybe for my classmates who actually knew cooking terms in english before this class, this isn't the case; for me, I didn't know some of the terms or techniques until I learned them here.  Now I'm going to have to look them up online to translate them back into english!  Oh, the struggles.  As if that wasn't enough, French people don't use cups or the farenheit scale.  So not only do I have to translate the words, I'll have to do calculations if I want to use these recipes at home!  As much as I love America, I have to ask: why couldn't we have just switched to the metric system back in the 80's or whenever they tried to get that going?  But that's enough griping for one day.  Allow me to now make you salivate with tantalizing stories of my cooking conquests.

Two weeks ago, I made un gateau roulé (cake roll) with raspberry currant jelly inside.  Did I waste 3 eggs in my struggle to separate the whites from the yellow?  Did I not beat the egg whites for as long as necessary?  Did I forget the baking soda?  Did the cake taste wonderfully despite my errors?  Answers: Yes.

Cooking friends and I, minus Robert

The first week, I made the potage, vegetable soup.  I chose well, as this was essentially impossible to ruin.  I peeled and chopped the appropriate vegetables, put them in boiling water, and then blended it all up when the were done.  Success!  In fact, over the course of our 6 classes, I'm happy to say we had nothing but success.  A few errors here and there, but all in all everything tasted great to me.  For our last class, which was this Monday, I started back where I began with a vegetable soup, this time a bit more complicated and even more delicious, if I do say so myself.  It was a tomato soup with onions and cheese.  The true art of this soup lay in the cheese - you have to wait "au moment de servir" to put the cheese on so that it melts across the top just as it is served.  I was nervous, but it worked out.  The dessert for our last class was îles flottante and a bûche de Noël - directly translated as: floating islands and a Christmas log.  Sounds delicious, eh?  Îles flottante is meringue floating in a custardy-cream sauce, and it was quite a spectacle to watch it being made.  It's not my favorite type of dessert, as I'm not a huge fan of custard flavors, but it was genial nevertheless.  The Bûche de Noël is a traditional Christmas cake.  A cake roll filled with chocolate frosting, then frosted on the outside with chocolate and decorated to look like a yule log.  It was delicious and lots of fun to decorate, although I didn't actually make it.  

Buche de Noel

I'm really glad I decided to take the class, because I learned a lot and got over my fear of cooking and because it was another great oppurtunity to learn about French culture and spend time with a different French family (plus my wonderful classmates/friends!).  Our teacher, Nicole, made the whole experience wonderful.  She is a stereotypical older French woman - stern on the outside, but warm and kind on the inside.  Each time I made a mistake, she'd say "Ah, c'est pas TROP grave" in a way that made me fear for the future of our meal, while at the same time remedying what she could and showing me how to avoid the mistake or do it differently in the future.  She takes great pride in her work and rightfully so.  Some of the recipes we made were her own creations and they were all fantastic.  She'd tell us if something didn't come out quite right, adding in something like, "Well, I know the meat was good because I cooked the other half at lunch and that was perfect, and I know the problem wasn't the recipe, because I wrote that myself".  Ah, the French know how to be proud, but it was a nice, well-meaning and well-deserved pride in this case.

Meal from last week - I made the clafoutis de carottes (in the back left), we also had ratatouille and a beef dish

In conclusion, although I've always enjoyed eating, I've never felt like a food connaisseur.  In fact,  I still don't feel this way, but there are certain aspects of French cuisine that I've come to appreciate which I will certainly miss back at home, like unpasteurized cheese and undefined meat dishes.  I can't say I'll miss everything (no crême brulée for me please ... and no cow face) but I'll always cherish my Grenobloise and Savoyarde specialities.    (Cooking class photo credits go to one Callie Feingold, thanks!)

p.s.  My host family's puppy is the cutest thing in the world.  Her name is Fluffy, which was inspired by yours truly.  We pronounce it "Flooofy" though, since the "uh" sound doesn't really work in french.