Cooking Class Part Two

I’ve now finished three days of French cooking class and have two more remaining. I’m really enjoying the class so far, but I really don’t like how it ends so early in the day. After we spend some time learning about our dishes and cooking, we then sit down at about 5:30ish and sample our work. Today for dinner I had bites of Blanquette de Veau (veal stew), coq au vin, duck breast with figs in port wine, lapin a moutarde (rabbit in mustard sauce), roast pork loin with prunes and golden raisins, steak au poivre, and leg of lamb with garlic sauce. After all that food and a couple of glasses of wine to wash it all down I become completely useless for the rest of the day.

I still feel like I’ve learned a lot from the class simply observing, listening, tasting and working with an instructor who knows more about food than I do. In general I rarely find myself cooking with someone who is more knowledgeable about cooking and eating than myself, so I really relish this kind of experience. I’m also happy that I’ve been able to avoid cooking some of the things I tends to do (pretty well) at home like: steak a poivre, sole meuniere, trout amandine and duck breast.

Today I got to work on the blanquette de veau, a traditional cassoulet and on some sweetbreads to be served with a sauternes sauce. Out of all the things we tasted I probably would have picked the cassoulet, a traditional dish that I read about all the time but have never made, the sweetbreads in sauternes (two things I really, really like in one dish) and probably the rabbit. Unfortunately due to the time constraints of the class we won’t be finishing the sweetbreads or the cassoulet until tomorrow. We have most of the cassoulet done but there wasn’t enough time in the class to bake in the bread crumbs, and the sweetbreads needed to be soaked, blanched and then released from their membranes and drained again.

I’m excited to see how the sweetbreads turn out, and if in the end I am good at cooking sweetbreads, all who know me will be eating different incarnations of delicious thymus gland in the coming months!