Finally Sharing My Food with Others!

This morning we had a practical first thing to make our Poached Hake Steaks with Hollandaise Sauce. I have to admit that I have stayed away from Hollandaise Sauce for the majority of my life. I think I once had a taste of it when a friend of mine ordered Eggs Benedict for brunch, but other than that it’s been one of those foods that in my estimation was too fat-heavy. But not that I’m here in culinary school everything has more butter than you could really imagine, so it rather becomes the norm and those foods which were on your “no fly” list before suddenly join the party. That and the fact that you can’t very well present a sauce (or any component of a dish) to the chef running your practical without having tasted it and expect to get good marks on it. “Taste, taste, taste” we hear that all the time. If all of the components of your dish are not perfectly seasoned, then there is no point in presenting it. You can nail the meat and be completely off on the vegetables and it’s not a complete dish.

The chef butchered the hake fish into steaks for us, so all we had to do was to make the vegetable bouillon in which we would poach the fish and to turn the vegetables. Yet again I will mention that turning vegetables is not as easy as it seems, or as you would like it to be. You want to end up with an elongated football-shaped vegetable, but somehow it never quite works out like that. And you want it to have seven sides, I mean come on, really?

Although turning the vegetables is not easy and not entirely successful at this stage of the game, the hardest part of this practical was making hollandaise sauce. You whip together egg yolks and water over a bain marie (water bath) on the stove and you have to be very careful that the water bath / your egg-filled bowl doesn’t get too hot, because then you will simply scramble the egg yolks and there is nothing you can do at that point to make a sauce. If you manage to whip the egg yolks and water long enough to get it to the “ribbon stage” (this means that when you lift up your whisk the yolks drizzle downward like a ribbon), then you can add the clarified butter slowly to the bowl. Once this is whisked in you add the lemon juice, salt, pepper, and a tiny amount of cayenne pepper. I got to the point of adding my seasoning and tasted the sauce and to me it just tasted like butter sauce, with not a lot of flavor to it. And of course I was at a disadvantage given that I don’t know what it’s supposed to taste like. In any case, I ended up adding more seasoning because it was so bland to my taste. When the chef finally came to taste it he coughed and said that there was WAY too much seasoning, especially cayenne pepper. I tasted it again after he was done with my dish and it still did not seem seasoned enough to me. Differences in opinion I guess. Other than that, however, my dish turned out pretty well. The zucchini could have been cooked a bit more, but that was the only other negative commentary that I got.

This evening was great because it was the first opportunity I’ve had to share the food that I cook at school with anyone else. One of the women, Elspeth, that I met the first weekend that I was hear at the wine tasting (that event was so wonderful and so important to a lot of the network I’ve been developing here) invited me over, as well as a friend of hers from work, and her husband Jean Christophe was there. One thing that makes this person so easy to like is that her name is very similar to my sister’s, Elsbeth, and I have never met someone else with that name. I know that there are people out there, but they’ve never been an active part of my life. It’s like when someone new you meet reminds you of someone who is already your friend, you are much more willing to think of them as a friend from the get-go.

Elspeth has a nice apartment in the 15^th, not too far from school actually, with a couple of large windows that look out onto the street below and provide a lot of natural light. I have to say that I’ve been generally very impressed with the interiors of the Parisian apartments that I’ve seen thus far. I brought over the hake steaks and vegetables and ended up making a salad out of them with a bed of lettuce and then reheating the rest of the food and putting that on top as well as adding a balsamic vinaigrette. Jean Christophe made a fire in the living room and we sat around it and ate our salads. I have to say that I also feel like I just want to eat endless amounts of greens when I’m not in school. The food tends to be so heavy that you want to counteract that with healthy options as much as possible.

Everyone seemed so impressed with the salad, it really made me feel great! I would so much rather prepare food for other people than I would for myself. It is just more rewarding. The desire to help and nourish other people is something I am always looking to do, it’s part of the reason I’m a yoga teacher. And it’s so wonderful to hear that people appreciate the effort that you put in.

After the salad we had some cheese and several desserts from Dalloyau. I had just come across the Dalloyau store in the 15^th earlier this week on a run and remembered seeing their name before on a list of great food places to visit, so it was great to be able to try some of their pastries. We had a tarte tatin and a passion fruit tart. Both were absolutely delicious! I think it was the best tarte tatin that I’ve had, largely because it had a strong taste of liquor. And I simply love how pervasive the use of passion fruit is here in France. It’s one of my favorite fruit flavors and it’s so nice to be able to taste it in multiple forms. Turns out that Dalloyau has been around since 1682, so they definitely know what they are doing.

On the whole, a wonderful evening with some wonderful company and I hope it will be the first of many dinner parties here in Paris!