What does a Cordon Bleu student eat for dinner? I’m glad you asked.
If you envision elegantly plated meals with the finest
wines, you are sadly mistaken. More
often than not we eat our class dishes – some days that’s a lot of food, and
other days, it’s little or none. After
the Chef grades our plates, we scrape the leftovers into plastic containers
and/or freezer bags while we’re cleaning up the kitchen. By the time we’re home for the day, the
sauces, proteins and garniture are inevitably
a congealed lump. And if it wasn’t a
particularly tasty dish to start with it can be downright nasty by then.
So when I got home after class this afternoon, the last sad,
cold blob of Poulet Basquaise was
staring at me from the shelf in the fridge.
I couldn’t bear the thought of another rich reduced sauce. Every dish last week had a similar type of
sauce and I just couldn’t stomach any more.
I grabbed my grocery bags and bolted to the nearest Asian
grocery store, jamming my cart full of interesting greens, mushrooms, kimchi, char siu, fermented black beans, various
noodles, and enough soup dumplings to run a small dim sum restaurant for a
month.
But this is typical, for me at least. During my last sojourn at LCB, I started to
crave anything and everything that wasn’t French cuisine. Perhaps it’s from working with the
ingredients, thinking about recipes, and marinating in the smell of the kitchens
every day, but the food gets tedious pretty quickly. The dishes on the curriculum aren’t always
the most tasty – they are part of the course to be instructive of a technique or
about the cuisine of a particular region.
I doubt there has ever been a person who has woken in the middle of the
night saying “Damn, I’d really love some Truite
en Bellevue “.
So tonight I enjoyed some kimchi and tofu soup and it was delicious.
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