Case of the Cordon BLUES

A gloomy peace this morning with it brings. And what a tearful 24 hours it has been. As you may have guessed, the cuisine exam did not go well. And now you know that I am a rather dramatic mourner of all things lost in testing situations.

I was given a break, or so I thought, and pulled the beef as my test recipe. I will spare you the long drawn out details of how and where I went wrong, how I couldn't get anything right, and how despite getting the easiest of the 3 recipes, I still managed to run 2 minutes late (costing me 2% points per minute off my score). This is all acceptable, until the shocking news arrived: the judges had made a horrifying discovery on my plate. It arrived to the table with a hair hidden in the carrots... Not only could this hair never have come from my head, but there was absolutely no sign of it when I checked the plate prior to leaving the kitchen. Eat your heart out lemon sole; when chef returned with this news, I was the gutted one.



And so this morning reared it's ugly head and for the first time, in I can't remember when, I had to forgo contacts for glasses.
Assessing the damage done to my living room from the previous post-assessment evening: a kicked bottle of Bordeux, two bloodied and beef-jus-stained aprons, a cell phone convulsing on the last legs of low battery, and a barrage of increasingly depressing and indecipherable text messages to anyone and everyone who would listen, I realized I was acting more like a carnivorous beast than the distinguished culinary student I am supposed to be.

With that (and with a big fat Please Forgive Me gift in route to my husband's office) I stumbled into my kitchen to resurrect another fallen hero...



With a clear disdain for travel of any kind (see their previous appearance), these pate a choux swans have become my Stay-at-Home-Swans. Let's just hope that if I get these Homebody Birds on the pastry exam they'll be suffering from a rare case of cabin fever and relish an outing to the schools patisserie...


Chantilly Crack


Ducks in a Rows


Squawk Box


Love Birds


Darcy Jones

APPLE OF MY EYEsore

Today marked our first foray in the pastry kitchen. During our inaugural lesson, I bore witness to the single most impressive fruit salad ever made. This delicious delicate dessert sings with the flavors of fresh vanilla and citrus and sounds of warm anise, cinnamon, and clove. It’s simply seductive syrup is used to infuse and preserve the fruits maximizing freshness and flavor, and let’s just say ‘fogettaboutit’- this is a natural sugar high.

Sadly, all highs must be followed by lows: after a 3 hour-long demonstration on the art of decorative fruit cuts (colloquially entitled ‘Fruits on Crack’) I was inspired to create a citrus sanctuary in my own kitchen. And from a substantial covey of Granny Smith apples here what I bagged:



I would say my V-cut creature looks more like Bird of FrIgHt than Bird in Flight.



In case you are wondering, it is supposed to be a swan...an apple a day, this way, won’t keep the doctor away.

Feeling rather demoralized at my lagging knife skills, I decided to flee the world of fruit and food for a breath of fresh air.
Although I met with no swans on my jog, I managed to enter Hyde Park just as a fresh snow coated the city commons. The flakes were so big and breathtaking that I had to stop and admire: I couldn’t help from imagining a celestial chef with his chinoise, smiling as he sieved the clouds to dust the square bellow in sugar.



This was truly a foodie’s fairytale.


Darcy Jones