I have to admit now: i do not know Paris

For the second time i thought it cannot be that difficult to get from A to B in Paris. In this case this morning i took the famous Paris velib system www.velib.fr , using the velib pass of my landlord Elena.

In fact from my appartement to school should be a 10 minutes bicycle ride,  straight forward. I made 1 or 2 wrong turns, found rue du Vaugirard (where i must be), but ended up at Boulevard Pasteur.  I should have gone right instead of left when i found Rue du Vaugirard. The problem in Paris that it is all one way streets, so once you are wrong, it takes forever to get back to the poit where you went wrong. In the end it took me 35 minutes up and down the Paris hills to get to school. Good excersice.

Today we had one demo and one practical.. Demo from Chef Patrick Caals, definitely the longest chef at Le Cordon Bleu. When he teaches he hardly can look under the mirrors in class. He is a great chef, very well organized, putting hygiene and organisation in the first place and being a perfect example of a well organized chef himselves. He demonstrated 3 dishes: Shell fish soup with garlic glaze, Savoy cabbage filled with salmon accompanied with red wine sauce and wild strawberries gratin. Intermediate is not basic cuisine anymore als Chef Caals goes through the recipes with incredible speed, leaving students confused (including myself) where we are in the recipe. Even the professional translator had difficulites to keep track. Chef Caals however notices everything and will go back as soon as he sees that his class has lost track.

Confused collegue students

The soup

The salmon cabbage

Wild strawberries desert

In practical we made the Savoy cabbage filled with salmon accompanied with red wine sauce. A reasonable recipe that i may once make at home, but not with the red wine sauce that does not match the dish at all. In general is a sauce that is not worthwile making. It is a lot of work and the result is less than avarage. Terrible sauce as most my collegue students agree.

To flush away the day, again we ended up in cafe du Commerce.

Discussing the day