Oh Paris

I could swear that there is a monster in my watch or calendar that is eating up the minutes of each day and the days of every month...time is passing so fast! Last week was a whirlwind because we had restaurant service on Wednesday and Thursday; the experience was interesting to say the least. I was assigned to plated desserts with two other students, Désirée and Aurora so we were responsible for all of the preparation, plate composition, expedition, etc. Wednesday was not one of my better days in the kitchen and I was glad when the night was over. 

We had two plated desserts - a chocolate tart with chocolate sorbet & apricot sauce and a chocolate/orange fondant with a raspberry center, vanilla ice cream in an almond tuile, and raspberry sauce. Two of my prep jobs were making tart dough (super easy, we've made millions of tarts already) and ice cream, both of which I managed to screw up then save at the last minute. Tart crust is so basic and I was quite unhappy (understatement of the century) when I learned that I made an error - I forgot to double the eggs! We were making a double recipe and I only added enough eggs for one recipe which is why my dough looked questionably dry. Luckily, I realized my mistake just in time and added the requisite egg....Phew! 

I promised myself and my group that mistakes were a thing of the past but the ice cream fairies had another plan in mind. I've never made ice cream before and having to do so during my first restaurant service was stressful especially since we were under a time limit. I read the recipe and verified it at least three times (this was also a double recipe) before I started. Things were off to a good start and I was whisking away, trying not to make sweetened scrambled eggs and monitoring the temperature vigilantly. My chef came over to check my progress and put my ingredients on the stove, or so I thought. I needed to add stabilizer to the ice cream and chef gave me specific instructions about mixing the stabilizer with part of the sugar to help its incorporation which is why I had two containers of sugar, one with stabilizer and one without...do you see where this is going? For some reason, only one of the sugar containers made it to the stove next to me and guess which one got left out??? The one with the stabilizer! I got to the end of my first ice cream making experience, turned around to the table and almost wanted to raise my hands to the heavens when I saw the sugar with the stabilizer sitting on the table...what were the odds??

To make a long story short, I had to add the stabilizer and then heat up the whole concoction again and thankfully, the ice cream did turn out well in the end. My last mishap during prep was dropping a hot tray of grué tuile on the floor - classic.  Luckily, during service, I was on chocolate tart duty - the plating was fairly straightforward with the exception of making quenelles of sorbet and I made it through without any major mishaps.

The rest of the week was a blur. We made raspberry millefeuille with anis flavored pastry cream for lunch service on Thursday and they turned out beautifully. Friday we were in the bakery making specialty breads because it was Open House at school and I went home with my favorite, olive bread with herbes de Provence. 

I spent Saturday afternoon at school for open house and we mastered Mont Blancs, Parisien flan, and almond paste roses.  People would come in and stand in the pastry laboratory for an hour eating whatever we or the other students put out on the table and asking us about the ingredients. At the end of the day, every morsel of pastry had been devoured.  

After open house Désirée and I decided to check out a well known chocolate shop, Jean-Paul Hévin (231, Rue St. Honoré), located on one of Paris' most expensive and fashionable streets. The chocolate shoe in the window captured our attention - chocolate and shoes, what more could a girl ask for? The funny thing about the chocolate shoe is that it costs the same amount as a real shoe that you could actually wear and not just eat! 

After a slightly hectic week, some much needed stress relief (aka dancing) was needed. Laura and I went to an old school R&B night at club Gibus, the self-proclaimed #1 hip hop club in Paris. The club was huge and there was a great mix of people including some hard core dancers. The whole night I kept thinking to myself, I feel like I'm back in the States. All of the music was American and everyone knew the lyrics and was crankin' it, brushing their shoulders off, poppin' and lockin' , etc...craziness! 

Sunday felt like springtime and I spent most of the day wandering around the Bastille market and the 6th arrondissement by my school before making a quick stop at Pierre Hermé for a ispahan millefeuille(lychee, raspberries, rose, and puff pastry perfection). After a weekend like that, I'm thinking that I may need to spend an extra year in Paris just exploring and enjoying the abundant culture this city has to offer.