Nice and quiet ...

It's been a quiet week around the Borders' apartment, which has been nice.  

Glenn and I are taking a French refresher course at Alliance Française that meets 3 mornings a week (lundi, mardi et jeudi) from 9 am to noon.  On Tuesday (mardi) after class, we met up with a couple from our organization for lunch in town, and then went back to Alliance Française to study in the library for a couple of hours.  (We saw on the library shelves a copy of Bien Dire, the french magazine that our daughter used to edit when she lived in Lyon!  How cool is that!)

After a couple of hours of studying in the library, we met up with the 28 other people who signed up for a field trip to the famous kitchen of Le Cordon Bleu!

Founded in 1895, Le Cordon Bleu in Paris is world renowned for it's educational program, dedicated to teaching the highest level of culinary and hospitality instruction to students who come from all over the world.  "Le Cordon Bleu is considered to be the guardian of French culinary technique that continues to preserve and pass on to future generations the mastery and appreciation of the culinary arts."  :-)

But before we could learn all their special secrets, we learned about the many French wines that are produced throughout the various regions of the country.  Not being a connoisseur nor even a fan of wine (about the only time I've had wine has been during the Lord's Supper in churches here in Europe),  I had a lot to learn.  It was interesting, even if the knowledge won't be particularly useful to me in the future. 

 I learned that the best wines produced in France are exported (because they can make more money selling them elsewhere) and therefore it is difficult, if not impossible, to buy the best quality French wine here in France.  I also learned that the residue that sticks to the side of a wine glass when it is swirled has nothing to do with the quality of the wine, but everything to do with the cleanliness of the glass.  The wine sticks to particles on the glass!  The purpose of swirling the wine is to oxygenate it to bring out the flavor. Also, it is a technique called "playing with your drink".  :-)

Then the chef prepared a colorful meal of meat that was basically lightly boiled for a few minutes and a side dish of green beans with beets, carrots, shallots, peas and snow peas all boiled in different pots of water, added together at the end and with a  large dollop of butter.  No French bread.  No dessert.  An incomplete meal, if you ask me!

While his "assistants" were slicing the pieces of meat and spooning the veggies on small plastic plates, the chef was creating his masterpiece for our aesthetic pleasure.  :-)  We watched him WITH HIS FINGERS painstakingly arrange the green beans, carrots and beets in a colorful "pile" (I don't know the technical culinary term for piling food) and then strategically placed 4 peas in a line on the plate to fan out from the pile of veggies.  

I'm sure to him it was a work of art, but to those of us who had not eaten dinner and had been sitting there for 2 1/2 hours, we were starving to death and just wanted to eat!

The finished culinary delight!  I guess the 4 peas in a line were on the back side of the meat, but do you see the drops of beet juice that he has dribbled across the plate???

The cooking demonstration was VERY interesting (it should be ...  at the cost of 40 euros that came out of our registration fee to Alliance Française) and the chef was quite entertaining as he bantered back and forth with his audience and shared cooking tips with us.  How was the meal?  The meat was tender and cooked to perfection and the veggies were very flavorful but by time all of us were served, the food was cold.  It was 9:00 pm when we finally got to eat so we were starving and would have been happy with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches!

As I mentioned, it was a quiet week around our place.  Saturday, we did odd jobs around the apartment.  I was taking care of things that had been covering the dining room table (my office) and Glenn was digging out from under the pile on his desk.  Glenn must have finished his pile first and was bored because I found him in the kitchen with a duster!!!

I've often said there is nothing sexier to a wife than to see her husband pushing a vacuum cleaner or  dusting the house!  Look at that fine specimen of a man!  He's got the moves that make my heart flutter!!!

We're here for two more weeks before we hit the road again ...