Look at this Healthy Boy!

Whoever made this comment must have been connected with the fruit loop brand. I have now come to understand under the tutelage of mon Chef, that coffee is breakfast and if you feel weak- you eat a croissant  or pain chocolate in extreme cases. Eat some from fruit with your coffee, if you are feeling guilty and if you are struggling with an addiction, then an electric cigarette with your coffee is recommended by many unlicensed medical advisors.

Keep breakfast simple. Save yourself for lunch. It’s THREE COURSES. None of the three course involved a peanut butter sandwich or a plastic Baggie. I’m not even sure if Baggies are even legal in every part of France.

So back to lunch. The French have perfected lunch. It’s two hours normally. Why would you want to have just an half an hour and rush back to work chewing on a peanut butter stained Baggie wondering why your hate lunch. However, for those of you thinking I get the two hour lunch, it is not so for les etudientes of cuisine. One hour  exactly and we are chopping again.

But before we chop we eat. Check this cafeteria special du jour.

Closest We Came to the Dreaded Ham and Cheese Sandwich

Pastry Chef is Back from Vacation

Looks Pretty

Forgot to mention that most days we have eat the creations we made before lunch. So I guess lunch really does span two hours or more and includes four courses. Good bye Peanut Butter, Good bye Fruit Loops. Hello Lipitor.

Strawberries are local

It starts out as a great idea. With all of this fantastic calorie laced food, I have been ingesting in the last week, Embracing a Vegetarian Lifestyle seems to make sense. Vegetarians are nice people, they don’t discriminate against candy or strawberries. I can support that type of movement. So I head out to the  Marche Saint Antoine to collect my fruits and vegetables. Of course the road to good intentions is paved with cheese in France.

It’s everywhere!

I avert my eyes because somebody once told me that cheese makes vegans into vegetarians and once vegetarians get hopped up cheese, they start looking at other parts of the cows.

With sight of cheese making salivate, I look at these little veggie delights

Tuesday could be toasted tomato sandwich day

They even make radishes and artichokes look. BTW, I can make a flower out of a radish and know how to cook an artichoke.

Never thought I would get excited over radishes

These actually taste good

Almost a vegetarians until I come across a Meatatarian’s Dream. So much for  those chestnuts roasting on an open fire. How about chicken roasting on an open fire with pork fat on top to baste them and at the bottom of all of this potatoes roasting in a combination of pork and chicken fat.

This smell of the chicken , I wish there was an apps for that.

I think I can’t a whole chicken. That would be very anti vegetarian of me. My illogical minds says, How about the greased roasted potatoes. An edgy vegetarians would be slurping up a couple of these puppies. Sorry to mention the puppies, now I have even offended the meat folks.

There’s that word again- MEAT. So what’s a guy to do in a strange market. I start like most addicts a sample of dry sausage, which just makes me smear crazy and next I know I’m standing there after ingesting a tripe sausage (yeah tripe equals stomach). Then in an act of self loathing I start to eat a Boudin (yeah that’s blood sausage).

I am surrounded by meat.

It always starts small

It gets worse

Be very careful we’re hunting rabbit!

Feeling guilty, I decided to adopt a few plants for my room.

These herbs are legal in most vegetarian diets

These herbs will find a good home on top a piece of animal carcass of course served with a wonderful cream sauce with a side of fois gras. Washed down with a couple of these beauties.

Ymmmmmmmmmm

So wrapped up the first week of “Cuisine and Culture” at Paul Bocuse with a skills test that lasted from exactly 8:30 am until 3pm. It was grueling! 30 different items to either cook chop, slice, cook to perfection. I lost five points on my evaluation because I forgot how to cut onions and another 5 points because my paysanne cut carrots were not done  “le technique Francais”.

So what happens after the test on a Friday afternoon? Perhaps leave early so you can lick the wounds your ego has suffered. No brand new unit on cake piping techniques after you whip a couple of liters of cream by hand. We all took a nap and then headed out to a bouchon for supper to wine together about the injustices of evaluation.  The meal was fantastic. The restaurant was a 5/5 but probably rates in the 300’s on Tripadvisor. Owning a restaurant in Lyon would crush your soul.

I missed Saturday.

Slept most of the day, but did manage to awake up early afternoon in time to get my Monoprix La Carte. It’s a loyalty card that gives you super deals on groceries. So instead of paying a fortune for everything, with a card, you pay a small fortune. My worst fears may come to pass and I may have to embrace a vegetarian lifestyle.

But before that happened, I had supper at a restaurant that has no cream sauce, no animal parts and no baguette. I was craving fish and chips and there is only one fish and chip place in Lyon- Made in Fish

Deep Fried Delight

Really nice couple runs the place. They are in their second year of operation and business is good. One of their biggest client segments is people who have hit the limit on French.

This is a publicity photo

Even though their signature dish is a fish and chip for $12 cdn, they do have other deep fried delights like calamari, and beef sausage. The cheapest I’ve seen a hotdog in Lyon was $7.50. I may spend the rest of my life living on 2 dogs for 99.

They also have a few unique twists to the fish and chip business. Like gourmet cupcakes, fresh crepes, and quiche. Hey it’s France

Doesn’t every fish and chip shop have these extras

Vegetarian Delight

There’s a couple new things I have learned. There are something like 17 different cuts of vegetables. So much for the slice, dice and julienne. When you cut these many vegetables, somebody is going to get cut (not me on the first day). I am not a chef. I am not a cook. I am series of bad habits in the kitchen. So I am learning to watch, listen and repeat after me- Oui Chef.

Our chef instructors are amazing. But here’s a tip. Never ask about what temperature you cook something on the stove? The answer is hot, but don’t burn it or I will either smell it or taste it. One exact thing is soup. 20 minutes to cook. Not 18, not 21 minutes. How much butter do you put in your soup? Until it tastes good. Oui Chef! How much vegetables in the soup? The same amount as the leeks! Oui Chef ! Notice the absence of measurement in the kitchen.

But here’s the weird part. With a couple of FRENCH techniques and some trays of vegetables, I ate at the best soup buffet ever.

I had a little help from nine other knives

Before you dig into the soup. Check out this collection of spoons. Remember there are 17 cuts of vegetables and even more spoons. If you can identify all them I’ll send you a baguette in the mail.

Here’s a spoonful of Trivia

Here’s some more prepped product for soup buffet. I’d write more but I am cooking eggs tomorrow. What way will I be cooking eggs? THE RIGHT WAY…… Oui Chef.

Chop, chop!

Never did Find Cain

So three guys walk in a Bouchon. A Canadian, an Austrian and a Guy From Croatia. Guess who orders the Cow’s brain?

Yummy cow brain!

So did you guess yet?  OK, Here are two more plates.

Quenelle

A picture of dish number three magically disappeared. I think it might of been the lady just to the left.

No it wasn’t her!

The third dish was actually a flank steak. Not so exciting. But interesting taste.

That’s right you were looking for a punch line.  We shared!

The brain was tasty and tender . For all of you with visions of “Silence of the Lambs”, the brain was not served with Chianti. But Tourne. potatoes and siffler carrots. Look close at the potatoes. There are seven sides, not six not eight, but seven sides. Why? It is “The French Way” and that’s what keeps Mon Chef happy.

The quenelle was really good. Oh never had quenelle? It’s pike that is placed in the Bass-O-Matic (see old SNL skit) and then incorporated in the softest dumpling ever and then topped with a mushroom cream sauce. I took two extra Lipitor when I got back to my apartment.

I could live here!

Do you remember your first encounter with a giant? I do. He was “The Friendly Giant” and he would be there magically waiting for you every morning as soon as you turned on the television. All the crew was there Rusty, Jerome, and occasionally the jazz cats, who I think had some struggles because they always wore sunglasses. You just can never trust cats with sunglasses.

The Friendly Giant, who was played by Bob Homme for close to 30 years, always had a mystique and Bob kept that mystique alive until the end of his career. Never making public appearance because he didn’t want to reveal the reality to children that he wasn’t as tall as the television camera portrayed him. It was one of my crushing blows of adulthood, while attending Ryerson University in Toronto, that Bob Homme in person was really nice like Friendly, but I didn’t have to “look up, look way up” to have a conversation.

Now I find myself much older and somewhat wiser heading to a different sort of castle everyday. But it’s the first day of school and it’s even better than “The Friendly Giant” because they have a coffee barista set up that makes the space shuttle look like a Ford Pinto. And to make it even better the people in the castle encourage us to play with knives. And then they feed us a three course meal at lunch. While I enjoyed many a peanut butter sandwich in my childhood, no offense Mom, but this is way better. I was going to take pictures, but I ate the whole thing.