Decquoise

It’s been a while.  I haven’t been feeling great for the last few days.  Quick side note, I’m eating my “blogging snack”, today a salad, and I really would love same avocado in it.  Too bad I’ve been spoiled rotten by the avos. I get at home. The French don’t do avocados.

Moving right along. I think that all the dairy has finally caught up with me and I’m having my usual reaction to it, which is a stuffed head. Regardless, I can’t seem to stop eating it! I can’t imagine how I would, living in Paris and attending pastry school.  Today I’ve managed to avoid it, besides the little square of 55% cocoa with mousse in the middle (heaven, but it could be a bit darker).  I’ve been having the time of my life here.  I finally feel like my life has started. I’m currently trying to figure out how to stay here for another three, and eventually six months.

Yesterday we had a new chef for our practical.  My group had a demo at 8:30 and then a practical at 3:30, so I sat around and waited for the practical in my chefs uniform. Everyone else left to go eat lunch but I brought my own lunch and I was nervous because I was class assistant with Michael, a very sweet Indonesian boy who works down in the girl’s side of the practical room.

The assistants are responsible for stocking the practical room with all of the things that are in the recipe. The eggs and milk are generally down in the stinky basement where the dishwashers are or on the 3^rd floor. Other things like fondant and almonds, in a variety of forms, are in the 3^rd floor storeroom. Michael and I headed up to the 3^rd floor storeroom where we bundled the metal round forms we needed for shaping the cakes, praline and sliced and ground almonds.  We rushed over to the dumbwaiter to send everything form the 3^rd floor to the 2^nd where the practical room was. Oh boy.  That thing is so confusing and by the looks of it we were not the only two people trying to use it. I searched for someone who could help us.  The dishwasher certainly couldn’t and didn’t want to have anything to do with my hand signs.

My favorite chef, Stanley Tucci’s twin, was there to rescue me. He told me to just carry the stuff from the upstairs pantry to the 2^nd floor. What a miracle! That dumb thing wasn’t working for me (pun intended).  I walked into the practical room and a new chef was there.  He was a little hottie.  Oh, side note, I’m over Hottie Chef, he’s played out (in my group of friends) like a hit song on the radio. This other chef on the other hand, he’s got green eyes, brown hair and well, not the best figure but he is a pastry chef.  By the end I pretty much had him eating my dacquoise out of my hand, but not really. I introduced myself to him and asked if he spoke English (some of the chefs do), he made it clear that he didn’t.  He told me that it was his second experience there.  It was my lucky day. Most other chefs yell at the assistants like no other, but he was friendly and came to me when he needed to tell the class stuff.  He called me over to read something that was in English on his phone. It said keep everything clean.  He must have thought that it was specifically for me because he kept telling me to clean my station.  Not once did he ask Michael (the other assistant) to put anything away.

We had to make these impossible roses out of marzipan to finish our dacquoise. I made a few of them and they were so heavy and ugly that I ended up balling them up and tossing them. Narges saved me and made mine for me after French man tried helping me and ended up laughing at me every time he came around the work surface. It was highly pathetic. Narges is a genius. Speaking of, in one of my first posts, I mentioned a girl who made really long skinny biscuit dough and ended up with 30 of them, she has blown all of us out of the water with her decoration/detail skills.  She would have mastered that rose. I thought that maybe I didn’t succeed because I like orchids, that’s probably nonsense but that’s what I kept telling myself. I cannot say it enough, I love my group.

At the end of class, I used my handy dandy fork, that sits in my left arm pocket to dig into my cake.  I ate about 1/8^th of the darn thing before I got out the door.  I think I drove the new chef insane because when the next group came in, I was laughing so loud that he said, “Bye Coco”.  It was time to leave.

During demo, I told the whacky translator that it was Shibani’s birthday, which it was and he said he was going to shower her with kisses during class, which I was all for. He then went on a crazy rant, as people went up to the demo table to take pictures of the cakes. He began telling me how professional he is and a whole bunch of other nonsense. He used a heck of a lot of profanity while trying to convince me of his professionalism. I didn’t know if he was being sarcastic or not.  I walked away to take a picture of the food and I heard him still babbling on. It was quite the day. Oh, and before that when Shibani and I walked into the room, we were taking our seats and all of a sudden some girl jacks my seat. This is one of the girls that completely freaks me out and always has makeup all over her chefs jacket, which is a NO NO. I gave her the seat and went to the 5^th row with Shibani. When the room was dead silent, I let out the biggest snort and everyone, including the chef, looked at me crazy. I sat down and waved at Tucci’s twin chef and he smiled and waved back.  I love that chef.

Later that night, the girls went out for drinks for Shibani’s birthday and it was a blast! We went to the Lizard Lounge, which I wasn’t that impressed with.  I was ready to get my groove on, but I ended up doing that at the end of the night in the middle of some block (yes Shibani, I said it, BLOCK) with my falafel in hand.  One illusion (nasty drink) and one dirty blonde (nasty beer) later we left and walked up the street to a famous falafel place, L’as du falafel. We got there just in time.  There was a slightly creepy man standing outside who I assume runs the place because we paid him.

A few of us ordered falafel. I began to dig into mine and half of one of my balls fell on the floor. Most of us were intoxicated, happily so when it hit the floor, all hell broke loose.

People started screaming so then the owner man came and told me, “I’ll give you two balls…one time only”.  Immediately I thought of the quirky translator, Ben that made the most outrageous hand gestures the other day.  I was on the floor for at least 5 minutes hyperventilating and crying because I was laughing so hard. While I was on the floor recovering from the laughing fit, I found this.

After the balls were spilled, the creepy man went around to each of us offering us his fresh balls that were hot. He insisted, along with Nicole that I take trade my old balls for fresh ones.

Oh what a night.

Bisous