Day 34

Drinking in the morning? We can only wish. No, these are glasses of consomme and clear beef stock. The consomme is on the left. What? How did I make such culinary feats? Okay, I will tell you.

So you take your clear beef stock and bring it to a simmer while you prepare your Clarification mixture. The magic mixture is ground beef, chopped tomatoes, egg whites and finely chopped carrot and celery. You decide how much mixture you need based on the size of the pot of stock you wish to clarify. Once simmering you dump the grody sticky mixture into the stock and whisk as hard and fast as you can, burning your forearms. You must stop whisking so that your mixture will form a raft and filter your stock. This MUST NOT BOIL. I assume the world ends along with your chances of clarifying your stock. So as is forms the raft you poke a hole in the center, not unlike ice fishing, so that impurities can float up through the hole. You ladle the stock over the sides of your raft and let it filter back down. You can see your stock getting clearer through the hole. If the gods shine on you, you will have consomme. Ladle the consomme out from the hole quickly (the raft will start to sink) into another container. Below is a picture of the raft with the hole in the center.

This would be amazing to watch if the pot was clear. Do they make see through pots? They should. Just for this process. Which is amazing. It's nerdy and awesome. Cloudy to clear via ground beef, egg whites, and tomatoes. You should try it. Plus then you have lots of egg yolks leftover and you can make cinnamon gelato like I did. You can do all sorts of smug culinary tricks with consomme. Float little raviolis in it, or fancy cut vegetables. Just think how crazy things could get!


These are the ingredients for pappa al pomodoro. Its a way simple tomato basil soup that you throw old bread into for thickening. Saute your onion and leek, add your garlic and basil, add your tomatoes (fresh and canned), add stock (we used chicken), and simmer until the onion is tender. Serve with old bread. Its satisfying and light. I ate it for breakfast the next day.

That's it in a big bowl. I don't like that much bread in mine, but that's just the lunch pot. We also made some bruscetta. I'm sure you can figure out how to top bread with stuff. Saute mushrooms and add Parmesan on top of toasted bread. Make a tomato, basil, garlic sauce and top bread. Mix together raw Italian spicy sausage and cream cheese and spread on bread. Bake until bubbling, sausage will be cooked. I did not like the last one. Real white trash like. What's up with that?
The white nuggets with the parsley garnish are spinach/ricotta gnocchi in a Gorgonzola cream sauce.

I had my doubts about whether my stomach could handle the gnocchi sauce but I was okay. The gnocchi are really easy and only involve mixing and chilling and boiling. My favorite flavor in them was the grated nutmeg. They are spinach, ricotta, flour, Parmesan, eggs and nutmeg. The sauce is just onion cisele, delgazed with wine, add cream and simmer, add Gorgonzola cheese and melt it in. Toss gnocchi in sauce. Take aspirin to help with heart attack. If you live through heart attack you can make it for others who wish to suffer myocardial infarction.

Tomorrow we make pizza.

Day 33

Okay, so the test was not that hard. But it was annoying. It was detailed but all over the place. I definitely memorized a bunch of useless shit. Fine, maybe it will be useful at some point. I missed at least 2 questions. I didn't remember why you had to cook a lobster alive. Well, it is so that the lobster does not flush itself out which I guess is what it does when it dies. I thought maybe the meat was just more tender. oops. So the other question was about which flat fish has 4 fillets. I don't know what the answer was but I was for sure wrong. Oh well. I was able to name 5 red and 5 white grape varietals used to make wine. Which I am sure is more important.

So we made clear beef stock using the ingredients below. Those black circles are charred onion halves, it gives some caramelized flavor that complements the beef. We tied up our chunks of beef and tied them to the sides of the pot. It was kind of like fishing. Also into that pot went oxtails, celery, the burnt onions, carrots and large bouquets.
The stock simmered for 8 hours. It came out looking like clear beef stock. But here in Italy week at school, this is not good enough. We went on to clarify said clear beef stock, but that's tomorrow. Today: osso buco. Osso buco is made from veal shank and is simple to make. My recipe was for osso buco a la milanese. Which involves prosciutto and tomato sauce. It works like any other braise. Sear meat. Remove. Add prosciutto and saute. Add small mirepoix and saute. Add garlic and saute lightly. Deglaze with white wine. Add equal parts tomato sauce and demi glace. You need enough liquid to go about 1/2 way up the side of the meat. Bring to simmer, cover, bake until meat is super tender. Add more demi if the liquid gets too low. This should take about 1 1/2 hours, maybe more.

Serve it over homemade egg pasta. People will like you more because of this meal. Make them bring fantastic wines to your dinner. I need to make friends with people who have/drink fantastic wines. Another great dish that we made was a veal scallopine with an artichoke and pancetta pan sauce. You start it by pounding your veal (from the top round) super thin. Flour and season and pan sear. Remove from pan to begin sauce.

Change fat in pan and add thinly sliced pancetta. Saute. Add finely chopped shallots, saute. Add chopped artichoke hearts (cooked), saute. Add chopped garlic, saute. Deglaze with white wine, reduce. Add about 1 cup demi glace and a shot of cream, simmer. Add meat back in to pan and serve. This is also good over egg noodles. Finish it with chopped parsley.

We had some extra time in class (since we had a student drop out last week) so Chef said we would take a short detour back to France for some crepes. He haughtily whipped up a simple crepe batter (no measuring) of flour, eggs, sugar, milk and melted butter. Then he quickly got 2 pans going to start cooking the crepes.

They were light and delicious just like this with sugar sprinkled on top. But nooooo. Chef said "I will make the crepes suzette". And seconds later they were there and gone. I could not photograph them because they were eaten by wild dogs which were me and my classmates. I did remake them though this weekend. It goes like this: equal parts butter/sugar in pan. Melt sugar and once done add orange juice (not too much). Add shot of grand mariner and add folded crepes to the pan. Swirl crepes around in the sauce and pour onto a plate. You can be smug and French too.

Day 32

Oh my god, rachel ray is on tv right now and is drilling holes in my ear with her diarrhea of the mouth. But today in school I made delicious swordfish.


We made a minestrone cut soup first this morning but I didn't photo it. It was just veg soup, people. It was a clean out of the veg drawer but with nicely layered flavors and some garbanzos. I didn't use pasta in mine although most of the class did. I don't like when you open the fridge the day after and the pasta has eaten all of the broth and become mammoth. It turns alien in size and falls to mush upon reheating. I don't enjoy this. But I did enjoy my swordfish.


This is marinating in garlic, parsley, oregano, lemon zest and juice, olive oil and capers. It sat in the marinade for about 20 minutes and then got a dose of salt and pepper before heading onto a hot grill. I did my best to make lovely diamond patterns on it.

It had a little rest after grilling while I finished my risotto. It was a fennel risotto, started with onion and large dice fennel. I used veggie stock and when I finished it I added fennel powder to the Parmesan. Its good. It served as a base for the grilled swordfish.

Isn't it nice looking? I thought so. Chef asked us to plate it in this manner. I would have liked to stir some fresh herb into the risotto at the end. Parsley or tarragon maybe? I might try it at home. We then made grilled steak Florentine. Big grilled meat with a topping of parsley, Parmesan, lemon, and olive oil.

Big steak. I think the grill could have been a little hotter. Its fine though. I didn't really eat much of it anyway. Especially with the thought of tomorrows dish: osso buco. Love it...but for lunch? Its a lot. Whatever. Maybe we'll have wine with it and that makes all manner of protein suitable at any time of day. That's official, you know.

Day 31

Welcome to Italy! We are with a guest instructor today learning some hand made pasta recipes. We start with dough. We made egg pasta and semolina pasta. Later we made gnocchi dough.


We let our dough rest while we made sauces and prepped what would eventually be lunch. We picked basil from our plants outside and cleaned it up. Okay that is a benefit of our
hot weather, we have basil almost year round.


We had such a pretty assortment of colors. We made a pesto from this with pistachios instead of pine nuts. We made filling for ravioli too. It was just ricotta, salt, pepper, nutmeg, and Parmesan cheese to taste. It made a lovely filling.


Yes, they were big. Not huge but like small sombreros almost as big as my palm. I ate two leftover cold this morning. Gross? Hell, no. They were great. And the texture of the pasta was fantastic. We used the egg pasta for the ravioli. We cut paperadelle and some fettuccine from the egg pasta also. The cut pasta was to be tossed with a simple meat and tomato sauce that we simmered while cutting shapes.

Nope, still can't figure out how to rotate pictures. If you can, let me know.
We made little ear shaped pasta with the semolina pasta. I can't spell it, but it might be orcheiette. or not. We treated it the same way we did our potato gnocchi. We tossed it in browned butter with some fresh sage leaves. That was grub.

Pasta day was all hands on. I can see, however, that this is something that you could do for the next 30 years and still be figuring it out. I might make it more often. Maybe. For sure if someone else wants to clean up my kitchen afterwards.
Tomorrow: Italian style grilling, a risotto, and minestrone.

Day 30

Sushi day! I have made sushi before with my cousin on one adventurous day. It wasn't hard. Just takes obvious practice. I'm talking about rolls though here. Not perfectly sliced fish with a knife that could take off your scalp like in the kill bill movie. I made rolls. We did start with baking some salmon skin until cooked and slightly crispy.


We made a huge batch of sushi rice, seasoning it with the usual vinegar/sugar mixture and keeping it covered so that it won't dry out. We started prepping all the ingredients for rolling.


Isn't this amazing. I love the color. That is not me cutting it. I avoided the uber sharp knife cutting expensive fish. The instructor was cutting this down. Some went to nigiri sushi, some to sashimi, some to a poke dish, and some to spicy tuna. A poke is a Hawaiian dish of diced fish, with sea salt, ogo seaweed, ponzu, chili paste, sesame oil, scallions and masago. Its great and in some asian markets they sell seasoning packets for it. You just dice tuna and stir in seasoning. Poke is fun.

This is the scraping of the tuna meat off of the silver skin that runs all through it. You use the scraped off meat for spicy tuna mixture. That is also not me with the little finger condom on. I did not have injuries this week. Yea me.

So some of our rolls were spicy tuna, poke, salmon skin, crunchy (shrimp tempura), eel, salmon, california and vegetarian. We also made a lightly marinated cucumber salad with thinly sliced octopus and some edamame. The colors on the platters were lovely.

Lunch could have been better with some big kirin lights and some sake. Well, next week is Italy. I will be puffy and full from all the carbs I am sure. If it wasn't still hitting 90 degrees I could hide in sweaters like the rest of the country. Fucking California sunshine.

Day 29

Today was our last day in Asia with Chef. Tomorrow we have a guest chef for sushi. So today I think was like Chef's version of movie day. Normally he is very specific about what exactly he wants to see in our recipes and on our plate. Today I made veg (clean out the walk in fridge) stir fry.
I love making veg stir fries so this was not in any way bad. It was just out of character for him. I used fennel, onion, carrot ribbons, garlic, ginger, baby corn, cabbage, and wood ear mushrooms. I sauced it with some salt, sugar and vegetarian stir fry sauce. The sauce sort of sucked right out of the bottle but mixed in the veggies it was okay. I just don't like bottled sauces, really. We also made a version of fried rice. I make this at home too, to get rid of leftovers. I don't think I have ever made uncle ben's rice at home so making fried rice out of it was a little weird. I would not do it again.
People liked it though. It wasn't bad. I just don't like that creepy uncle ben with his shitty processed rice. Who is he anyway?


Miso soup is a no brainer, right? We made ours without dashi (bonito/kombu) stock. Its still great although a little less complex. You boil or simmer water. Whisk in miso, add scallion, wakame seaweed, and tofu at the end. Breakfast is served. Next we made steamed seabass over Chinese egg noodles, zucchini and a beurre blanc of our choice. We were suprisingly free to set this up as we pleased. I set to work on my lemongrass beurre blanc. I made the usual wine reduction with smashed lemongrass added to my shallot, pepper and wine. After whisking in my cubed butter, I strained the whole sauce and adjusted the seasoning. Before plating I added finely chopped cilantro for color, freshness and texture. I liked it but I liked my classmate's sauce better. She did ginger garlic in her reduction and chives at finish. The ginger garlic had a sweetness that I liked. I steamed my seabass with salt, pepper, and sweet curry powder. It took on a lovely light yellow color (I guess from the tumeric). I burnt my fingertips many many times feeling up the fish to check for doneness. I realized later that a toothpick would have worked fine. Duh. So Chef boiled and then shocked the noodles that we were to serve between our sauce and fish. We were to plate and serve them as we saw fit along with some cooked julienned zucchini. I thought about how I like to eat egg noodles...crispy. Why couldn't I fry them until crispy like they serve them at all manner of Chinese restaurants? Naive? Of course. I cut my zucchini into long strips and tossed them with my noodles and heated some oil in a small teflon pan. I dropped my mix into the pan and pressed it together hoping that it would form into some sort of cake like disc that I could crisp up and serve fish on top of. No sooner had I dropped the mixture into the pan then I hear behind me "so Jennifer, what are you planning to do with that?" Like I really knew. So now all of class is looking at my pan and skeptically evaluating their own little plans for serving noodles. He thought it would probably not work without some sort of binding, like eggs. I just left it there until the edges were crispy and with prayers sent out flipped the noodle cake over. It stuck together but browned unevenly. I was pleased. I finished crisping the second side and dropped the sauce onto the plate, followed by a drained cake, and the steamed sea bass.

It looks a little yellow/beige for my taste but it was good. I was picking at the crispy noodle edges immediately after Chef looked it over and tasted it. He was really pleased. He said to remember the dish for my final or for when we stage our restaurant later in our schooling. Hmph. Everyone else had boring piles of bland noodles with limp zucchini under plain white fish. Yes, I felt superior. Don't worry. It did not last long. You can see in the pic that the edges browned uneven. Chef didn't like the crispy part. He said with a scowl "it's hard". I blame that difference of opinion on his being French. Tomorrow: Sushi...

Look at that rainbow parade! Where's a pride party when you need one?

Day 28

Malaysian Coconut Beef. Its some of the same flavors as earlier curries this week but thickened with an unsweetened coconut galangal lemongrass garlic chile paste that we made. The sauce is great. Beef, meh. I just don't really do well cooked beef. It takes too much chewing. The sauce was kafir lime, coconut milk, and tamarind juice.

Serve, again, over rice. Next we made we made chicken soup. Tom Yan Goong. Thai style chicken soup. So good and comforting. We simmered lime leaves, galangal and lemongrass in chicken broth for 15 minutes to infuse the flavors, strained, and then returned to a simmer. In to the stock went pieces of shrimp, enoki mushrooms, a Thai green chile, cilantro leaf, lime juice and fish sauce. Lots of fish sauce.


It was strong and delicious. I don't ever order this at Thai restaurants. I will have to try it at my favorite place. It should definitely be made at home too. Its simple as long as you can find the ingredients. It helps to have solid homemade chicken stock on hand as well.
Next dish was another Indian chicken dish. This one was shorter on ingredients but had an interesting technique of using a cooked, pureed onion to season and and add body to the sauce. It gets added after the spices but before the chicken and yogurt. It also gets a pinch of saffron for color. Its not my favorite, but it was good over basmati rice for lunch. I hope to pawn it off to the family tonight. See the black specks in it? Those are cardamom seeds. At home I have only used pods, which I like to remove. The seeds are really strong in flavor and overwhelm my mouth often. I would substitute pods if I made it again. But I doubt I will. Meh.

But lets talk about deep frying now, shall we? I don't deep fry at home for all manner of reasons having to do mostly with cleanliness. But I will make a mess in other people's kitchens no problem. So today we made Filipino lumpiang. They are an egg roll sort of situation. This version used equal parts shrimp and pork, water chestnuts, green onions, egg, and soy sauce. You roll em up into small cigars and fry. Mine were large cigars as you can see. I don't have that small nimble rolling thing down quite yet.

You fry for them for about 5 minutes and then burn the fuck out of your mouth while trying to eat them before they cool down enough to handle. We made a funky dipping sauce of ketchup and sugar, water and Tabasco. It was really sweet so we upped the spice to try to balance it. It was tasty with the lumpiang. Are homemade deep fried crispy egg rolls ever not tasty?

If you said no go fuck yourself. They are of course good. And afterwards your stomach expands and you feel sleepy for a good few hours. I have leftover filling that I am going to use with wonton wrappers tonight. I will not be making ketchup sauce.

Tomorrow? Chef says we will eat the best fried rice of our life. I am of course skeptical. I'll let you know. We also are making my favorite Thai soup: chicken with coconut milk. MMMmmm.

Day 27

So we started our morning with a yogurt chicken curry situation. It was a fabulous situation actually. It has a list of ingredients like 2 pages long so here is a summary: chicken, aromatics, spice mixture including, cinnamon, clove, bay leaf, cardamom, and nutmeg, garam masala, cilantro and nut paste to thicken and stabilize. You simmer chicken until cooked really. We ate it with rice and it was fine.

Its something I might make again, if I was craving Indian foods and not interested in the old standards like tikka masala. I tend to always make daal (yellow split peas) and eggplant (benghan bharta) so this was a nice change up. The spices were really tasty.

We then made the lamb balls. We made little 1/2 ounce meatballs of lamb and seasoned them with jalapeno, ginger, cilantro, garlic, cloves, and mace. They get fried and please reserve your balls for later. The sauce was tomato and yogurt based and also utilized the nut paste made earlier. Once sauce is simmering, return balls, and simmer long enough to cook through. No Pink Balls, please!

The little balls get a minty finish and served over rice. Try not to love my balls!

Wonton soup was our last dish of the day. It was an easy simmered soup that had snow peas, black ear mushrooms, shitakes, and chicken stock. The wonton filling was long on ingredients but quick to make. It had shrimp, chicken, water chestnuts, oyster sauce, sugar, Chinese wine, egg, cornstarch, and soy sauce. Wrap them up and drop them in simmering soup to cook in about 3 minutes. They are great pan fried too. I have leftover filling and will probably make some more tonight for dinner.

I can't seem to get enough dumplings in my life. We are doing another one tomorrow: Lumpiang. Its the Filipino egg roll.

Day 26

Asia is quite a bit of land to cover, you know? So we hit up some main flavor combos and cooking techniques. First we deep fried beef. If you don't like fried beef for breakfast, get over yourself. It was great. Real fortifying like. We marinated our meat in rice wine and then just deep fried it in oil. After that it just gets tossed with garlic, coarse ground black pepper, oyster sauce, soy, szechwan peppercorns, and sesame oil. Serve over iceberg lettuce. I balanced out my meal by eating extra lettuce. I know it helped. I am sure.

It was super good. I just can't be bothered to deep fry at home due to the whole spattering and disposal of oil situation. Next we made wontons. A basic pork, ginger wonton that we boiled and served with a fragrant dipping sauce that had chile oil and cinnamon in it. I tried folding them all sorts of ways but I do not yet have the nimble fingers of an old Chinese lady.


The wontons were good. Not as good as some we will make later this week. We also pan fried and deep fried some just to taste the difference.
Our next dish was mango pork curry. I guess its Burmese. It was my favorite dish of the day. The sweet and velvety mango and spicy savory meat are a killer combo. You sweat your aromatics (onion, garlic, ginger, chile flakes) and then drop in the raw cubed pork, mango slices, and a small amount of water to coax the mango into puree. This simmers for about 15 minutes and then you can serve it over rice. The color is much nicer in person. I would have really enjoyed eating this as leftovers but someone beat me to it.

Next time I will hide it in an old yogurt container or in the cheese drawer.

Our last dish was an eggplant salad dish. I usually like any eggplant preparation, especially when it starts with roasting an eggplant until super tender. These were scored and seasoned and drizzled with a little peanut oil before roasting.

We took them out of the skin carefully and mixed the loosely chopped flesh with peanuts, onion, garlic oil, cilantro, red chile, and fish sauce. I was too full to eat it then but it made an amazing breakfast the next morning on toasted pita bread.

Isn't it nice all tucked back into its shell? I like it. And it tastes fresh and delicious. Please note that this is one of the ONLY non meat dishes we have ever made in school. I asked chef if we would be doing any more veg this week and he said "Why? Are you on a diet? Huh!" Please say it with a French accent and make the Huh almost a snort.

Tomorrow: Sauteed balls of lamb. Lets see how many balls jokes can be made in one day. Yes, I am maybe 12.

Day 25

So with the running of a half marathon and all, I have been neglecting my school memoirs. I have now recovered feeling in my legs and am prepared to share school with you. I did finish my half marathon in case you were wondering. It was awesome and terrible all at once. So for our last day in France we made bouillabaisse and tarte tatin. Our bouillabaisse (I will from here on out refer to it as soup, since typing bouillabaisse annoys me) started with a saute of fennel, onion, and celery, then rockfish (red snapper), then garlic and saffron, then fresh tomatoes, then fumet (fish stock). This gets simmered until the veg is well cooked (about 45-60 minutes) and then painstakingly pushed through a food mill. I recommend going to the bathroom while your classmates struggle with this step. You now have fish soup. To serve the soup you line up your fantastic array of Mediterranean seafood in a saute pan with a drizzle of olive oil on the bottom. We stabbed that lobster through the head just this morning. I did not even feel bad about it or pray for his crustacean soul. These exoskeletons don't tug at my heartstrings anymore. I am hardened, cold, and crusty.

But doesn't soup sound great? Just ladle the soup on top of the seafood and simmer for maybe 5 minutes. The seafood cooks up quick and is ready for serving.

We made a rouille with boiled potato whisked with egg yolks, saffron, garlic, and extra virgin olive oil. Baguette croutons were baked and rubbed with cut garlic cloves. Rouille goes on croutons, croutons go on soup and pour some rose (we drank Tavel from Provence) and you can pretend you are somewhere other than in stinky fishy chef whites sitting on a stool sweating and eating in your hot stuffy kitchen. The soup was great though. What a good party dish.

For tarte tatin apples get peeled, cored and halved. They are then wedged as snug as possible into a baking pan lightly greased. If you have extra cracks you should fill them with apple quarters.
From here we used chef's shortcut version. We made a caramel on the stove top and poured said liquid hot magma of sugar on top of apples. They got baked for about an hour (until tender) and then covered with a round of puff pastry. This baked until the crust was cooked and then cooled in the fridge. Once cooled sufficiently it got flipped out of its pan and cut into wedges to eat. I didn't like it very much. It tasted a little burned and the pastry tasted tough. I would make it again for sure to try it but I didn't take any home for late night noshing.

Au revoir France. Next week we go to Asia.

Day 24

Have you ever eaten 6 different potato preparations in one day? Well, I don't recommend it. Ever. Even if you are recovering from the worst day at school ever. I am sure I just changed clothing sizes. But here they are for you to see.
The red one is sauteed and then finished in red wine. Sooo much better than it sounds, I swear. The next one is plain old lyonnaise potatoes, sauteed with onion and thyme in olive oil. Next to that is a saute finished with chicken stock, obviously a class fav at 10 am. At the end the mostly empty pan was holding the orgasmic duck fat sauteed potato. It far surpasses any and all other potato preparations on earth. Don't even think about being grossed out by duck fat. If you hate duck fat please immediately pack your knives and go.
We also made 2 versions of au gratin style potatoes. Nothing mind blowing. One was cream over potatoes with cheese on top, the other was more of a custard type like potatoes dauphinois. It was hard to tell if the dauphinois sucked or was overcooked. I would like to try it again. We made it in teams and I was not on that team so I'm not sure what they felt "cooked" meant. I do like the idea of serving au gratin that has been cut into shapes with a cutter or ring mold. I think the layers will look pretty.
We moved on to duck a l'orange. Duck breast with orange sauce. I had always wondered how this sauce was made. You start with a gastric (vinegar + sugar) reduced to syrup, add oj, reduce and then add demi glace. Simmer and voila! Viva la France! I cooked my duck to medium rare and then freaked the fuck out about how not to make it look shitty on the plate. While trying to make sure all hot items were as hot as possible. My potatoes did stay crispy though. Thank you little buds. I fucked up though by not using odd numbers. It would have been so much nicer to look at. I also should have used a bunch of green in the center too. This is like a bad fall sweater.

I did enjoy it for lunch though. Those are orange segments in between the duck slices and that's orange zest at the top. Its in a cute fluffy little pile that you can't really tell from the birds eye view. Our next dish was so French that I can barely stop from having the rest of this post translated into French. Lucky for you I am tired and can't be bothered, really. Behold sauteed sweetbreads (ris de veau). I spared you the pics of the raw ones. It was rather unappealing. But seared? super.
These lovely thymus glands of baby cows were braised in a port wine/demi glace mix. They get 2 pan sears. One before the braise and one after. The one after with the big flambe is much more fun. All the good juices join together with some sauteed mushrooms to make a killer sauce. Sort of a liver texture but in a good way. I really liked them. Don't be scared. They are not creepy.
You can make a cute little bowl for them out of puff pastry like we did. I even carved Viva France into the top rim of the bowl for chef's entertainment. He seemed pleased by that. He then carved the pretty tomato rose and placed it on my plate. Bonus points for being fired up about France.
Big day tomorrow as we have our beautiful bouillabaisse and a tarte tatin.