Dinner Parties!

Today was a national holiday in France, so Le Cordon Bleu was closed, and my classmates and I decided it was time to have a little dinner party! I spent the morning flipping through the cookbooks I have here, trying to come up with a recipe whose ingredients I could find at the only market open today! I decided on sweet pea gnocchi, despite the fact that I've never made gnocchi before, and certainly not in a Barbie doll-sized kitchen like those we have here in our Paris apartments!

But that idea was feeling a bit flat to me, until I remembered a phenomenal dish I had in the spring at Customshop, in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was a squid ink pasta with chilis, crab, and peas ... but the key to the dish was mint, chopped to a powder, and mixed into the pasta dough. I love the combination of fresh peas and fresh mint, so this seemed like a winning idea to me, if only I could pull it off.

The good news? I pulled off the flavor. The bad? Gnocchi texture is tough to get right, and my first venture into gnocchi-making was, although not entirely unsuccessful (everyone had seconds!), not entirely successful either. But look how pretty and green!

We also enjoyed a lovely tomato, mozzarella, and basil salad with homemade pesto, and butter chicken (courtesy of Amit's secret family recipe)! And ice cream for dessert. One of these days my pastry friends are going to step up and make a delicious dessert for a dinner party ... until then I'll just have to settle for snaring leftovers at school!














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This was the second dinner party we threw this week! Monday was our written exam in Basic Cuisine, and a few of us got together Sunday afternoon to study our hundreds of vocabulary terms, and dozens of recipes, sauces, and proportions. (How much roux for a liter of Sauce Supreme? How about for Blanquette de Veau? What's in a bechamel? Bearnaise? Hollandaise? Albufera? Define monder ... detrempe ... abattis.) But what kind of culinary school students would we be if we didn't bring food?!

Anne and I threw together some apero -- bruschetta with tomatoes, basil, mozzarella, and olive oil; asparagus with roasted red peppers and olive oil; and watermelon with feta, basil, and lime juice. Do you detect a theme? (No butter!!) See the excitement on the face of an LCB student when she gets to use olive oil, and not butter!

I was in charge of the chopping (as we were cooking in Anne's kitchen, so I was her sous...), so here I am (LCB hat and all) preparing a tomate concasse.


It wasn't just apero, though ... Alexandra prepared cod Duglere, atop a healthy bed of spinach. What's this? A meal in Paris without a potato to be found? Shocking!

Of course, the whole point of the evening was to study, not just to cook, so here we are, studying...


It wouldn't be studying without a glass of pink bubbly, now would it? I'm pretty sure we all passed, we were just celebrating early!