The Paris Life: "A party without a cake is just a meeting."-Julia Child

Sorry for the late post but I was swamped this last week with course work and some personal stuff, all is well and as always, I am looking to the future and counting my blessings.

No Meetings here.......
NO MEETINGS here, just dinner party business when the Le Cordon Bleu Patisserie future chefs get together for an evening of fun. This is the first time in my life that I have been surrounded by people who are just like me.....they love talking about food, recipes, restaurants and cooking together in our spare time after just having spent our entire day cooking in class.

At one point we had between 5-7 girls cooking in my small kitchen....it was one of the fondest memories that I will take with me from this whole experience.We had so much food, everyone made something specific to their country....we had had the following countries represented in our buffet below, (Turkey, Iran, Italy, Japan, France, Spain, U.S.) great assortment of choices.

Shayda to the left making Persian rice, Yumi making sushi and Pelin making a Turkish dish.

All of us in my apartment enjoying our buffet of food after hours of cooking.

Great food and great company.

This week at Le Cordon Bleu:
Wow, lots and lots of cooking this last week. Oh, and did I mention that I set the table on fire with the torch while trying to caramelize citrus tarts?!?! I also forgot to mention a few weeks back that I put my supply bag in the oven (we never use the conventional ovens just the convection ovens) for storage and someone walked by and turned on the oven. I noticed an odd burning smell and smoke coming out of the oven, thank goodness I retrieved my bag before it melted entirely.

On a positive note, I met with the head chef for my evaluation and I am happy to report that to date I have a very good grade (with God's grace). I have been praying and working on improving and it's working...YAY! The things that I have to work on before finals are; piping decoration technique, puff pastry dough, tart sweet dough and a few other things. I am blessed to have a dear friend in the program who is an outstanding future patisserie chef, she is going to help me over the next few weeks before our final.

A variety of tarts, the head chef called this Texas sized tart rings because the French prefer smaller ones.

The infamous torch in front of my baking sheet.

A wonderful caramelized pear tart that I made this week.

Out with a few Le Cordon Bleu friends, the school hosted a dinner for us this week.

Getting my $$$ worth out of my Eurail pass.......
Since I am on a strict budget I decided the cheapest way for me to travel over the next few weeks is by Eurail. I am happy to say it has worked out beautifully thus far, I accidentally sat in the "reserved for pregnant and elderly" seats on my first adventure and did not realize until it was too late...I was wondering why I was getting strange looks from the elderly gentleman next to me.

First stop....Honfleur, France:
I decided to take a last minute trip to Honfleur and it did not disappoint, except for maybe the fact that when I got to the beach there was no ocean water...I am not kidding, the tide was at least 3 football field lengths down and you could not even walk to the water thousands of feet away because the sand was like quick sand in some spots. It was still beautiful and relaxing, pretty much just laid out on the sand and watched the tide finally start to move in 2 hours later.

I was so excited about a little salt water and sunshine, walked onto the beach and discovered that is not what mother nature had in mind. It was absolutely stunning though and I had the beach to myself.

Took 2 hours for the tide to come in, amazing to watch.

Cargo ship going into port looks so strange without water.

This town is straight out of a movie, birds chirping, the smell of flowers in the air and beautiful streets lined with french homes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honfleur

Second stop.....Giverny-Vernon, France-The Monet Gardens
Took a quick one hour trip up to see the Maison et Jardins de Claude Monet (Claude Monet's House and Gardens). Words cannot describe the beauty these gardens embrace, what a blessing to get to see this in person.