An Afternoon with a Le Cordon Bleu Chef-To-Be

I spent this past Mother's Day with my friend’s niece to help her cook a great French dinner for her family. Ok, so I can't say I helped cook the meal, but I did take a lot of photos and peeled some potatoes and carrots :-). She recently enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu Ottawa, and decided to cook for us to practice for her upcoming exam.

Everyone, meet Ashley, aka Chef Ashlee (pronounced in a heavy Frech accent). She is a funny and personable 18 year old who has chosen a career path in culinary arts. She is passionate about food, and can talk your ear off about her experiences at Le Cordon Bleu.

Chef Ashlee

She arrived with a big black bag around her shoulders, and revealed that it was her set of beautiful Wüsthof knives.

Wüsthof Knives

Le Cordon Bleu Ottawa is one of the best campuses in the world, and lucky for us, they are planning on opening a second campus here in Ottawa. I learned that there are some campuses that are not true Cordon Bleu Paris schools, which means they only teach a subset of the French techniques in the regular curriculum.

Even though Ash is a vegetarian, she says that it has not been a challenge cooking at Le Cordon Bleu. She loves cooking, and that’s all that matters. She decided to become a vegetarian because she is a huge animal lover and doesn’t believe in the slaughter of animals. She does understand that there are people who will always eat meat, so she tries to keep an open mind about the issue. Her ultimate dream is to work for a gourmet vegetarian restaurant (Zen Kitchen, are you looking for people!!??).

Le Cordon Bleu does not provide a lot of notes. For each dish learnt in class, only the ingredients list is provided. It is up to each student to diligently take notes on the method and techniques taught in class. While Ash was busy setting up her kitchen, I looked through her notes, and laughed out loud when I came across this page (pictured below). The only thing that stood out on the page was an instruction to "turn these bitches".

Not only can the girl cook, but she can draw as well. She calls herself weird for drawing the picture below, but I think it's brilliant.

We spent a large part of the day preparing and turning vegetables.

Shallots

Turning vegetables is a traditional French technique that involves shaping vegetables into an egg-like shape with exactly 7 faces. This specific shape makes it easier to sauté vegetables because it allows them to easily roll around in a pot. A lot of the vegetable is wasted through turning, but at Le Cordon Bleu, the unused parts are used to make vegetable broth.

Turned Turnips

Next came the meat preparation. This poor little piggy cutting board got butchered during our lamb and beef prep.

Here's Ash hard at work searing the lamb before it went into the oven. Check out her tasting spoon attached to her sleeve. I was amused by it.

An interesting fact I learnt about Le Cordon Bleu: they put gelatin in their good wines to prevent students from drinking it. It is still good to cook with, but awful to drink…hehe.

Ash is definitely an interesting character, and that is evident when I asked her who she would invite to her dream dinner party. She responded with 4 guests:

• Chef Gilles Penot (her favorite chef at Le Cordon Bleu Ottawa),
• Davey Havok (lead singer of AFI),
• Auguste Escoffier (author of the culinary bible), and
• Stephen Hawking (in her opinion, the most intelligent man in the world)

One thing she did make clear was that Gordon Ramsey would not be invited because he scares the P out of her (what P means exactly, I'm not sure).

And FINALLY, here's what we ate for dinner:

Freshly baked multi-grain baguette.

Multi-grain baguette

Tomatoes stuffed with parmesan, bread crumbs, and parsley...very flavorful and tasty.

Tomatoes Stuffed with Bread Crumbs and Parmesan

Navarin D’agneau Printanier, a DELICIOUS braised lamb shoulder stew with veggies glacer au blanc. The veggies were sauteed in water, butter, and sugar. This was definitely my favorite of the evening.

Navarin D’agneau Printanier

Cote de boeuf grille avec beurre marchand de vin: Grilled beef ribs with an awesome butter that got its beautiful pink color from a red wine reduction. I don't normally like butter, but I couldn't stop eating the butter Ash made. Not only did it taste good, but she made it look good by piping the butter into pretty little flowers.

Cote de Boeuf Grille avec Beurre Marchand de Vin

For dessert, we had a humongous Costco apple pie with vanilla frozen yogurt.

Costco Apple Pie