Lyon doesn't wake up very early. At almost ten in the morning, there was hardly any traffic on the streets, and very few businesses and shops were open. It was so quiet and calm that it felt more like oh-dark-thirty than almost ten o'clock. We were on our way to our cheese workshop, and I suspect the cheese shop was open early today just for us. It was a tiny little shop with room for maybe six people at once, and all seventeen of us crowded in.
There was absolutely no room to swing a kneazle. And unless you were packed in at the very front, there was no way to see what was going on, either. Andy and I were in the middle and all either of us could see was the back of the person packed in ahead of us. The cheesemonger started off by telling us that while it is traditional to sip red wine while tasting cheeses, recent research shows that the tannins in red wine tend to change the taste of the cheese, so now most cheese tasting is done with white wine.
And we were all handed a glass of white wine. French cheeses are made with milk from cows, sheep and goats, and the reason you don't see many French cheeses in the United States is that many of them are made with unpasteurized raw milk and are therefore not allowed in. We could all hear the discussion and description of each cheese, but because we only saw the cheese when it was passed back to us on a plate with other cheeses, and could not see it when the cheesemonger was discussing it, most of us had no idea exactly what we were tasting.
No matter. We happily tasted it all with chunks of good bread and sips of wine, starting with the mild cheeses and working our way up to a blue cheese that I liked best. It wasn't a Roquefort or a Stilton, but it was very good, creamy and bursting with that classic blue cheese flavor. The blue was the only one I recognized for sure.
And you know what? White wine does go very well with cheese.
After our brunch of bread, cheese and wine, we headed back to the subway and to a silk factory. Lyon's silk industry began in the 16th century, had its heyday in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and began to decline with diseases that wiped out the silkworms in the late 1800s. The Industrial Revolution and the advent of modern textiles such as nylon and other polyester fabrics added to the demise. Today there are only three silk factories in Lyon, where there used to be 18,000.
The shop we visited today is the only one regularly open to the public. The shop proprietor learned his trade from his father, who learned it from his father, and so on. The shop has been in the family for centuries. . The work they do now is mostly restoration work for museums and places like Chateau Montmelas, but today he was working on a private commission from Japan. It was a silk kimono into which he was weaving solid gold and silver threads. He wouldn't give the price for the kimono, but he did say it would take ten months to finish it. ("That thing is what I'd call wearing the bank on your back," I commented to Andy.)
The silk shop proprietor showed us the silkworm cocoons, each about an inch and a half long and about a half inch thick. (They come mostly from Brazil and other parts of South America now.) We saw how the very fine threads are unwound from the cocoons, and I got to feel skeins of raw silk and finished and dyed threads ready for weaving. Most of the threads are so fine that it takes 800 to 1000 or more to fill one square centimeter of silk cloth, and he often is only able to complete ten square centimeters or less a day.
If there ever was a day I missed my colors, it was today. Fabrics and fabric art are my first love, and I loved feeling all the silk threads and fabrics. But I remember how brilliantly silk takes on color, and I just ached to really be able to see the colors of all the fabrics I was feeling. The velvets were especially tantalizing, because the most brilliant color would seem deepest black until the light shone just the right way on the nap, and then I'd see ... a hint. A shimmer of something warm that I'd think was deep red but Andy would tell me was bright orange. Or I'd see palest blue that Andy would tell me was really a deep golden brown. I gave up trying to see the colors and just let Andy tell me what they were.
They had remnants of fabric and several scarves for sale there, and Andy helped me pick out a couple scarves. One is a dark red velvet on a black base, with a leaf design burnt into it (they use a heat-activated acid that eats the silk but leaves the polyester base). The other is a sheer silk chiffon with colors merging from dark red to magenta to red-violet. I'll get a lot of use out of both of them.
After we finished touring the silk factory, Emmanuel took the group on a walking tour before our final cooking lesson at three this afternoon. Andy and I skipped the walking tour and headed for an Apple Store near our hotel to get my iPad sorted out. My email program and Internet connection have been spotty for more than a week and totally on the blink ever since we arrived in Lyon.
We would have gone to the Apple Store here days ago, but everything has been closed over the weekend and decfor the Labor Day holiday yesterday. (That's one major difference between Europe and America: Europeans shut down over the weekend, but Americans stay open for business and go shopping every day of the week.)
Once we got into the store, we had to wait a few minutes, but it was nothing like going to an Apple Store at home. For one thing, the noise level was actually reasonable. I had to work hard at it, but I could hear almost everything our Apple techie said. For another, it was nice not to have to make an appointment. A very savvy (and attractive) young lady named Doumya made quick work of getting me reconnected to the Internet and my email back in operation (I have no idea what she did, only that it worked).
However, she was not able to retrieve my draft letters from London and Paris, and the first few letters from Lyon. I've lost all those. Fortunately I have been keeping notes, and Andy's good for a memory jog, too, so I should be able to get them all rewritten, even if it will take some time.
Doumya also showed me how to use the Notes feature effectively, and helped me figure out what I'm doing when I delete stuff by mistake sometimes. Part of the problem is that I simply can't see well enough to read the menu bar when it pops up and asks me if I want to copy or cut or delete all or whatever. If I hit "cut" or "delete all" by mistake and don't catch it soon enough, I can't get my deleted text back, even with the "Shake to Undo" feature that Megan put me onto. When you can't see the text above the line you're typing, it's easy to miss the fact that the reason you can't see that text is because you deleted it, not because you simply can't see.
Such is life in my lane.
Doumya was such a good help to me I told her she was way better than any Apple Store techie I'd ever gone to at home. She said she was going to vacation in Los Angeles in a few weeks. We told her if she makes it up to Northern California, to please come see us, and I gave her my card. She really was a sweetie and we'd love to see her again.
After getting my iPad sorted out, Andy and I stopped at a little Vietnamese restaurant for a light lunch of spring rolls and a very tasty shrimp salad. We've seen quite a few Vietnamese restaurants here, which is not surprising considering that Vietnam used to be a French colony.
By now it was a long day already and we were happy to have an hour in our hotel room to catch our breath before catching our taxi to the cooking school to meet the rest of our group. I'm feeling lousy. The sore throat is bad and I'm sucking on cough drops to kill that awful post-nasal drip cough. At least the tablets we picked up from the pharmacy are keeping the headache at bay.
We had our limpid-eyed chef back for our last cooking lesson today. I have only just now learned that he is the same chef we had for our first cooking lesson-that-wasn't-really-a-lesson, and the one who impressed me the second day. This is what happens when you can't see enough to identify the people around you. Ah well. Anyway, in hindsight and from his point of view, it was a smart move to turn us loose that first day, as that was an excellent way of gauging how experienced (or inexperienced) we all were.
So anyway, our last cooking lesson today was meringue cookies and fillings. When I think "meringue" I think of that awful sticky sweet fluffy stuff on top of the good tart lemon custard in a lemon meringue pie. But this meringue was something else. He showed us how to make both Italian and French meringues, and because I thought I didn't like meringues much, on top of feeling lousy, I didn't put much energy into the kind of focused attention I would usually put into a good cooking lesson.
I do recall that for the Italian meringue, he made a heavy sugar syrup, using a digital thermometer to heat it to the precisely proper temperature, and then drizzled the syrup into the stiffly whipped egg whites, whisking all the while. The French meringue was made with granulated sugar. To both he added flour and ground nuts. And a little green food coloring (a powder, not a liquid) to one batch. The dough was stiff and sticky.
He showed us how to transfer the raw meringue into a pastry bag and pipe small one-inch diameter dollops evenly onto a baking sheet.
It takes practice to make nicely uniform and evenly-spaced dollops. Some of the dollops our classmates made were very weird and wayward.
Then he picked up each baking sheet full of all our uniform and wayward dollops, held it up about two feet above the counter, and dropped it flat onto the counter four times. This was to settle out any air pockets so that the meringues would rise and cook evenly.
While the meringues were cooking and then cooling, we made custard fillings. I paid more attention here, and got to make a lime custard, more of a lime curd, using a method similar to one for a classic pastry cream. The fragrance from the fresh-squeezed limes was wonderful. We also made a basic pastry cream, and a chocolate ganache.
The fillings used up all the yolks we'd separated from the whites to make the meringues, and I remember the rule he gave us about eggs. The French don't refrigerate their eggs. But when separating the yolks from the whites, our chef told us, the yolks must be refrigerated and used within three days. Whites can last for three weeks in the refrigerator, however.
When the meringues were all done, we had to let them cool completely before they could be lifted off the parchment-covered sheets. We made little sandwich cookies, filling each pair with the custards and chocolate ganache.
I was surprised how good they were, and sorry I hadn't paid better attention. They were really, really good, not too sweet at all, and we all scarfed them down with champagne. Andy and I liked the Italian meringues best. They were crunchier and nuttier. I didn't care for the chocolate-filled ones but I loved the ones filled with the pastry cream or the lime curd.
The lime curd ones were my fave, even if they were ugly as sin. Whoever piped the green meringues made the weirdest and most wayward ones. (Andy had a more tactful way of describing them: "They were very edible but not very presentable.")
So. I will continue to eschew that awful sweet sticky fluffy stuff, but will go for an Italian or French meringue sandwich cookie any day.
We were presented sous chef hats to go with our aprons, had a group photo and a final champagne toast, and just enough time to hit the cooking school store again before we had to leave. Andy and I bought a couple cans of the vanilla powder and a seasoning mix that I want to use for poaching pears or apples in red wine. And I picked out a couple of savory seasoning mixes for Yvonne and Rita -- my two friends who cook as well or better than I do.
It was after five thirty by the time we all left the L'atelier des Chefs, and it was just beginning to sprinkle. Emmanuel had planned a short walking tour on the way to Cafe des Federations, a bouchon where we were having dinner. (A bouchon, by the way, is a type of restaurant uniquely typical to Lyon, that serves classic Lyonnaise food. And like other French restaurants, it doesn't open for dinner until seven or seven thirty.)
So we set off in the very lightly sprinkling rain that we didn't mind, but it soon turned into a heavy downpour that none of us wanted to be out walling in. We took cover in the open lobby of a large building that Andy thought was some kind of public building that had closed for the day. It took about forty-five minutes for the downpour to let up, and then Emmanuel led us straight to the Cafe des Federations. It was still early, but the restaurant let us in and took us down to their basement wine cellar, to wait while they finished geting ready to open.
The basement was a softly-lit, arched room of solid stone crusted with mineral salt that flaked off if you brushed against it. Getting down the stairs was scary for me -- no railings again -- but we women were delighted to find a very nice restroom down there, and we were all happy to dry off and enjoy an aperitif in comfort while we waited for our table. In the center of the room was a large table with a glass top and a recessed base holding a three-dimensional map of the Lyon countryside. It was nice down there, perched around the map table on barstools, chatting over over aperitifs and appetizers.
I was hoping we'd get to have our dinner there, too, but we were called upstairs to squeeze around a long table in a crowded dining room. We were offered a choice of main entrees such as pork cheek stew, andouille sausage braised in red wine, lobster quenelles, and a chicken and wine dish (I don't think it was a classic coq au vin, though). I opted for the pork stew, and Andy got the andouille sausage.
There was a rillete of wild boar on the table, served with crusty toasted bread, and we were all served a tasty lentil salad dressed with a mustard vinaigrette. And a classic Lyonnaise salad of frisée greens, bacon and poached egg, which was very good but I liked the one Rita made for me before I left on my trip better. And there was a cup of a hearty meat and vegetable soup. AND a small plate of very thinly sliced sausage served with little tiny pickles.
It was like a traditional Basque meal, with dish after dish coming to the table. And then our main dishes arrived. Four of us ordered the pork cheek stew, and it was served in a quart-sized Le Creuset saucepan (just like the one I use at home) for us to dish out our individual portions. I was sorry I'd eaten all the preliminary dishes, because that stew was so good. The meat was very tender and the sauce was rich and hearty. Andy tasted it and wished he'd ordered that instead of the andouille sausage. In fact, he liked it so much, he asked our waitress if she would give him the leftovers.
"When are you going to eat that?" I asked him. "We don't have a microwave in our room, you know."
"I'll eat it cold," Andy said. "We're on our own for lunch tomorrow," he reminded me, "and I'll eat it then." He was so pleased when our waitress brought him a plastic container full of the stew that he tipped her a five Euro note.
And we still had dessert to come. There was a wide selection for us to choose from, including profiteroles again, a creme brûlée, a chocolate fondant, rum baba, fruit salad, a pear poached in red wine, and various sorbets and gelatos. Andy went for the chocolate fondant and was very happy with it. I seriously considered the rum baba to see how it'd compare with the one I had last night. But I really didn't want anything that rich and heavy, so I ordered the pear poached in spiced wine. That was just the right thing for me.
The whole meal was wonderful, but not one I'd want to do often. It's just too much food.
We waddled our way out of the bouchon and were very pleased to find taxis waiting for us. It was still raining a little and we've all been rained on enough for one day. Tomorrow should be clear.
Tomorrow is our last day, too. I'm hoping a good nights' sleep will fight off the rest of my sinus cold, and I'm looking forward to a relatively easy day tomorrow. We visit a chocolatier in the morning and then have the afternoon off until dinner at Pierre Orsi, a Michelin-starred restaurant.
LInda and Bill will be getting back into Lyon tomorrow evening, and then we'll all be taking off for Barcelona Thursday morning.
Short shots:
Profiteroles:
The French do like their profiteroles. I grew up calling them "cream puffs." They're not hard to make, and Mom made them fairly often. They were a favorite family dessert, as well as one she often made for company. She always filled them with vanilla ice cream and drizzled chocolate sauce over them.
Too much food:
I'm sure I've gained weight on this trip. I remember Rita telling me that after her month-long vacation in France when she retired, she gained three pounds "but it was all worth it." I've probably gained more than that, but I'm with Rita: it's all worth it.
Cooking lessons:
Well, we didn't get around to any duck dishes. And it occurs to me that we never got any written recipes. If we were baking, it'd be necessary to be a lot more precise, but most cooking is all about using basic techniques with recipes of general proportions rather than precise amounts. Once you have a few basic techniques down, you can go with whatever you've got and improvise a bit here and there to make it all work.
There was absolutely no room to swing a kneazle. And unless you were packed in at the very front, there was no way to see what was going on, either. Andy and I were in the middle and all either of us could see was the back of the person packed in ahead of us. The cheesemonger started off by telling us that while it is traditional to sip red wine while tasting cheeses, recent research shows that the tannins in red wine tend to change the taste of the cheese, so now most cheese tasting is done with white wine.
And we were all handed a glass of white wine. French cheeses are made with milk from cows, sheep and goats, and the reason you don't see many French cheeses in the United States is that many of them are made with unpasteurized raw milk and are therefore not allowed in. We could all hear the discussion and description of each cheese, but because we only saw the cheese when it was passed back to us on a plate with other cheeses, and could not see it when the cheesemonger was discussing it, most of us had no idea exactly what we were tasting.
No matter. We happily tasted it all with chunks of good bread and sips of wine, starting with the mild cheeses and working our way up to a blue cheese that I liked best. It wasn't a Roquefort or a Stilton, but it was very good, creamy and bursting with that classic blue cheese flavor. The blue was the only one I recognized for sure.
And you know what? White wine does go very well with cheese.
After our brunch of bread, cheese and wine, we headed back to the subway and to a silk factory. Lyon's silk industry began in the 16th century, had its heyday in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and began to decline with diseases that wiped out the silkworms in the late 1800s. The Industrial Revolution and the advent of modern textiles such as nylon and other polyester fabrics added to the demise. Today there are only three silk factories in Lyon, where there used to be 18,000.
The shop we visited today is the only one regularly open to the public. The shop proprietor learned his trade from his father, who learned it from his father, and so on. The shop has been in the family for centuries. . The work they do now is mostly restoration work for museums and places like Chateau Montmelas, but today he was working on a private commission from Japan. It was a silk kimono into which he was weaving solid gold and silver threads. He wouldn't give the price for the kimono, but he did say it would take ten months to finish it. ("That thing is what I'd call wearing the bank on your back," I commented to Andy.)
The silk shop proprietor showed us the silkworm cocoons, each about an inch and a half long and about a half inch thick. (They come mostly from Brazil and other parts of South America now.) We saw how the very fine threads are unwound from the cocoons, and I got to feel skeins of raw silk and finished and dyed threads ready for weaving. Most of the threads are so fine that it takes 800 to 1000 or more to fill one square centimeter of silk cloth, and he often is only able to complete ten square centimeters or less a day.
If there ever was a day I missed my colors, it was today. Fabrics and fabric art are my first love, and I loved feeling all the silk threads and fabrics. But I remember how brilliantly silk takes on color, and I just ached to really be able to see the colors of all the fabrics I was feeling. The velvets were especially tantalizing, because the most brilliant color would seem deepest black until the light shone just the right way on the nap, and then I'd see ... a hint. A shimmer of something warm that I'd think was deep red but Andy would tell me was bright orange. Or I'd see palest blue that Andy would tell me was really a deep golden brown. I gave up trying to see the colors and just let Andy tell me what they were.
They had remnants of fabric and several scarves for sale there, and Andy helped me pick out a couple scarves. One is a dark red velvet on a black base, with a leaf design burnt into it (they use a heat-activated acid that eats the silk but leaves the polyester base). The other is a sheer silk chiffon with colors merging from dark red to magenta to red-violet. I'll get a lot of use out of both of them.
After we finished touring the silk factory, Emmanuel took the group on a walking tour before our final cooking lesson at three this afternoon. Andy and I skipped the walking tour and headed for an Apple Store near our hotel to get my iPad sorted out. My email program and Internet connection have been spotty for more than a week and totally on the blink ever since we arrived in Lyon.
We would have gone to the Apple Store here days ago, but everything has been closed over the weekend and decfor the Labor Day holiday yesterday. (That's one major difference between Europe and America: Europeans shut down over the weekend, but Americans stay open for business and go shopping every day of the week.)
Once we got into the store, we had to wait a few minutes, but it was nothing like going to an Apple Store at home. For one thing, the noise level was actually reasonable. I had to work hard at it, but I could hear almost everything our Apple techie said. For another, it was nice not to have to make an appointment. A very savvy (and attractive) young lady named Doumya made quick work of getting me reconnected to the Internet and my email back in operation (I have no idea what she did, only that it worked).
However, she was not able to retrieve my draft letters from London and Paris, and the first few letters from Lyon. I've lost all those. Fortunately I have been keeping notes, and Andy's good for a memory jog, too, so I should be able to get them all rewritten, even if it will take some time.
Doumya also showed me how to use the Notes feature effectively, and helped me figure out what I'm doing when I delete stuff by mistake sometimes. Part of the problem is that I simply can't see well enough to read the menu bar when it pops up and asks me if I want to copy or cut or delete all or whatever. If I hit "cut" or "delete all" by mistake and don't catch it soon enough, I can't get my deleted text back, even with the "Shake to Undo" feature that Megan put me onto. When you can't see the text above the line you're typing, it's easy to miss the fact that the reason you can't see that text is because you deleted it, not because you simply can't see.
Such is life in my lane.
Doumya was such a good help to me I told her she was way better than any Apple Store techie I'd ever gone to at home. She said she was going to vacation in Los Angeles in a few weeks. We told her if she makes it up to Northern California, to please come see us, and I gave her my card. She really was a sweetie and we'd love to see her again.
After getting my iPad sorted out, Andy and I stopped at a little Vietnamese restaurant for a light lunch of spring rolls and a very tasty shrimp salad. We've seen quite a few Vietnamese restaurants here, which is not surprising considering that Vietnam used to be a French colony.
By now it was a long day already and we were happy to have an hour in our hotel room to catch our breath before catching our taxi to the cooking school to meet the rest of our group. I'm feeling lousy. The sore throat is bad and I'm sucking on cough drops to kill that awful post-nasal drip cough. At least the tablets we picked up from the pharmacy are keeping the headache at bay.
We had our limpid-eyed chef back for our last cooking lesson today. I have only just now learned that he is the same chef we had for our first cooking lesson-that-wasn't-really-a-lesson, and the one who impressed me the second day. This is what happens when you can't see enough to identify the people around you. Ah well. Anyway, in hindsight and from his point of view, it was a smart move to turn us loose that first day, as that was an excellent way of gauging how experienced (or inexperienced) we all were.
So anyway, our last cooking lesson today was meringue cookies and fillings. When I think "meringue" I think of that awful sticky sweet fluffy stuff on top of the good tart lemon custard in a lemon meringue pie. But this meringue was something else. He showed us how to make both Italian and French meringues, and because I thought I didn't like meringues much, on top of feeling lousy, I didn't put much energy into the kind of focused attention I would usually put into a good cooking lesson.
I do recall that for the Italian meringue, he made a heavy sugar syrup, using a digital thermometer to heat it to the precisely proper temperature, and then drizzled the syrup into the stiffly whipped egg whites, whisking all the while. The French meringue was made with granulated sugar. To both he added flour and ground nuts. And a little green food coloring (a powder, not a liquid) to one batch. The dough was stiff and sticky.
He showed us how to transfer the raw meringue into a pastry bag and pipe small one-inch diameter dollops evenly onto a baking sheet.
It takes practice to make nicely uniform and evenly-spaced dollops. Some of the dollops our classmates made were very weird and wayward.
Then he picked up each baking sheet full of all our uniform and wayward dollops, held it up about two feet above the counter, and dropped it flat onto the counter four times. This was to settle out any air pockets so that the meringues would rise and cook evenly.
While the meringues were cooking and then cooling, we made custard fillings. I paid more attention here, and got to make a lime custard, more of a lime curd, using a method similar to one for a classic pastry cream. The fragrance from the fresh-squeezed limes was wonderful. We also made a basic pastry cream, and a chocolate ganache.
The fillings used up all the yolks we'd separated from the whites to make the meringues, and I remember the rule he gave us about eggs. The French don't refrigerate their eggs. But when separating the yolks from the whites, our chef told us, the yolks must be refrigerated and used within three days. Whites can last for three weeks in the refrigerator, however.
When the meringues were all done, we had to let them cool completely before they could be lifted off the parchment-covered sheets. We made little sandwich cookies, filling each pair with the custards and chocolate ganache.
I was surprised how good they were, and sorry I hadn't paid better attention. They were really, really good, not too sweet at all, and we all scarfed them down with champagne. Andy and I liked the Italian meringues best. They were crunchier and nuttier. I didn't care for the chocolate-filled ones but I loved the ones filled with the pastry cream or the lime curd.
The lime curd ones were my fave, even if they were ugly as sin. Whoever piped the green meringues made the weirdest and most wayward ones. (Andy had a more tactful way of describing them: "They were very edible but not very presentable.")
So. I will continue to eschew that awful sweet sticky fluffy stuff, but will go for an Italian or French meringue sandwich cookie any day.
We were presented sous chef hats to go with our aprons, had a group photo and a final champagne toast, and just enough time to hit the cooking school store again before we had to leave. Andy and I bought a couple cans of the vanilla powder and a seasoning mix that I want to use for poaching pears or apples in red wine. And I picked out a couple of savory seasoning mixes for Yvonne and Rita -- my two friends who cook as well or better than I do.
It was after five thirty by the time we all left the L'atelier des Chefs, and it was just beginning to sprinkle. Emmanuel had planned a short walking tour on the way to Cafe des Federations, a bouchon where we were having dinner. (A bouchon, by the way, is a type of restaurant uniquely typical to Lyon, that serves classic Lyonnaise food. And like other French restaurants, it doesn't open for dinner until seven or seven thirty.)
So we set off in the very lightly sprinkling rain that we didn't mind, but it soon turned into a heavy downpour that none of us wanted to be out walling in. We took cover in the open lobby of a large building that Andy thought was some kind of public building that had closed for the day. It took about forty-five minutes for the downpour to let up, and then Emmanuel led us straight to the Cafe des Federations. It was still early, but the restaurant let us in and took us down to their basement wine cellar, to wait while they finished geting ready to open.
The basement was a softly-lit, arched room of solid stone crusted with mineral salt that flaked off if you brushed against it. Getting down the stairs was scary for me -- no railings again -- but we women were delighted to find a very nice restroom down there, and we were all happy to dry off and enjoy an aperitif in comfort while we waited for our table. In the center of the room was a large table with a glass top and a recessed base holding a three-dimensional map of the Lyon countryside. It was nice down there, perched around the map table on barstools, chatting over over aperitifs and appetizers.
I was hoping we'd get to have our dinner there, too, but we were called upstairs to squeeze around a long table in a crowded dining room. We were offered a choice of main entrees such as pork cheek stew, andouille sausage braised in red wine, lobster quenelles, and a chicken and wine dish (I don't think it was a classic coq au vin, though). I opted for the pork stew, and Andy got the andouille sausage.
There was a rillete of wild boar on the table, served with crusty toasted bread, and we were all served a tasty lentil salad dressed with a mustard vinaigrette. And a classic Lyonnaise salad of frisée greens, bacon and poached egg, which was very good but I liked the one Rita made for me before I left on my trip better. And there was a cup of a hearty meat and vegetable soup. AND a small plate of very thinly sliced sausage served with little tiny pickles.
It was like a traditional Basque meal, with dish after dish coming to the table. And then our main dishes arrived. Four of us ordered the pork cheek stew, and it was served in a quart-sized Le Creuset saucepan (just like the one I use at home) for us to dish out our individual portions. I was sorry I'd eaten all the preliminary dishes, because that stew was so good. The meat was very tender and the sauce was rich and hearty. Andy tasted it and wished he'd ordered that instead of the andouille sausage. In fact, he liked it so much, he asked our waitress if she would give him the leftovers.
"When are you going to eat that?" I asked him. "We don't have a microwave in our room, you know."
"I'll eat it cold," Andy said. "We're on our own for lunch tomorrow," he reminded me, "and I'll eat it then." He was so pleased when our waitress brought him a plastic container full of the stew that he tipped her a five Euro note.
And we still had dessert to come. There was a wide selection for us to choose from, including profiteroles again, a creme brûlée, a chocolate fondant, rum baba, fruit salad, a pear poached in red wine, and various sorbets and gelatos. Andy went for the chocolate fondant and was very happy with it. I seriously considered the rum baba to see how it'd compare with the one I had last night. But I really didn't want anything that rich and heavy, so I ordered the pear poached in spiced wine. That was just the right thing for me.
The whole meal was wonderful, but not one I'd want to do often. It's just too much food.
We waddled our way out of the bouchon and were very pleased to find taxis waiting for us. It was still raining a little and we've all been rained on enough for one day. Tomorrow should be clear.
Tomorrow is our last day, too. I'm hoping a good nights' sleep will fight off the rest of my sinus cold, and I'm looking forward to a relatively easy day tomorrow. We visit a chocolatier in the morning and then have the afternoon off until dinner at Pierre Orsi, a Michelin-starred restaurant.
LInda and Bill will be getting back into Lyon tomorrow evening, and then we'll all be taking off for Barcelona Thursday morning.
Short shots:
Profiteroles:
The French do like their profiteroles. I grew up calling them "cream puffs." They're not hard to make, and Mom made them fairly often. They were a favorite family dessert, as well as one she often made for company. She always filled them with vanilla ice cream and drizzled chocolate sauce over them.
Too much food:
I'm sure I've gained weight on this trip. I remember Rita telling me that after her month-long vacation in France when she retired, she gained three pounds "but it was all worth it." I've probably gained more than that, but I'm with Rita: it's all worth it.
Cooking lessons:
Well, we didn't get around to any duck dishes. And it occurs to me that we never got any written recipes. If we were baking, it'd be necessary to be a lot more precise, but most cooking is all about using basic techniques with recipes of general proportions rather than precise amounts. Once you have a few basic techniques down, you can go with whatever you've got and improvise a bit here and there to make it all work.
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