Wednesday, Sept. 25 - On the Way home--almost

Today we checked out of our Paris Perfect apartment early this morning, left our bags at their office, and walked over to Catherine Reed's restaurant, REED--clever name, don't you think? We had signed up for a cooking class because our flight is not until tomorrow, we're spending the night at the Paris airport, and we decided to not just 'schlepp' around the city for the day. Besides, we had heard that Catherine's classes are fun and informative. The class was everything we expected and much, much more.

JoAnn and Catherine meet up outside her restaurant 

There were four other participants and we quickly became BFF's while Catherine readied the prep area.

Ready to go--Catherine is very organized 

We soon donned our crisp white aprons and we were off to the races. Catherine is an excellent chef (we've eaten at her restaurant several times) and it turns out that she is an excellent teacher as well. The menu consisted of  violet artichokes as an appetizer, an interesting chicken preparation with a mushroom garnish with four different kinds of mushrooms, and strawberry shortcake for dessert.

Lloyd attacking the chicken

JoAnn tries her hand at boning the chicken leg - what a challenge

Catherine "refines" JoAnn's boning technique

We cleaned artichokes, peeled potatoes, chopped shallots, and even learned how to bone a chicken. We also learned how to clean mushrooms (not with water) and how to cook them for maximum flavor.

Hard at work

Everyone agreed that you can't go wrong by adding some butter to a dish.

The final "piece de resistance" of the day was the construction of strawberry shortcake--none like I'd ever had before. Catherine started the the morning by teaching us how to make the pastry and alerting us to how we would learn to use all our senses. For example, she doesn't time the shortcake pastry. She uses her sense of smell to determine when to remove it from the oven. (Mushrooms sing to her as they saute, raising and lowing their 'voices' to tell when they are ready for the next step.) After the shortcake cooled and while the chicken was cooking, we worked on our individual desserts. Catherine made a sample for us:

Catherine's

Lloyd has to practice a little bit on his technique

Finally we were ready for our feast. It was a delightful morning; we all agreed that we had learned a lot and we would certainly recommend investing the time to spend a morning with Catherine.

Cheers!

We are at the airport hotel; this year's adventure is about to come to a close. I will post some final thoughts about Paris in in my next blog entry, probably tomorrow or Friday. Thanks for following along. Au revoir!