Day 16 - Lyon

Distance Walked: not a lot again, Alcohol Consumed: 2 glasses red wine

Today was cooking class day.  The class, Plum Lyon, was held in the Croix Rousse district which is built on a very high hill.   It is some distance from my apartment so I headed over there early and had my breakfast at a cafe nearby so I wouldn't have to rush to find it.  The cafe turns out to be run by a Kiwi - it had flat whites on the menu.  The coffee was very good.

There were six of us in the class.  A mother and daughter duo from Tennessee.  Mother had recently retired so the two of them had left their spouses (spice?) at home to go travelling, with a focus on food and drink.  There was another couple, an Australian woman who had just gotten married to an Englishman.  There honeymoon involved eating and drinking their way through France and onto Italy.  The fifth person was a woman, originally from Lebanon, but now living in Tunisia.  She is a journalist but is thinking of throwing it all in and becoming a chef.   She has taken a few weeks off work and is taking cooking classes to see if preparing food is as exciting as she thinks.   I suspect enjoying cooking and enjoying being a chef are very different things.  Our instructor, Lucy, was an American woman who had met and married a Frenchman.  She used to be a commoditites trader but retrained as a pastry chef.  She gave that up to run the school once she had children, as a pastry chef's hours are not particularly civilised.

To start with we went to the local market to buy ingredients for our meal.  This involved walking up to the top of the hill, so Lucy paused frequently and told us a little of the history of Lyon and its food.  It was a major Roman town, the capital of the northern part of the empire, so the roads and merchant networks were excellent.  For that reason it has had some of the best food and food culture for centuries.

Once we got to the market, we did a quick wander through it to see what was good.  Lucy told us how to spot which stall was run by a local farmer and which was run by someone who has just gone to the wholesale market and was reselling what they'd bought from there.  In addition to fruit and vegetables, there were several stands selling charcuterie, cheese, meat and one that sold nothing but various sorts of olives.  Once we'd gone through the market once we decided on what looked good and what we were going to buy to cook.  Below is the menu we came up with.  

 After buying all the fresh ingredients we headed back to the school to start preparing it all.  The class had started at 9am but we didn't start preparing food until 11:30am.  I'd had a light breakfast so was getting peckish.  However, the first thing we did was slice up lots of onions for the onion confit.  This takes at least 3 hours to cook.  Next we started a veal stock, which included veal bones.  We pushed the marrow out of the bones first and put that aside.  Next we made homemade mayonnaise for the remoulade sauce.  This is actually dead easy to do.  Next we grated the celeriac (actually Lucy's KitchenAid mixer did that) and topped it with the remoulade sauce.  This was served with 5 different sorts of salami, tiny goat's cheeses, two sorts of terrine and radishes served with butter and salt (which is a popular snack here apparently).  The marrow was mashed and spread on bread & sprinkled with salt.  This was then toasted in the oven.   It was very good.  I don't like marrow as a rule, but served this way it was just a mouthful of something a bit rich, a bit salty and a bit crunchy.  I liked it a lot.  We washed this all down with a local sparkling wine.  This was our entree course but we didn't get to it until 2pm, so we were all ravenous.

Next we made the apple tarte tatin, pastry first then slicing the apples and making the caramel, before putting it all in the oven.  After that we cleaned a bunch of mushrooms by brushing them with paintbrushes, which took an absurd amount of time.  Finally we made a salt rub for the duck.  This included grinding up rosemary and other herbs and spices in a mortar and pestle so we took it in turns as fresh rosemary takes forever to grind down by hand.  Then we made a sauce by reducing down half a bottle of red wine with shallots then adding obscene amounts of butter.  Finally, we cooked the duck breasts, pouring off the rendering fat to use to fry our potato cake.  I forgot, at some point in all of this, we steamed some tiny leaks and made a vinagrette for it.  Finally at 5pm we sat down for out main course.  Below is the duck with mushrooms around it (it was sitting on a bed of confit onions), then the potato cake (sadly too thick so it was mushy on the inside) and the leeks (very tasty).

The best bit of this course was the duck with the sauce.  I must try that at home.  The leeks were good too.

After this we tried a bunch of different cheeses, including two sorts of Comte  and rather runny brie-style cheese.  Again, I had to resist the urge to make Monty Python quotes.

Finally we had the tarte tatin.  This was good but needed something to cut the sweetness.  Raspberries perhaps. 

We then all made promises to keep in touch, that none of us will keep, before staggering off.  The honeymooning couple had a dinner booked for 8pm but the rest of us couldn't face the thought of food.  I walked back to the apartment and stopped at a boulangerie as it was near closing and bought myself a mini pizza and a pastry.  I'm not sure if I'll eat any of it.  Perhaps breakfast tomorrow.