[Plongeur]

This is my favourite week so far - at last we get to do some heavy knife work, cutting up large parts of animals with the sort of knife I've never managed to use in my previous life as a civilian cook. Sure, I guess there are plenty of home cooks whode -bone their own shoulders of lamb, but I was never one of them. Simply because, like most people, I was always too intimidated to know where to start. And it's the sort of thing that, when a professional cook demonstrates it, it looks so easy that you just KNOW it's not easy at all.
Chef at the restaurant has kindly got some shoulders in for me to practise on; unfortunately they won't be arriving until tomorrow, which kinda negates the point, but it'll be interesting again to see how techniques differ.
And the problem with learning the technique at school is that there are 16 of us crowding round a workstation, trying to watch all the important, tiny cuts and movements Chef makes to make sure as little meat is removed with the bones as possible. Which means that, once he's finished and we've all returned to our own workstations, everyone wants him to come and look at what they're doing to see if it's OK. Which means that it takes us getting on for an hour to finish just thede -boning. I don't ask him any supplementary questions since, for this recipe anyway, we're going to be cutting the meat into 50 gramme/two ounce chunks (we're making a Navarind'Agneau ) so, if the knife slips a tad during the bone extraction, well, it's not the end of the world. Then again it would be useful practise to get it right this time. Then again there's gonna be half a dozen or more shoulders waiting for me tomorrow so I'm gonna have plenty of practise anyway.
With our shoulders de-boned and trimmed into 50 gramme chunks we set about turning them into a Navarin d'Agneau; the Larousse Gastronomique defines a 'Navarin' as a ragout (a stew of meat and veg cut into regular pieces cooked with/out being browned in a thickened liquid and named either after the battle of Navarino, or the navets - turnips - it traditionally includes (NB: make sure you pronounce navet as nav-ey not nav-ette - a 'navette' is a shuttle, as in Channel Tunnel or Space and definitely not the sort of ingredient you want in a ragout). Since the Battle of Navarino (when the French, British and Russians destroyed the Turks and Egyptians during the Greek war of independence - oh, we're all learning today!) happened in 1827 and the word 'navarin' was around for a long time before anyone went to help the Greeks, I'll stick with the turnip explanation.
As does Chef, making us 'tourner' turnips and potatoes; I've learned how to turn the potatoes à l'anglaise quite well now - Restaurant Chef showed me how to practise the necessary curved knife action on the side of an egg, and it really does help you cut curves in spuds and turnips too. In particular it means leaving less peelings behind, although between us we manage to produce enough for a good couple ofgastros of pommes dauphinoise (as opposed to dauphine , which we're apparently going to do later this term) - potatoes cooked in cream, eggs and milk in a dish rubbed with garlic and butter. Yum.
The Navarin is to be cooked 'à blanc', in a white sauce, which means producing a white stock - no browning of the lamb bones, just blanching them and then adding a garniture aromatique and letting them simmer as long as possible. This is then used to cook the Navarin, with the sauce coming from the cooking liquid; we're given a choice of thickening by adding a roux or by reduction; I opt for reduction, seems healthier and more in keeping with modern trends, although a roux is much more traditional (and the 'school approved' way of doing such things, they're still quite old-fashioned here).
And it works out OK, although I have to say I'm not a massive fan of such fatty cuts of meat; yeah, yeah, flavour and what have you, but mouth feel is as important to me; if I were eating or serving this to clients, I'd be tempted to shred the cooked meat and remove much of the fat before plating it up. But the sauce does taste very good indeed.
Hygiène this afternoon after we get to eat the Navarin we made this morning in the school's self-service canteen. Our Hygiène teacher is a former hospital dietician who is, ahem, on the larger side of slim, shall we say, but who lectures us constantly on the evils of over-eating and gives us countless recipes for 'healthy alternatives'; these go down like packet mashed potato, as does the following lecture on the 'bad consequences of eating too much fat'; this is a class of sausage, cheese and foie gras-eaters who are unimpressed at the idea of replacing oil in mayonnaise withyogurt (yeah, yeah, it tastes good, oil tastes better, get over it). We have three students from the accompanying 'Salle' classe , those who are studying to become waiters (waiting is a serious profession in France, you can do degrees in it even). One of them is always less than attentive; in fact, he sleeps through every single class, today being no exception. At least he doesn't snore. All of them could care less about the recipe side of things anyway, they're just here because they have to have a basicknowledge of nutrition for their qualification.
Back in the kitchen, it's puff pastry time again. Today we're making 'talmouses en tricorne', cheese sauce-filled miniature tricorne hats; so we get to learn béchamel and mornay and more puff pastry work; I'm pleased with my puff pastry, it always rises nicely and I enjoy the process of making it, it's kinda therapeutic.
We also do some cheese sticks which don't work as well; I put too much sauce mornay inside so they all explode open in the oven. Still taste good, but you wouldn't want to serve them to paying customers. Which is what it's all about, really.