First of all, I must send the happiest of birthday greetings to my dear friend L. I am terribly envious of her April 1 birthday, as I am quite fond of a good practical joke and am prone to foolish behavior. Aries also seem to think they're the best of the zodiac: all headstrong, passionate, brilliant, and always, ALWAYS right. Given that the majority of my friends are Aries, I must subconsciously agree. But it may just be that we leos are drawn to other fiery dispositions.
As this is a significant birthday year for a bunch of us, we are planning a trip to Paris to fête the occasion as one should: with lots of good food, great wines, and best friends. I think it is also particularly appropriate to return to the City of Lights accompanied by those with whom I first visited it. And to help boost the Now Serving portion of this blog, I'll be spending a few extra days there, walking in Julia Child's footsteps by taking some cooking classes!
It's no secret that Paris is my favorite city, although our first introduction was not auspicious. As L can likely recount better than I, since she watched it all happen, we took an overnight train from Switzerland and arrived very early in the morning, and in my groggy state, I ended up tripping over my bag, tumbled down the train steps, and greeted Paris for the first time on my hands and knees. So I kissed the ground of my ancestors and tried to regain my dignity after the peals of laughter from the entire crowd subsided.
Despite the awkward beginning, a weekend was all it took for Paris to steal my heart. So I returned to spend a schizophrenic junior year of college studying at three different institutions, the bulk of which time was spent at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques trying desperately to keep up with my exceedingly bright cohort and generally failing to do so. It's my own fault, of course: most of my friends took a year abroad and lightened their courseloads so they could jaunt around Europe every weekend. Little overachiever that I am, I was offered the "opportunity" to do a program where I was fully integrated into the notoriously difficult IEP program (vs partial integration, where the small classes were with other foreigners and considerably less demanding on the workload front). As with my first trip to Paris, and most of my life generally speaking, I leapt before I looked, and so spent a year where all my American friends spent the weekends discovering Prague or Barcelona sprawled across piles of books in the library. But sticking close to campus meant I spent a year discovering the complexities of Paris, from my piano lessons in Cité de la Musique to admiring the buildings in La Defense. I think I visited nearly every museum on my free student pass from my one art class at the Sorbonne. I taught English to the lycée students near the Père Lachaise Cemetery and took photography classes in the industrial 11th. I loved Paris more than ever at the end of it, but not in the romantic whirlwind way; more in the ups and downs of any long term relationship kind of way.
So planning a trip back opens up doors of memories. Of course, as they say, it's never the same river twice, and so I'm excited to see it anew and am especially excited about my cooking class! However, i need to finally decide whether to take the easier classes at Ecole Lenôtre's Paris branch prettily situated at Le Pavillon Elysée, whose website makes it sound like cooking classes for Ladies Who Lunch, or brave the 3-day course with Joël Robuchon at their professional school located someplace near Versailles called "Plaisir," which sounds pleasant enough, but which is going to entail an hour commute. I have received special dispensation from the administration to attend M Robuchon's course, but although I am thrilled by the idea of being 1/12th of a student body taught by the world's best chef, I am having flashbacks to my various foolish leaps in Paris, and wondering if perhaps just for once, if for the first time ever, it might be better to choose the easier option. Might I not be happier with some perfectly nice chefs teaching a handful of women how to make pain au chocolat instead of trying to understand how to make the most elaborate entrees from a self-described perfectionist who wanted to be a priest - the man who taught Eric Ripert and Gordon Ramsey - while surrounded by more of France's best and brightest? The thing is, while I hated being the class dunce, I loved -and always have- being pushed harder by my peers. But this is my birthday, and supposedly a vacation, and maybe I'd actually enjoy being head of the class for once.
So I put it to you in my second reader's poll: do I make the potentially foolish leap in a quest for culinary excellence, or take it easy for a change and just enjoy the pleasure of cooking in a pretty space with pretty people?
As this is a significant birthday year for a bunch of us, we are planning a trip to Paris to fête the occasion as one should: with lots of good food, great wines, and best friends. I think it is also particularly appropriate to return to the City of Lights accompanied by those with whom I first visited it. And to help boost the Now Serving portion of this blog, I'll be spending a few extra days there, walking in Julia Child's footsteps by taking some cooking classes!
It's no secret that Paris is my favorite city, although our first introduction was not auspicious. As L can likely recount better than I, since she watched it all happen, we took an overnight train from Switzerland and arrived very early in the morning, and in my groggy state, I ended up tripping over my bag, tumbled down the train steps, and greeted Paris for the first time on my hands and knees. So I kissed the ground of my ancestors and tried to regain my dignity after the peals of laughter from the entire crowd subsided.
Despite the awkward beginning, a weekend was all it took for Paris to steal my heart. So I returned to spend a schizophrenic junior year of college studying at three different institutions, the bulk of which time was spent at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques trying desperately to keep up with my exceedingly bright cohort and generally failing to do so. It's my own fault, of course: most of my friends took a year abroad and lightened their courseloads so they could jaunt around Europe every weekend. Little overachiever that I am, I was offered the "opportunity" to do a program where I was fully integrated into the notoriously difficult IEP program (vs partial integration, where the small classes were with other foreigners and considerably less demanding on the workload front). As with my first trip to Paris, and most of my life generally speaking, I leapt before I looked, and so spent a year where all my American friends spent the weekends discovering Prague or Barcelona sprawled across piles of books in the library. But sticking close to campus meant I spent a year discovering the complexities of Paris, from my piano lessons in Cité de la Musique to admiring the buildings in La Defense. I think I visited nearly every museum on my free student pass from my one art class at the Sorbonne. I taught English to the lycée students near the Père Lachaise Cemetery and took photography classes in the industrial 11th. I loved Paris more than ever at the end of it, but not in the romantic whirlwind way; more in the ups and downs of any long term relationship kind of way.
So planning a trip back opens up doors of memories. Of course, as they say, it's never the same river twice, and so I'm excited to see it anew and am especially excited about my cooking class! However, i need to finally decide whether to take the easier classes at Ecole Lenôtre's Paris branch prettily situated at Le Pavillon Elysée, whose website makes it sound like cooking classes for Ladies Who Lunch, or brave the 3-day course with Joël Robuchon at their professional school located someplace near Versailles called "Plaisir," which sounds pleasant enough, but which is going to entail an hour commute. I have received special dispensation from the administration to attend M Robuchon's course, but although I am thrilled by the idea of being 1/12th of a student body taught by the world's best chef, I am having flashbacks to my various foolish leaps in Paris, and wondering if perhaps just for once, if for the first time ever, it might be better to choose the easier option. Might I not be happier with some perfectly nice chefs teaching a handful of women how to make pain au chocolat instead of trying to understand how to make the most elaborate entrees from a self-described perfectionist who wanted to be a priest - the man who taught Eric Ripert and Gordon Ramsey - while surrounded by more of France's best and brightest? The thing is, while I hated being the class dunce, I loved -and always have- being pushed harder by my peers. But this is my birthday, and supposedly a vacation, and maybe I'd actually enjoy being head of the class for once.
So I put it to you in my second reader's poll: do I make the potentially foolish leap in a quest for culinary excellence, or take it easy for a change and just enjoy the pleasure of cooking in a pretty space with pretty people?
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