When I was in college I worked in the French Hotel Sofitel bakery as a pastry chef. I will never know why I got the job. I don't know which I exaggerated about more in my job interview—my cooking skills or my French speaking skills. Anyway, I worked physically harder at that job than any other job—lugging around huge metal bowls of 101 combinations of pastry dough, burning my wrists and hands on baking pans, and sweating from 6 am until 3 pm in a kitchen that had a wall of floor-to-ceiling walk-in ovens. I admit eating as many ice cream filled Profiteroles you want was a perk, but it was soooo hot in the bakery that near the end of my tenure working in the hotel, I moved to the much cooler main kitchen in the hotel making Coquilles St. Jacques and Ratatouille.
Check out a more lighthearted look at a French kitchen in the video below. The beautiful cookbook, The Little Paris Kitchen, also has a brand new BBC2 TV series with Rachel Khoo cooking up a storm from her tiny Parisian kitchen. She is a British chef and she admits that the hardest people to cook for are French chefs. I agree with that! But she seems fluent in both her cooking and French speaking. Her skills tower over mine. Maybe I need some more practice. A trip to France would be nice this summer I'm sure...
You can watch the video above on YouTube also.
IMAGE: Graphic by me, Chris Olson, featuring images from the short film The Little Paris Kitchen.
