Not A Cooks Blog ... Mastering French Cuisine With Julia Child ... (Once A Week): Series Three: Part Four "A Cordon Bleu meal for all seasons "

Sometimes you are just spoilt by choice... and with 72 Cordon Bleu magazines to look through I had that exact predicament. What to choose??? To resolve the problem I decided to take the whole 3 course prescribed meal from course number four. This consisted of:
- Melon Salad with Hot Herb Loaf
- Carbonade of Beef with Creamed Potatoes and Braised Red Cabbage
- Austrian Coffee Cake

I had all the ingredients at the ready. Albeit the honeydew melon... not thinking that this would be a sufficient reason to trip over to a trophical island, I braved a replacement of kiwi fruit. This did turn out to be a refreshing start to the dinner with the combination of tomatoes, cucumber and the kiwi. I did start to peel the tomatoes as instructed but abandoned the idea pretty quickly not thinking my skinning skills would allow hardly any tomatoe left by the end of it.
I prepared the French dressing which is added to the prepared fruit / veges, along with a final sprinkle of mint and parsley.

One of the fantastic additions to the 3-course meal section of the Cordon Bleu magazines is it timetable section. This was a great help and kept me organised (for the start of the day anyway). I peeled the potatoes, made and baked the cake, prepared the herb loaf and sweeten the coffee with sugar and added the rum. For a 8pm dinner I needed to return to the kitchen at 5pm. For a Sunday evening with lunches to make, a week's neglected washing to do 8pm was far too late. However my plans to return earlier were stymied by the enthusiasm of clearing out a front section of our garden. The family was in full flight with chain saws, weed eaters, filling the trailer with rubbish and even fitting in a trip to the local native plant nursery. Of course there was scope creep and we kept on being distracted with another area to clear.. and so the time went flying past. At 4:30pm I was in a right mess and in desperate need for a wash.... so much for my timetable!
Needless to say dinner was on the table a little later than planned. I am not sure if it was because we were all starving hungry after our strenuous afternoon but the 3 course meal went down a treat. Even Caroline ate the Austrian coffee cake (with the rum!). With the combination of the timetable and the decision of what to cook made, I even surprised myself with the smoothness of getting the 3 dishes on the table. This theme of choice was reflected in my short shopping spree in the afternoon when purchasing plants where (with no prompt from me) the nursery owner observed that he found customers seemed more content with a reduced choice... I must say all I could do was agree!