Not A Cooks Blog ... Mastering French Cuisine With Julia Child ... (Once A Week): Series Three: Part Ten

I had taken the advantage of being in Auckland recently to visit the Mercy Hospice shop in Ponsonby. Being an employee of Mercy Hospital back in the 90's, it was nice to revisit and support this great cause. I was delighted to purchase a soup tureen, and with a cold southerly change in the weather this weekend, a soup was called for. Cordon Bleu series 41, included a section on Veloute, iced and bisque soups. I went for the warmth of a veloute soup. As CB explains the consistency of veloute soups is described by their name meaning velvety (from the French for velvet - velours). They are made by pouring a well flavoured stock on to a blond ronx. This is blended, returned to the heat and stirred until boiling. The finishing touch is the addition of a liaison made of egg yolks and cream. I chose the St. Germain soup, which used spring onions, lettuce and peas (old and rather floury peas were called for but not something I have readily available, so Pams frozen little numbers had to do the trick).
I needed to do a main and came to CB series 62 section referred to as "Career Girl Entertaining". The name in itself was enough to fire up the feminist inside me to start a rave and lecture to my daughters of tales of female suppression and harmful limiting stereotypes. The necessity of the statement as per page11 "... we will give ideas for husbands temporarily coping with the family cooking in a future lesson" was hopefully now of an age and stage, which like Trumps campaign "is over"! Looking beyond this historic context I cooked up the "Fish crumble". This involved cooked white fish (I choose Lemon Fish), hard boiled egg, prawns, a crumble mixture to go on top and a béchamel sauce. I was pleasantly surprised that all members of the family enjoyed this.

In relation to Crème St Germain this was more to the adults taste. St. Germain is an area in Paris renown post war as being synonymous with intellectual life centred around bars and cafes. As a family we were fortunate to visit this particular area of the Left Bank. With Jamie doing a visit to an agent in the area, the girls and I took advantage of visiting a café. This became a memorable experience for two main reasons. Firstly it would have to be the most expensive hot chocolate I have ever brought, even Imke at the great age of 8 with advanced fiscal appreciation, was horrified. Second reason was in the enthusiasm of drinking this liquid gold we managed to create a Willy Wonka chocolate waterfall with the chocolate jug tipping over and spilling over the edge of the table pooling onto the carpet below. In a very calm manner we left to clean ourselves up in the refined toilet facilities, then to make payment at the desk. Leaving the café and avoiding eye contact with our waiter I couldn't help but wonder if the man who now occupied our table was aware of how dangerously close his feet were to a rather soggy chocolate patch!
St Germain... not only memorable for its soup...