Adrenaline is an amazing thing. I have been flying on that alone for well over 24 hours. So I got “Mia” (names changed to protect the innocent) to cheat for me, and one of Marcelo's friends who works in the basement kitchen snuck around for us and said the only exam thing he could find was trout. I was thrilled because the trout recipe was SUPER easy. It remained a mystery as to the second dish...

I got to school this morning, and Tulio and I sat in the garden, going through the recipes, studying the obvious choices and skipping the ones they would never put on the exam. At 8:30 sharp, I went upstairs, picked my green chip out of the hat, and set up in the spot the chef directed me to. In my mind, I had the trout. I was fully in the mindset of trout. Easy. Then the chef said, "The blue chip is the trout, and the green chip is...the chicken."

The chicken??? Are you joking? CHICKEN? The recipe is called Basque Chicken, but it is totally chicken cacciatore, this dish my mom has made since she and my dad got married. I was stunned. Ten minutes prior I had said to Tulio, “Poulet Basquaise? Skip it, it’s too easy. They’ll never choose that one.” I was floored for a minute, and then I was plain, old-fashioned psyched. They might as well have handed me a box of Mac and Cheese! I finished early, my hollandaise, the technical portion of the exam, was perfect, and my plating was decent. Hooray!

I am still in denial that they chose chicken. So obvious why “Eric” couldn’t see what else was on the exam- there are always chickens downstairs for stock, etc. Chicken. No one orders the chicken.

As for pastry…I pulled the Douceur Chocolat. It is a yummy cake, and, when put together well, it is stunning. It involves tempering milk chocolate to make disks and decorative items to top the cake. I was fine until it came to the disks. I rushed the tempering and my chocolate wasn’t very shiny. Then, it was too warm when I tried to cut the decoration and it came out pretty ugly. It wasn’t my worst work ever, but I hold my title as pastry chef for the blind. I know I passed and I am pleased with my work.

After the Basic exam, I was ready to just pack away my knives and give up. This time, however, I am itching to get back in and do more. Maybe that’s the adrenaline. Nothing I say or do now (2am - that makes 4 days of going to sleep after 1) is based on sleep or reason.

I know I have been MIA for awhile, and most details of my life in the past week will remain a mystery for now, as my exams are tomorrow and I am FREAKING out.

I cheated, and I got my friend "Mia" to find out what the recipes are ahead of time (she works at school). She got the pastry exams for me but not the cuisine, which is a bummer because I am the 3rd group to do pastry and the first to do cuisine. So I am cramming ten recipes for tomorrow at 8 am. Someone in the basement kitchen said we may have the trout. That would be good. But I wanted the fish recipe last time and that didn't work out well for me. But I am happy with the pastry options; two of them are very time consuming, but the two most difficult options (the macaroons and Passionatta) are not going to be on the exam. Hooray.

God, I am a boring person.

As we creep up on the end of the trimester, schoolwork slows down. The written exams were this week, and they were as equally full of questions that we have never covered as they were last round. However this time around, I was able to pull more answers out of thin air and feel confident that they were correct; could it be that I am learning??? The dreaded list of possible recipes for the final exams were passed out as well. Again, I am very confident about cuisine, but I am nervous about finishing the elaborate pastries that we have done in the two and a half hour time limit.

This week in food was fairly ho-hum. We made a croquembouche, which is a tower of chou pastry (cream puffs) dipped in caramel and built into a tower. We made steak in a truffle sauce. The highlight was the fish dumplings in a crawfish sauce. Yes, fish dumplings are gross, but the crawfish were good and I miss them. The sauce has flambéed cognac, and that was really fun to do. It’s a very effective tool for quick hand hair removal. You can see my flambé a little in the picture, and my look of complete rapture- how lame am I? Could I be any more excited over a tiny bit of fire?

Here are my reflections on Brussels:

Is this possibly the junk food capital of Europe? Over 800 beers brewed and bottled in a country of 10 million, and very few of them, I believe, are crap. It’s famous for moules/frites, but on the average day, people forgo the mussels and just eat very large paper cones filled with fries smeared with mayonnaise. It’s also famous for waffles, but here they’re thicker and more like sweet bread than pancakes. Of course, they’ll cover them in ice cream or chocolate for you. And let’s not forget the chocolate…total heaven. Who’s to say Americans are the only ones who eat poorly?

It’s possible to walk absolutely everywhere in Brussels, and it seemed positively impossible to get lost. I had a tiny map in the back of my guidebook, and there were only about four streets that were labeled. I’d be walking along, looking for a specific road or landmark, and I’d think I was completely lost and off track. Just at the point where I felt I needed to ask directions or hop in a cab, the place I was looking for would appear before me. Amazing.

People in Brussels couldn’t have been nicer. In two and a half days here, I’ve had more conversations with people I don’t know than I have had in five months in Paris. Also, everyone is at least tri-lingual, and I mean perfectly so. Wow.

All in all, despite a rainy Monday before I headed back to Paris, it was a great trip. I wish I had more time to travel, but then again, I’m here to cook…

Before I met Natalie for brunch, I decided to walk to the Sablons area and see what there was to see. As soon as I hit the Grand Place, I noticed all sorts of little booths and stages…a street fair! The city of Brussels was running what they called the “Fete d’Iris,” a daylong festival, mostly for kids, but I’m a kid too. I totally got suckered in. As I was walking past everything, there was an amazing eight-piece wandering jazz/funk band. They had amassed quite a crowd, and we followed them to the place de Petit Sablons, where a jazz tent had been set up. I listened to music for a while; it was surprisingly really good, but then had to interrupt the fun for brunch and some museum time. After a great tour of the Horta Museum (http://www.hortamuseum.be), I couldn’t resist walking back to the fair. By late afternoon, it was really in full swing, and unlike American carnivals, there were no cheesy rides or games for kids. Instead, there were interactive street performers, photo ops (little scenes set up where kids could get into costumes and act like they were a garbage man riding on the back of a truck, or a sailor on a life raft, or a bellhop in a hotel), and hourly masked parades. All in all, these things were kind of weird to me: the “parade” that I caught was 8 people dressed up like giant insects in very elaborate costumes, pulling their “insect king” in a bug-chariot, juggling sparklers and lighting flares. I’ve never seen anything like it, but hey, there were plenty of “cornets des frites” (massive cones of french fries covered in any one of many sauces) to go around, so I just took it all in.

Paris, why must you treat me so?

I left an hour and fifteen minutes before I had to be at the train station to go to Brussels. I was really regretting my poor choice of staying out so late (and drinking as I did), especially when I was squeezed onto the line 4 with thousands of really smelly Frenchmen. I got to the Gare du Nord, a very colorful neighborhood, and as I was stepping off the train, a man who wanted to get on pushed me out of the way. And I mean he literally took both hands and pushed me to the ground like a five-year-old on the playground. And here I was thinking that the French weren’t rude…

In the train station, I went to the automatic ticket dispenser, was told that the machine couldn’t read my card and that I had to go to the ticket counter. The line at the ticket counter stretched all the way to Belgium, and I missed my train standing in it. That was the least of my problems, for when I got to the booth, they had no record of my reservation. After much searching and a phone call (to whom, I still wonder) my reservation was found. The next train left an hour later, and I wasn’t guaranteed a seat. I had to wait until everyone was on board before I began my desperate search for a lone seat in which to sleep in. I dragged myself through three cars before I spotted one lucky little seat by a window.

As I sat down, the guy across from me was talking to the woman kitty-corner from him. Thanks to Nadia, I can easily recognize a Russian accent speaking French, so I knew he was Russian. I thought that they were together, until he told her his name. It was then that I realized that he was weird. I immediately pulled out a book so that he wouldn’t have an easy time engaging me in conversation. He talked loudly to no one in particular the entire train ride from Paris to Brussels. There were two main topics in his diatribe: 1. The cost of specific items in Paris versus the same in Russia and how much more Paris costs. He named prices and asked others to name prices as well. 2. Jobs he has had and things he has done. He is a musician with nowhere to perform in Paris. He is a translator, a writer, a chef, a monk, and a former employee of Princess Diana. He would not shut up. The best moment was when the woman from the window seat across the isle stopped him and said, “Could you please be quiet? I just want to read and you are really annoying.” He stopped talking for thirty seconds, just enough time for all of us to breathe a sigh of relief, and then announced that he had just bought a new pair of tennis shoes for 70 euros and that he could have gotten the same in Moscow for 25. And on and on and on…so much for sleep.

On a happier note, Brussels is lovely. I’m at a great hotel. It's just steps away from the Manneken Pis: the single most disappointing landmark in Europe. I had a great little walk around with Natalie (Marcelo’s wife- she works in Brussels) and then settled down to taste some real Belgian beer.Belgians are my kind of blondes...

Soon, it will be hot in Paris. In anticipation of this predicted heat, I went to find a fan today. The de Bretteville’s told me that once it starts to get warm, stores sell out of fans and, remarkably, don’t restock them. I had to find a hardware store that sells fans and that proved a challenge. In the end, after wandering around and asking about fans for 45 minutes, I had to travel a half hour by metro to the 20th to get to the Castorama. They did, happily, have fans aplenty, but lacked all forms of customer service. Once I paid for the fan, there was no bag or help or anything, just a table at the exit with some twine and packing tape on it to “make transport easier.” I’m no boy scout and my makeshift handle broke before I got to the metro. I don’t recommend lugging a very awkward box onto the metro. Does anyone have a screwdriver? Because I need one to put the damn thing together.

On a lighter note, the student party was tonight, and I managed to get a lot of mileage out of the open bar. So much so, that I actually went to a club afterwards and stayed out until the metro reopened. Go me.

This morning I had a cuisine practical, and that’s all I had scheduled for the day. I started my easy day off right: Lamb, with “tian” of spinach, mushrooms, and tomato concassé. I was pretty pleased with my efforts, especially because I finished early. The chef in demo told us that this dish often shows up on the exam. He decides what’s on the exam, so there you go. I may be making this one again.

It’s warm and beautiful in Paris right now. You should come here. Immediately. It probably won’t last.

At the end of my day outside, I went to the post office because someone who loves me sent me a package! The French post is just as bad as the US post (and I know how bad it is at home; people in New Orleans are STILL not getting their mail). I waited in line for half an hour to find out that my package is out on a truck somewhere and I can’t get it until tomorrow…

Now presenting the Passionata. Have you ever seen anything edible be so day glo in your life? I can’t say it’s delicious, either. It’s a Cigarette batter under a Joconde biscuit (very thin vanilla cakes- pretty flavorless), with coconut dacquoise (a better, more flavorful cake), a passion fruit mousse, a raspberry mousse, and a raspberry glaze. All that in two hours. We did work in teams however; one person made a double batch of one thing and the other person made double of the other and we spilt it down the middle. It was great teamwork and it really made things easier and faster. Unfortunately, this cake was one of the exam cakes last session, and you don’t get to share for that. How did anyone ever get all this done in two and a half hours? If I have one wish, it’s to not have to do this nasty, bright cake on the exam…

Happy May Day!