Rain Rain

Its been (very) rainy so much of what I've been doing lately is inside. My life has also gotten much less interesting since I've settled into a pattern here. My room is actually starting to feel like "my room" and I no longer have to look at maps to get between "home" and school.

Nonetheless, things are still interesting. I had my first French class at l'Alliance Francaise last night. I will try not to complain that after five (?) years of French they placed me in level A2 (2nd of 4 levels). The truth is that, although my vocabulary is good, I need a pretty thorough review of grammar. However, we spent most of last night's class going over things like when to use etre or avoir in the past tense and the use of imperatifs. These are things that I did in 7th or 8th grade, and they've been hammered in me pretty well. After class the teacher noted that maybe I should go up a level next week, and I think I agree with her assessment. Since the books are non-refundable though, I will go through and redo all of the really boring stuff, just to make sure I have it down.

Today we made pissaladiere (wikipedia has a slightly better description). As the chef described it, it is a pizza with ingredients that little children don't like. (olives, capers, anchovies, onions, tomatoes...yummy....) Surprisingly it isn't so bad, and mine turned out pretty well!

(Chef did not crimp the edges of his, though we had to in practical)
Chefs:
Mine:

This was part I of our dough sessions. So far we have used "savory yeast dough" in pissaladiere, have seen pasta being made, and today we saw savory short dough (for a quiche Lorraine and a wild mushroom quiche) and also the preparation of puff pastry. In many ways, I feel like all of this dough making is for naught because dough is one of the things that is easy to screw up: the ingredients must be measured precisely and you must know exactly how much to knead (or not knead) the dough. And it is just so easy to hop into a local supermarket freezer section to buy dough. (Dough freezes very well, so you lose nothing from buying a good dough that has been frozen) Furthermore, flour comes in different "grades" (In Europe, it is marked - for example "55" is all purpose and higher grades have more whole wheat, but in most parts of the world flour isn't marked) and the grade determines how much water/butter you need to add to the recipe. This is frustrating! And where will I buy "dry butter" that I need to make my puff pastry with?

Sometimes its great to make something from scratch (like apple pie during thanksgiving), but so far, I am not convinced that making dough, rather than buying it, is particularly "worth it" for most occasions.

Bissous!
Daria