Another day, another soup

The day started out with wine class. Every week in September and then every other week until the end of January, we have a class about wine and then a tasting. Not too shabby of a way to spend two hours time. The past two weeks we have talked about wine in general, but next week will start learning about a different wine region in France every time. Next week is Provence, so stay tuned. Hopefully, I'll be able to see clearly enough after class to blog about it :)

The afternoon was dedicated to St. Germain soup, a bacon and pea soup. First, we made a white veal stock as the base of the soup. Below are the starting ingredients, mostly bones.



You may be asking yourself, "What is that white thing on the bottom left?" Well, my friends, that is a calf's foot. Yep. Here's a close-up of it before I took my cleaver and hacked it to pieces...

Moving right along...According to Chef, today my soup had very good flavor, but was too thick (which I knew when I presented it to him). Yesterday was too thin, today too thick. I've got to find the middle ground!

Want to know a cool thing about Chef Stephane? All my DFW followers will appreciate this. He worked for a while in a restaurant in Fort Worth called Saint Emilion, a well known French establishment. Well, apparently that led to him cooking for the Bass family several times, including taking their jet to their Aspen house to cook for them there. Now, that's a pretty good gig.