Tag Archives: French

Rhum Barbancourt

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Rhum Barbancourt

So today we’re trying a new rum. This one is in the French style from Haiti. It’s Rhum Barbancourt, aged eight years. It definitely is different from the English style found in Trinidad that was obvious on the first sip. While the Trinidadian rum had a hot lead and then quickly mellowed to feature an extended flavor profile post-palate this Haitian rum, in comparison resembles most closely Cognac.

I quite enjoy Cognac so this will be perfectly acceptable. Now that I’ve tried two different rums, I can clearly say that the English style so far has my preference. Perhaps there will be some new notes I can pull out of this Haitian rum, but so far it’s pretty much wrapped in a kind of straightforward Cognac simplicity.

My selection of rums was pretty much a coin toss. It was either going to be this one or one from the Dominican Republic. It’s a learning process, so I’m not going to weep over a rum that isn’t exactly knocking my socks off.

After I perused the label a little bit longer, I discovered to my chagrin that this rum is 86 proof, while the Trinidadian one was a standard 80. That increase in alcohol is definitely a major factor in the taste of this liquor.

Rosetta Stone Francais Level 1 Unit 1 First Thoughts

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I just finished Level 1 Unit 1 in my new Rosetta Stone Francais course. The approach is something I’ve never experienced before. The interface is so simple that I found myself overthinking it several times. It’s helpful in that it tells you “Nothing here is click and drag” instead everything is clickable, talkable, or writable.

What did the first unit cover? It didn’t approach the language as I thought it would. There was no demonstration of rules, no tables for Je, Tu, Vous, Nous, Ils, and so on and so forth. There weren’t any verb conjugation drills and I found myself not translating after a little bit of time. Of course, a little knowledge is a very bad thing, and in this case I have the tattered remains of my grade school and high school french floating around in my head while I’m going through the basics again, and oddly enough, for the very first time.

It was extremely pleasant and I found myself picking up a kind of natural approach immediately. I think what bothers me the most about Rosetta Stone isn’t the actual product, it’s very polished and professional, but what gets me is that I would probably be better off starting French with this program than if I had skipped a foreign language completely in grade school and high school altogether! I can’t imagine what a Rosetta Stone course would cost a grade/high school and I’m sure it would “break the bank” as it were.

One thing that’s really quite awesome about the Rosetta Stone courses is that I can do all my work on my laptop and practice on my iPhone almost as well. The entire course structure is synchronized in the cloud at Rosetta Stone itself so as you follow along in the program on a computer the mobile app knows where you are and makes the programs available to you over wifi or 3G to keep on practicing.

During this unit the things you learn are boy and girl, singular and many, gender, and certain verbs such as swimming, drinking, eating, running, reading and writing.

One thing I can tell immediately is that this is going to be incredibly fun to use and at the end I should have basic fluency in French. That will be a wonderful feeling.

Something else that I’ve been thinking about is the need for translation. All throughout school it was a translation matrix, memorizing language rules and then establishing mental lines drawing from English to French. Imposing a germanic language onto a romance language can only work so far before you run into conflicts. That’s what’s always upset me about the standard way other languages are taught in the United States, it’s always English-wearing-another-language. I have a faith, as I don’t know outright and for sure, but I suspect that the shape of thinking in English is different than the shape of thinking in French. We think in words, we think in our language. We can imagine without language, but when we want to share what we think we have to drag what exists in our minds as honest thoughts through the bog of our language so we can communicate our thoughts. I have it on good authority that while people think in different languages there is no reason to think that the quality of those thoughts of the efficiency of communication is any different from language to language, it’s not a matter of good and bad, it’s just different.

I think that’s the thing that draws me to the Rosetta Stone courses the most. That excitement I feel when my thoughts can dip their little toes in another language-bog altogether. Instead of thinking in English and communicating in English, I could possibly (with enough hard work) start to think in French. That’s what drives me, that curiosity of what it feels like to think in another language. Not so much to do more things that have a direct application with it, although that would also be nice, but to sit back and feel the difference between expressing a thought in English and then expressing it in French.

Only time can tell if Rosetta Stone is successful in coaxing my 36 year old brain to re-accept a new language. This is where kids born today are the luckiest kids ever. A young 4 to 6 year old brain, in the channel of language acquisition can soak up all of these new thoughts and even more before they settle into a primary language and an “other” language. If only Rosetta Stone was available in 1983, I could have mastery over French, English, and German for example. Maybe I still have the ability, despite it laying dormant for so very long.

French Cooking

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Last night I got home and was faced with a quandary, what to make for dinner. The classic response to this is a battle royale where we struggle to figure out what the other person wants to eat, we compare what we have in the pantry and fridge and if we’re very lucky we can make something that if it isn’t what anyone really wanted, does at least dispel hunger for a while longer.

Last night I arrived home and looked in the freezer. I had previously used my FoodSaver system to secure/freeze a giant blister pack of chicken breasts, two at a time per bag and they were mocking me in the freezer. “Oh whatever will you do with us!? Try as you might, it’ll be either minimally acceptable or barely edible!” and it struck me that I had a copy of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”, AKA, THE GREAT BOOK. (The Holy Bible is the Good Book, whereas the MAFC is THE GREAT BOOK. Accept that cookbooks > bibles and you’ll go far in understanding me!) So I grabbed the blessed tome of tasty and looked through the table of contents. Ever since becoming acceptably proficient in making Boeuf Bourguignon I’ve been itching to try more from THE GREAT BOOK. I discovered that what I had was 4 frozen “Supremes”, or so the French call them, and there was an entire section devoted to them in the MAFC. I opened the first recipe “Supremes De Volaille A Blanc” and looked over the plan. I had nearly every ingredient on hand. On the sheer thrill of trying something from the MAFC I thought about a side-dish that I could make and remembered that two days ago I had watched an episode of French Cooking (yes, the B&W one, Julia herself, soldiering on, and yes, on our HDTV) where she featured potatoes as the theme. She had prepared Gratin Dauphinois and watching her became a clip-meme that was bounding around in my head since I saw it. I decided that I would look it up, found it, again had a good number of the ingredients already on-hand and that became side #1. As I pondered over the MAFC it struck me that I had a main course, a side-dish featuring potatoes, but no vegetable! (I don’t regard potato as a vegetable, I regard it rightly, as a pillar of cuisine, I’m Irish, deal with it.) I then scanned the MAFC and briefly chuckled at my hubris, that I would take on not one but three untried recipes singlehandedly. For the vegetable side I selected Carottes A La Concierge. I marked the three recipes using slips of paper (I need a set of five bookmarks to just keep in THE GREAT BOOK itself I think) and had a list of things I needed to get at the market. I was able to acquire the ingredients for this hubristic cavalcade for just under $20, which was just about all I had left in my food budget.

Once I returned from the market with my supplies I got down to thinking about something I need more experience in, which is kitchen timing. Which dish do you start with? How do you manage mise-en-place with hot components, and how can you work three MAFC recipes with a kitchen as woefully tiny as mine? I enlisted a friend in vegetation disassembly but once I had everything I was pretty much on my own. Let it be clear, I was on my own by design, many offered to help but working with the MAFC is a one-man-one-book-one-sharp-knife deal. I started the Dauphinois first, since it needed to bake for at least half an hour in a blazing box at 400 degrees. I then got the ‘Carottes’ dish off the ground and started both it’s primary section and it’s attendant sauce and finally worked on the Supremes, and their attendant sauce.

The first thing that occurred to me as I promptly botched the prep for the Dauphinois was that Julia’s two pounds of potatoes is kind of a winking joke. There was no way that two pounds of potatoes were going to actually come together properly, it’s actually about 1 pound 12 ounces that you need. Julia’s estimations aren’t wrong, for her tools they were probably just right, but for me and mine, yikes. I was able to salvage the botched prep on the Dauphinois and then the first durable lesson popped out at me, that dogmatically following these recipes would be an utter disaster. If you want to cook French properly, you have to follow Julia’s suggestions on her video programs and cook by the seat of your pants, the recipe as a rough guide, not a scaffolding or a plug-and-play situation as I originally approached them as. Along with the potato oddity the instruction that a supreme should be able to cook to done in a 400 degree oven in 6 minutes from raw was dangerously off. I was really concerned about this because the 6 minutes passed and my probe thermometer showed an internal temperature of 108 degrees for the Supremes. I sat there thinking about why I read “6 minutes, maybe a moment more” when my common sense is screaming “try 14 ya dumbass! Yer gonna kill someone with raw chicken!” and then it struck me like a ton of bricks. Julia Child, and the MAFC was written when Supremes were of a certain size. Yes kids, we have witnessed a definite manipulation of CHICKEN. My Supremes were 3 times bigger than Julia’s! Each! So armed with my probe thermometer I let the Supremes go for nearly 17 minutes, checking every few minutes until they got to 150. I knew they would coast all the way to done at 160 and I knew that they were rendered “safe” at 140.

As the Supremes coasted and rested I was able to turn my attention to the sauces. Once I got them whipped into shape I pulled out the Dauphinois and looked down and into the casserole dish I had prepped them in. I couldn’t face them if they were as I feared, goopy and overdone or raw vegetal nasty underdone. I was absolutely convinced that the Dauphinois was an utter loss. I reached in, grabbed them, and pulled them out. As I set it down on the counter I peered in, steeling myself for the absolute worst. Well, as it turns out, they came out perfectly. They were not goopy, nor were they underdone. I reflected on the Dauphinois, it wasn’t difficult to throw together and the recipe is deliriously (and thankfully) resistant to botching, even if you utterly botch the prep! With one success under my belt for the night I covered the Dauphinois and got back to everything else. I added the egg/cream thickener to the ‘Carottes’ and what was a dingy speckled thin mess became a mustard colored dingy speckled thin mess. I let it simmer for a long while and in the end I figured this would be my failure. I poured the sauce onto the ‘Carottes’ and covered it all up and let it rest.

All in all I was facing plating and presentation, the Dauphinois was a great surprise, and I could handle the failure of the ‘Carottes’ if the Supremes worked. As everyone congregated I uncovered the Supremes and started to plate them each out, 1 Supreme per person. I got out the forks and I showed off all that I had done. The sauces sensed my foreboding and thickened magically and when I uncovered the ‘Carottes’ dish, they were PERFECT. Everyone dug in and in the end I had a lot of clean plates and very happy diners.

I must admit that I did not suffer for my hubris, and now I have experience in these particular dishes I now feel more at home in the MAFC than ever. I find myself itching to try other recipes in the MAFC, and a part of me would love to whip up something for my folks in Rock Hill when we go on vacation.

Which brings me to another thing I’ve discovered. There is a kind of magic in cooking. It’s a feeling I haven’t felt since my early years at SUNY Buffalo. Watching the loom of the kitchen work, all the ingredients coming together, the amazement at the complexity of some of these dishes and the utter surprise when they are successes feels a lot like hacking away, writing code in whatever programming language, and creating something. That I think is the same rush that painters feel when their work is done, when a sculptor chips the last bit of marble off, when a thing is created, new, and it was all your doing that made it happen. I also firmly believe that the loom of the kitchen cannot operate properly unless emotions are also present in the room, and all of them too, hope, compassion, love, rage, will, avarice, and fear. It’s why I could never cook like this on a timer, for money, I could never be a professional chef. I care too much, I think. It’s also a kind of therapy I think, definitely a giant batch of crack for a Cancer such as myself to cook this way. There is something utterly delightful and perfectly wonderful in creating truly amazing dishes. The MAFC may be a doorway for me to find my Art.

Only time will tell.