CAP - Admis

After a long wait and meticulously checking the test website every day, they finally posted the results for my CAP exams. Verdict? Admis - Admitted. However, the website only provided that information and no indication of how well/poorly I did on the exams. How typically French (i.e. useless).

A week later I received a letter in the mail with my grades. I'm not exactly sure how the grading system works, but it appears that the tests each have a different coefficient and are out of 20 points. I guess some are weighted more heavily than others, which makes sense. So here's the breakdown:

Approvision & Gestion Des Stocks: 13.50
Fabrication De Patisseries: 13.00
Francais Et Histoire-Geographie: 14
Mathematiques, Sciences: 19.5
Anglais: 20
Moyenne Generale (Average): 14.4

I don't know about you but 14.4 out of 20, aka 72% is a C to me, and not really a good grade. However, the way the system works here, anything over 16 is excellent, 14-16 is very good, 10-12 is average, and anything under 10 is not passing. Maybe I'm being to hard on myself and forgetting that I took a test in a foreign language taken by students who generally prepare for two years. Well, at least I did justice to my Asian heritage by doing extremely well on the Math and Science portion!

Things I don't understand

Though I've lived in France for almost a year now, there are a lot of things I don't understand here. And I'm not just talking about the language, cultural differences, or why nothing administrative (i.e. health insurance, post office, etc) works in a timely manner.

Living here, I've discovered some things that just don't make any sense. If someone can figure them out, please... enlighten me.

1) Light switches on the outside of bathrooms/toilets.
This just is begging for a practical joke. I see the news headlines now: "Woman slips in tub and dies after 8 year old child turns of light in bathroom."

2) Toilets that are in tiny rooms completely separate from the bathroom with a shower and sink.
Though I've been told its so one person can use the toilet while someone else is taking a shower, it doesn't make sense to me, hygienically. It's not that Americans poop on our hands or anything, but there's just something wrong about not washing your hands before you touch knobs or switches. From a female perspective its even more gross. A friend of mine is a nanny for two kids who says they never wash their hands after using the toilet, and always end up with a tumult of sicknesses (including worms). Perhaps if the sink was in the same room they'd be more likely to wash? Just saying.

3) Doors that lock from the inside with a key.
Another potential practical joke. Maybe I was just a devious child, but by locking yourself inside a place with a key, don't you leave the opportunity wide open for said key to be lost, hidden, or thrown out the window? Fire marshals in the U.S. would have a heyday with this safety hazard.

There are a dozen other things I don't quite get yet, but off the top of my head, these three confuse me the most. Maybe its a European thing and not limited to France. Confused, but not complaining... since at the end of the day, I still live in Paris.

Collioure

I haven't been posting lately, and quite frankly I don't have a good excuse other than exhaustion. Maybe it's the heat, or work fatigue, or some new form of mono. Who knows. I have one month left in my stage and am looking forward to two months in California to play catch up on US life. Then it'll be back to Paris to maybe do another stage or scope out a potential job opportunity (more on that later).

A few weeks ago I took a mini-break and went to the town of Collioure. The town is in the South of France close to the Spanish border. Aside from being gorgeous, visitors flock to the coastal town as it was made popular by many famous artists such as Picasso and Matisse.

Finger vs douille cannelee

So every day I make mignardises, which are bite-sized desserts, sometimes referred to as petits-fours. Our mignardises are choux pastries cut in half and topped off. We make two varieties of these pastries. Creamy ones topped with chocolate decor, and chantilly ones topped with a fruit puree gelee sphere. We make three flavors of each type: caramel, chocolate, vanilla, coconut, violette, and pistachio. Usually we make about 25 of each, totaling 150 choux to cut and fill. You keeping up? Today we had about 185 of each. Yes. That's well over 1100 little pieces of crap to assemble. And a lot of piping.

I'm generally in charge of piping all the chantilly cream for the mignardises, since I've been there the longest and probably make the best looking rosaces (or swirls of chantilly) in the least amount of time. What do we use to make them? Piping bag and a douille cannelee. Whats this fancy sounding thing you ask? Nothing more than a star pastry tip. Yeah I know it doesn't look very dangerous unless you jab it into someones eye.

Well today, in my mad harried state to finish all of the mignardises, I quickly used my finger to pierce the piping bag to pull out the douille. End result? A normal piece of pastry equipment quickly turned into a chinese finger trap. My poor index finger was jammed so far into the pastry tip that i couldn't pull it out without getting jabbed by the pointy teeth. I tried to get a new stagiaire to help me, but she had no idea what to do. The pastry tip was stuck, and hurt like a @#$%! when I pulled at it. A coworker tried to help by saying "okay you're going to scream".. thinking I'd let him rip it off my finger. I don't think he realized it had pierced my skin. Luckily enough for me, today I worked with the nicest chef-de-partie, and he got a knife to bend back the pastry tip teeth to release my finger. Not one of my smartest moves at work.

On a positive note, my finger is still intact, and tomorrow we only have about 500 mignardises to do.

Summer BBQ

I've yet to go to a BBQ in Paris. I imagine it's quite hard for people to grill outdoors since most live in apartments without terraces. The BBQ's I've seen in my local bricolage aka do-it-yourself store hardly hold a charbroiled flame to our Webers back home. However I have seen disposable BBQs like this. Tempting.

Well summer is here, and I've been craving BBQ, so I did the next best thing to firing up a grill. I slow cooked some pork shoulder, shredded it, and added some BBQ sauce. Perusing the grocery store, I was also able to find coleslaw (kind of shocking isn't it?), and "American Burger Sauce", which upon further inspection looked like thousand island. With a bag of chips, and a salad, these pulled pork sammies made for a perfect summer meal.

For dessert I quickly threw together some banana streusel muffins.

Manifestation and the kid I wanted to kill

On my days off, I like to take the bus around town. It's a nice change from traveling underground all week long. However, today there was a 'manifestation' over by Bastille. What does that mean? To me it meant that all the buses going in that general direction were either canceled or detoured. A normally 30 minute metro ride, or 45 minute bus ride took over 45 minutes 2 buses, a metro ride, and a lot of walking. I did a Google search for what might be going on in the neighborhood, which was useless. I checked the twitter posts of one of my favorite food bloggers and it turns out there's some demonstration going on. A lot of angry people.

Speaking of angry (a perfect segue into my next blog topic), I usually don't get very angry at work. Exhausted, burned, and hungry. Sure. Angry? Not really. I usually don't talk too much about the people I work with either.  This is an exception. Last week marked the return of this 15 year old piece of sh*t stagiaire who came to work with us for a week, about a couple months ago. I'm not sure if he's young, or a bit slow, or just has no respect for anyone. It could be all three. Half the time if he wasn't messing up a recipe he had already attempted twice, he was ignoring his duties and wandering around the lab asking others what they were doing. Also, when cleaning time came around, he'd conveniently disappear or say that he needed to go home.

Why fondant blows

Last week in preparation for my CAP exams, I decided to make some pate a choux. I knew they'd be on the exam and would likely take the form of eclairs. Whenever I think of eclairs or pain au chocolat, I always think of one of my former classmates and friend who is slightly eponymous and loves writing about her pastry shenanigans as much as I do.

J'ai fini!

Which means "I'm done"! Though I could say je suis fini, though the literal translation in french is "I'm finished" or rather "I'm dead". Surprising how many people make that mistake. I'm not quite dead, but je suis vraiment claque. Which means "I'm really beat."

Enough with the French lessons. This morning started at 6:30 AM, even though I didn't work. But I still worked in a lab at school taking my CAP practical exam. From around 8:00AM until 3:00 PM (with a 30 minute pause for me to stuff my face so I didn't pass out), I had to make croissants, chocolate croissants, chocolate eclairs, an apricot tart with pistachio almond cream, and a charlotte cake layered with biscuit cuillere, vanilla bavarois, pears, and a marzipan topping. The cake had to have a Valentines Day theme, so I just threw together some marzipan roses and cut out some hearts. It was tiring. We had a proctor who helped us along to work faster. Actually now that I think back to it, he mostly yelled at us... telling us to not fall asleep and to hurry up. Best part were the Ferrandi kids who washed our dishes.

Unfortunately I don't have any pictures to post of the goodies I made today; photographs were strictly prohibited. The proctors and 'jury members' seemed to be amused by an American taking an exam that most French kids have to take. They were pretty nice about the fact that I couldn't quite say something, but could describe it enough to get my point across. The proctor asked me why I was taking the CAP. My response? Because I can.