Dégustation Days

4 April - Day 20

Today we were treated to a grand tour of Jit Hu's old culinary school by his professor, Pascal. We walked through corridors and peeked into kitchens full of students in full food-making mode, dressed in their smart aprons and awesome hats frying steaks, glazing pies and managing not to eat everything.

Pascal took us through all the facilities of the school, which is also a fully functioning hotel and restaurant. The only catch is that the guests and customers have to be the guinea pigs of these aspiring members of the service industry.

We had lunch in one of the application restaurants and were to be subjects of one of the cooking classes and the waiter-ing class. The food was great and the service was good and the class professor would provide some entertainment by ocassionally berating one of the students. This high tension among the waiters often resulted in us being served by a pair of very shaky hands which dad thought was quite funny.

After lunch, we headed over to the Vietnamese restaurant that we had dinner at on our first night in Toulouse. We ended up spending most of the afternoon there. Pascal had brought a big bag of stuff back from a recent trip to Malaysia for Jit Hu from his mother.

However, among the yum Malaysian goodies were inexplicably two toothbrushes, powdered mash potatoes, some Italian pesto and Malaysian chocolate. We relieved Jit Hu of these and promised to do something useful with them. Like give them to a homeless guy.

Since we had nothing better to do, we also decided to help Thuy and Hanh prepare for dinner at the restaurant. Jit Hu showed me the proper knife technique for peeling onions and garlic. I almost kind of got the hang of it, but was really slow and peeled about 1 piece of garlic for every five that he did. I prefer the other way he showed me, where you place the garlic between two metal bowls and smash it about until the skin is loose enough to feel off, because it adheres to my theory that you can solve most problems by hitting them really really hard.

We moved onto dicing onions and slicing carrots with the gigantic kitchen knife. I was equally slow and incompetent with this, but I considered it a great success as I still have a full set of fingers.

Dad thought it was all very funny and spent most of the time laughing at me. I was then moved to prawn peeling duties with dad, ending up with frozen fingers after peeling a whole bucketful of them which was also the end of my short career in Vietnamese food prep.

For dinner we headed over to Jit Hu's place to have steamboat dinner with his landlord Kit, Kit's wife Sylvia, their baby son Kendrick and his roommate Isa. Kendrick is a hilarious baby who enjoys wearing my sunglasses, playing with powertools, saying "doi doi doi" and eating sour strawberries, although he screws up his face and shakes his head vigourously after each bite. Dinner was excellent and lasted several hours. Conversations in their house are a fun mix of English, French, Mandarin and Cantonese. Kit is a very spirited man who works as a food sculptor and chef. Unfortunately for me, most of the interaction between him and my dad were in Cantonese. I can only just understand when people speak Mandarin and French (and English sometimes), but my comprehension of Cantonese is on a whole other level of cluelessness. Regardless, the snatches of English were very funny and Kit is very entertaining when he talks. Dad says his stories are hilarious so I'll just have to take his word for it.

5 Apr - Day 21

Today we picked Jit Hu up and headed to Albi, which is a one hour drive out of Toulouse.

 

Upon arrival, the first thing we did was to go in search of a restaurant. We ended up eating at a nice place in the old area of the city. We all ordered the same thing: roquefort salad for the entree (from which I learnt that I don't like blue cheese) and steak and fries for our mains. I managed to eat more this than my cousin which is an impressive feat, trust me

We wanted to go look at the big cathedral afterwards but it was closed for lunch so we wandered down to what I assume was the Garonne river and skimmed stones across the water for a while. Afterward, we walked back up to see the cathedral which was very big and cathedral-y. This one was particularly interesting because of the extremely detailed stonework and the abnormally large amount of bird poo at the entrance because of all the footholds that the detailed stonework gives to the pigeons. Then we ate ice creams and went home.