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I am Lois, from France. I have not moved to Lausane from my current town, Antibes, which puts me in the group of "remote partners". Fortunately, I am able to fly back to Lausane often on the weekends, allowing me to support my wife, Nisha (one of the IMD serial blogger) and to join the awesome partner group. On the job side, I am a Social Media consultant at the R&D group of Accenture. The best part of my work is to deliver Social Media strategies to our clients and to drive the delivery and to pilot the next generation of Accenture assets in this space. If I had to travel quite frequently for my work, the trip I cherish the most happened 4 years ago, when I decided to go for a one month vacation in Asia, on the occasion of a friend's wedding in Singapore. As unlikely as it looks, I met Nisha, we fell in love ( Nisha always says that I fell first :-) I really can't tell any more) and we maintained a 2 year long distance relationship seeing each other during vacation only before getting eventually and happily married. On the leisure side, I don't consider myself as very original. I like electronic gadgets, books, US series (Dexter!), snowboard, scuba diving, hiking, good food, cinema... that's should be it!
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I had the pleasure (and pride!) to be called a “chef” at a cooking class kindly (and efficiently) organised by Alison. It was awesome to meet in person and interact with some of the partners I knew only from Facebook. Until now, I have not been even “Facebook Friend™” with most of the partners, which meant I had only a tiny, sometimes mysterious picture as a way to identify them on the IMD 2011 partners group! Actually, I realized I knew and discussed (virtually) with Iryerida’s feet way before talking to her in person. I guess we can call this a Social Media miracle!
Anyway, let’s get to the two important things of this event: people and food. I really would like to thank the attendees Maria, Alison, Iryeda, Diana, Wai Man, Sarah, Peter (& Babies ) for their very warm welcome and patience in my sometimes hesitating cooking. I have to say that even if I love to cook I got a bit out of practice: before the MBA started, Nisha used to do most of the cooking at home and when she moved to Lausanne, I did not spend a lot of time in the kitchen. I have been collecting far too many loyalty points from our pizza delivery shop :-/ essentially for two reasons, I have been super busy at work (since five years Nisha would point out) and it is not really fun to cook for oneself. I believe the best way to transform food from necessity to pleasure is to share it family and friends. Everybody’s mood was excellent and the warm sun light was making Maria and Joseph’s apartment even more welcoming.
I tried to select the menu for having the best taste/simplicity/typical ratio. We started the French South East meal with an Italian starter: “Green Salad with Feta, Basil, Prosciutto Crudo involtinis”, because well, first French South East and Italian cuisi
ne have been influencing each other so much since centuries that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish them, and second because I just thought as a “chef” that it was a good choice and that should be enough – please keep in mind that in French tradition if one questions the “chef” terrible things could happen! –
As a main, I chose a roasted chicken and a Gratin Dauphinois. These are relatively simple dishes, however, by using few small tips and tricks gathered around (essentially from my mum, friends and cookbooks) they can be composed into an excellent meal!
As a dessert, I went for “Crêpes” i.e. French pan cakes, as it is the perfect dish to share with family and kids: it’s warm, tasty, not too heavy, and highly customisable with anything one likes from sugar, hot chocolate, ice cream to even apricot jelly and mackerel for the most adventurous gourmet (as far I know my dad is the only known human liking this last one!).
Let’s look at the recipes!
Starter: Green Salad with Feta, Basil, Prosciutto Crudo Involtinis
Follow the instruction here http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2010/04/involtini-feta-prosciutto-rolls/ to prepare the involtinis and serve them on a plate with green salad seasoned with salt olive oil and few drops of balsamic vinegar.
Main: Roasted Chicken & Gratin Dauphinois
Roasted Chicken
Ingredients
• 1 free range chicken
• 1 lemon
• some provencal herb mix
• olive oil, salt, pepper, few cloves of garlic
Recipe
1 .Boil a pot of water and drop the lemon in it for 3-4 minutes.
2. In parallel, rub the chicken with olive oil, salt, pepper and herb de provence. Peal 3-4 some fresh garlic cloves and put them inside the chicken body.
3. Get the lemon out the water and poke it with a fork ( be careful, it’s hot and the lemon juice might fly around).
4. Put the lemon inside the chicken body.
5. Bake the bird at 180C. The cooking time should be about 30 minutes per 500Gr of meat, but start to check it regularly after 45 minutes. In order to tell the chicken is cooked just cut the meat between the body and the leg. If the juice coming
out is clear, lunch is ready!
Gratin Dauphinois
Ingredients
• 1.4KG of potatoes for "gratin" i.e. ideally from the following type "roseval", "monalisa", "agata" or "nicola". If you don't find these, no worry, just pick a kind which works well in an oven
• 600 ml of "fresh full liquid cream" "creme fraiche liquide entiere > 30% fat", it's really important that it's liquid and unfortunately full fat
• few fresh cloves of garlic
• a bit of nutmeg
• salt and pepper
Recipe
1. Remove the potatoes skin and clean them.
2. Cut them in slices of about 1.5 mm – it is important to allow them to cook nicely –.
3. Remove the cleaned skin from the garlic cloves. Rub/scratch the cloves in the baking dishes with a bit of salt.
4. Whip the cream for few minutes, with the salt, pepper and nutmeg. Stop when the cream does not look liquid any more, but before it is solid. When you will pour it on the potatoes the cream should slowly flow between them.
5. Put the potatoes flat in the baking dish, don’t go over 4-5 cm of thickness. If required use another dish with the remaining potatoes.
6. Cover the potatoes with the cream.
7. Put the dishes in the oven at 180 for about 60 minutes (the cooking time depends a lot on the potatoes) . If it gets brown cover the dish with some aluminium foil. To know if it is cooked put a knife into the gratin, it should be soft and smooth. If you feel the texture of the potatoes, it is NOT cooked.
Dessert: Crepes
• 400gr of white fine flourIngredients
• 3 eggs
• 1/2 L of milk.
• a bit of baking powder
• a bit of oil and salt
• to enjoy them: basically anything that you like, and usually sugar powder, jam, nutella, honey, lemon, icecream...
Recipe
1. In a large bowl put the flour, the baking powder, the salt. Make a hole.
2. Add very slowly the milk while mixing. Mix it until the
batter is smooth (if you can’t get it that way, filter it with a sieve).
3. Leave the batter in the fridge, ideally for few hours.
4. Get the liquid out of the fridge, and add few spoons of milk, until the mix is a smooth thick liquid.
5. Prepare one or more non-stick pans. Oil them with a cooking brush or with a fork rolled with kitchen paper.
6. For the cooking part, it is really too hard to explain, and so easy to show: follow this video and everything should be fine! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1DgmbMMOgA&feature=related
Looking forward to attending more cooking classes, but this time as a student :-D
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