Délicieux! Four weeks of French delights in Canberra

I'm a big fan of learning, and cooking, and eating, and all things French so a recent offering by the Canberra Institute of Technology was irresistible! Andrew and I just completed a four week evening course on the cooking, language and culture of France. Yummo. The classes were taught by the affable Claude, a French chef and charcutier, and attended by seven Canberra Francophiles (counting us). Each night we made one dish.

Week one: Tarte tatin

Week two: Barramundi en papillote with wild rice

Week three: Mousse à l'orange served in chocolate baskets

Week four: Coq au vin

Delicious! As regular readers of this blog will know, my food presentation can be a bit ... rustic. That is, I tend to concentrate on flavour and nutrition ahead of looks. So this course was eye-opening both in the new recipes and techniques introduced, and its emphasis on making the food look good on the plate. ('Plating up', as all those ghastly cooking shows call it.)

The course also covered bits and pieces of French language and culture, though most of the time was spent on cooking, which seemed to suit everyone. Merci beaucoup to Claude and our intrepid classmates for a very enjoyable learning experience!

This wasn't our first foray into international cooking. Check out the cooking classes we did two years ago in Malaysia, here, and earlier this year in Singapore, here.