Fire Starter

Yesterday was not really a day for writing a lot.
 
Up and out (yesterday) after the essential work was tidied away and off on a rare flight with Mr B to Paris (I think you guessed that bit).  He’d bought me a course to learn how to make sauces – evidently bored with my fine, but monotonous, gravy.
 
We arrived in Paris in time to go to the centre, grab a sandwich, then I got stuck into chopping, sautéing and generally saucing the heck out of things.  Very cool bunch of fellow students (a Brazilian art dealer, an American pilot, a Lebanese architect and an Australian diplomat – I felt positively pedestrian) and we had a lot of fun.  Unexpectedly, to me, the course lasted until 8pm, when I had been promised by Mr B a 5pm finish… Also, it finished with dinner, which was salmon and then steak, with all the lovely sauces we’d made.  Delicious, but a little troubling when Mr B had booked us in at – obviously, thinking I’d be famished – a steak restaurant….
 
Somehow he struggled through the rib of beef for two, brave soul that he is!
 
Later, cocktails and many other things at a Scottish bar.  I’m rarely in bars these days, but I’m so used to the endpoint being when they call “time” that it was rather a surprise to find that happened at 3am, not 11pm…  We got a bit lost on the way home.  However, Mr B was – to my delight – happy at that late hour to try all the sauces I’d been carrying around in a cool bag.  Having no food to dip in them (didn’t think of the mini bar crisps till the next day) he just scooped it up with his fingers.
 
Anyway, that brings us to today.  As you might imagine, it was a fairly slow start.
 
The morning was for lying in bed and trying to make the world go away which, with kids having left missed calls and no messages, was difficult.  A walk started bringing feeling back into my brain, and lunch helped, but it was nonetheless a super-fragile SooB who arrived back at the sauce room.
 
Job 1: fry a bunch of live crabs.
 
I couldn’t even watch when the chef did it.  I had to ask one of the sous-chefs to do mine.  I get that it is hypocritical of me to be happy to eat creatures but not kill them, but you didn’t see their little legs as they tried to crawl out of the pan…
 
(As it happens, the sauce was delicious.)
 
(And my mushroom sauce was pronounced perfect.  And the Chef proclaimed himself very amused that Mr B calls me his Soo Chef – geddit….)
 
Off then post-haste (via a brief sojourn the wrong way on the metro) through the rain to Tara’s restaurant, where a very warm welcome awaited and the table of honour right next to the radiator.  Fab food, of course, and a doggie bag of potatoes for my breakfast.  Another late night…