meg-made it to Le Cordon Bleu, Part Deux

I am going to try and keep this Le Cordon Bleu post a little shorter and less wordy than my first one, but in doing that, I realised that I therefore am going to need a Part Trois to this series!! 

So for my 30th Birthday last month my Husband gifted me a one day gourmet Fish & Shellfish cooking class at Le Cordon Bleu London. I had such a wonderful day and felt like I had finally found the learning environment that I was suited to, and have reevaluated my life long goals accordingly! 

I wanted to share some photos of what a professional kitchen looked like (I'd never seen one before) and some snapshots of my day. The Chefs can't be shown for privacy reason (apparently they have sold their souls to LCB) and so all the videos I took of Chef Eiric at work can't be shared unfortunately! 

But here's my round up of my course, and then Part 3 will be a recipe or two that has come from the course (stay tuned, it may take me a little while to get to that one!). 

We each had our own station and in our own fridge was our tray of fresh seafood. I say fresh, and I mean FRESH! The crab and the lobster were still moving, which was kind of hilarious because we all discovered this fact at the very same time, so there were A LOT of shrieks around the kitchen!

I love how organised and segmented everything is in a professional kitchen. And because we were there to learn skills and techniques for preparing seafood, we didn't have to chop any vegetables, they were all prepared for us already so we could focus our time on the Champagne Zabalone!! 

We made our own lunch, mussels, lots and lots of mussels!

And I had to take a photo of the size of saffron that Chef was using! It was hard to get a proper perspective shot showing just how big it was, but about the size of an A5 piece of paper (which, if you think about my usual half matchbox size costing about £5, that's a serious amount invested in saffron!!). 

I had to stop and photograph this one moment because it was when I really felt like cooking is really something I enjoy. I loved having four different things on the go at once, its kind of like those pesky interview questions "when have you demonstrated multi-tasking"..... right here!

And here is my poor little guy, post pot of boiling water, but I will say, he was delicious!

While we were doing one or two things, Chef Eiric produced about 8 different dishes and displayed them for us to drool over / emulate!

And so that night I tried my hand at the Lobster, and it was really darn good. Served with a Mango compote, it made me remember that summer might actually come again to England one day! 

After being a little bit of a geek and collecting my certificate...

....I couldn't help but purchase the Cuisine Foundations cookbook on my way through too! Apparently this book is part of the course curriculum for students, so I thought it would be an investment! I haven't had much time to go through it properly yet, but it is such a wonderful teaching tool that I can't wait explore and practice with. 

So that is just a little bit of a snapshot of my day at LCB. If you are passionate about cooking, I can't recommend Le Cordon Bleu enough for a special gourmet course or gift for someone you love. I am so grateful that in marrying my best friend, I am constantly able to live my dreams and when I haven't even uttered the words out loud, he knows how to make every dream of mine come true. Thank you so so much Pete. I love building dreams together.

Psst!! If you are looking for a little more meg-made, I'd LOVE for you to follow along!