The fun started Friday afternoon, with my weekly riding lesson. Friday's was a continuation of the gloriously summer-like weather we had been enjoying all week, and my spirits were further boosted when I discovered we would be doing obstacle (jumping) rather than dressage. I rode Quadrille as usual and she was particularly well-behaved.
She can be a little spooky around jumps and also if someone approaches the arean, but in general she's pretty honest, and as long as I'm no-nonsense with her when she starts to spook, she straightens up right away. Unfortunately we didn't get to jump very high (and for me not very mant times, because some of the others riders had some trouble and thus took many attempts to get it right). For the exercise, Béa (the isntructor) set up a very narrow obstacle with the usual posts on each side, and then two bars on each side of the jump, creating a little tunnel. She then proceeded to remove first the side bars, then the jump posts, leaving only a 3-foot wide box as the jump. The goal of the exercise of course was to work on our precision and on jumping the center of the obstacle.
After my lesson and some serious spring cleaning of my room, I headed to Candice and Laurie's for some sangria and quesadillas! Normally I wouldn't eat or drink any alcohol before practice, but I knew that Friday night's practice was actually... a surprise birthday party for Gaëtan! His family arranged it and asked us to help with the surprise. We arrived 9pm as usual and were throwing around while Gaëtan explained he would be leading the warm-up before the drills and scrimmage. At 9:15, right as he was about to start the warm-up, his family and more friends burst through the doors, bearing a considerable spread of food and drink. He was thoroughly surpsied! We sang Happy Birthday, chatted, chowed down on the delicious food and eventually played a short scrimmage, with Gaëtan's grandfather pulling the disc for the first point (pretty adorable). The surprise was a great success!
Birthday toast!
Marion, Gaëtan, and Franzi
Unfortunately we were missing a significant chunk of the team for the liuttle party on Friday night because they were still on the road back from the national championship of university Ultimate. Alex (team coach), Gaël, Lucie, Clémentine, Colin, TéTé, Alex and Réné finished second out of 16 teams at the two-day tournament in Nantes. Nantes is in the west of France and so the drive back took them between 8 and 9 hours (they arrived at around 2:30am on Friday night/Saturday morning).
The glorious weather continued through Saturday, and Colin and I decided to take advantage of it by having a late picnic lunch at the parc de la Gare d'eau by the bank of the Doubs river. We expected there to be a huge crowd, but there weren't very many people at all. It was probably the hefty wind that deterred them, although in the sunshine it wasn't cold or unpleasant at all. Although we both had slept-in quite late, we couldn't resist an afternoon nap in the sun...
Afterward Colin went to get his hair cut and I did a little window shopping for spring shoes (currently I've been switching between two pairs of boots, but with the warm weather this week I realized exactly how impractical they will be once it gets just a little warmer). Then Colin drove me to my macaron workshop! It was held at a culinary institute located in École Valentin, a suburb of Besançon. There were 8 of us (all women, mostly in their 30s I would guess) with the chef and his two assistants. We made passion fruit-chocolate ganache macarons. The class was scheduled to last only an hour and 15 minutes, but ended up taking nearly 2 hours.
We first made the passion fruit-chocolate ganache filling, then put it in the refrigerator to set while we made the meringue cookies. This was one of the parts of the lesson which surprised me most : Parisian macarons (the type most people are familiar with) are always an almond-flavored cookie with a flavored filling. The cookies are colored to correspond with the flavor of the filling, but there isn't actually any flavoring in the cookie itself. For example, with ours, you would guess that the cookie is passion fruit-flavored and the ganache is chocolate. But in fact the ganache is chocolate and passion fruit-flavored, and the cookie is just almond. The rest is just in your head!
Unfortunately I wasn't able to take pictures during the class, but they did give each of us a copy of the recipe and I took detailed notes. I'm pretty confident I'll be able to reproduce it once I get home, but I don't think I will attempt them until then because it would take forever to bake the cookies in the tiny oven in our apartment, plus it would be easier to make the meringue with a Cuisinart rather than my hand-mixer). For me, the most complicated part seemed to be getting the egg whites "peaked" to just the right level at the same time the sugar mixture reaches 118 degrees Celsius. I can imagine lots of egg whites being sacrificed in my first few attempts... But it was really neat to have everything demonstrated for us... hopefully that will make it easier when I try to make my own macarons without a master chef and his professional-grade tools to help me!
Saturday night was another social one: I went out with big group from the Ultimate team for Saint Patrick's Day! Lots of the bars in Besançon were giving out these ridiculous hats if you bought 2 or more pints of Guinnes and our group managed to acquire a couple:
Then Sunday (I know this entry is getting long, I promise I'm almost finished), the heavy wind which started Saturday afternoon and worsened that night turned into rain. I did some shopping for dinner (more on that in a second) at the few markets which are open on Sunday, then proceeded to bake cookies to give Steph for her birthday. I was so proud of myself, baking them Sunday afternoon so they would be ready when she and Charly got back from visiting their families that night, and before her birthday on Monday. Except it turns out that her birthday was last Tuesday! I had put the wrong date in my Google Calendar and was entirely convinced her birthday was the 19th! She was still happy to get the cookies though. After a quick run (quick because I felt really good and did the loop which usually takes me 55 minutes in 47), I got to work on dinner. Blanquette de veau à la vanille et nouilles (lamb in a white vanilla sauce over noodles) was the recipe I picked out to attempt this weekend, and Colin was brave enough to accept my invitation to dinner.
Whenever I attempt a new French recipe, it always takes much longer than I anticipate, and this time was no exception. It wasn't the hour and 30 minutes that the meat cooked slowly with vegetables and herbs, but the preparation of the sauce after which took a long time. But Colin was really patient, and helped me juggle the 5 pots and pans I was using to simultaneously cook part of the meal and at the same time and keep the rest hot. The sauce wasn't quite as thick as it was supposed to be (or at least as thick as I would have wanted) but despite that the dish was delicious! We used a stalk of vanilla which Colin's friend David brought back from Madagascar (and Colin gave me to use) and I'm sure that was part of the reason the vanilla flavor was so strong and so good. Definitely saving this recipe!
This picture is of Colin's seconds - I forgot to take a picture the first time around!
So blanquette de veau over tagliatelles, sautéed fresh peas in the pod, some 18-month aged comté and a Saint-Félicien for the cheese course, and chocolate oatmeal cookies for dessert... a successful Sunday evening meal. I crashed pretty hard that night, which I'm sure was in no small part due to the intense run that afternoon. I was thoroughly pleased though -- I couldn't have asked for a better weekend!
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