L'Atelier de Valérie... cooking with Valérie

Lisa, my lovely sister-in-law (ma belle-soeur) recommended that I have some fun by taking a French cooking class. After surfing the Internet, I found L'Atelier de Valérie, which is a cooking school about 5 minutes away from ILA (my language school) The chef, Valérie Sabantino, is the owner and has a terrific website if you are interested. You can even take a virtual tour of her kitchen.

www.atelier-valerie.com

She teaches a wide variety of courses from entrées to plats du jour to les pâtisseries. The menus change and courses are offered on different days and at different times. It just so happened that today's course fit into my schedule, so I registered on-line for "En Practique - Les Grandes Ravioles aux mélanges savoureux". That roughly translates to learning one cooking technique for ravioli with variations for 3 delicious fillings. The first was a mixture of champignons et châtaignes avec jus de persil (mushrooms and chestnuts with a parsely sauce); the second was potiron et noisettes avec émulsion parmesan (pumpkin and hazlenuts with a parmesan sauce) and the last was saumon aux morilles avec beurre blanc au Noilly Prat (salmon and morels with a butter and Noilly Prat reduction) 

Here we are getting ready to begin. Our stations are clean and some of the ingredients are at this end of the counter. Our first task was to don aprons and wash our hands.

 

After that, I'm afraid that I didn't understand very much of what she said. Fortunately, I do know how to cook and I'm pretty good at following by example. Most of our time was spent chopping the various ingredients - shallots, onions, onions, garlic, chestnuts, hazlenuts, salmon, pumpkin etc. 

Some of the ingredients ready for cooking.

Valérie demonstrated how she cooks the mushroom mixture with the shallots, onions, garlic, butter (used liberally I might add) sunflower oil, spices etc. She cooked the first half and poured it into a strainer. Then she asked me to cook the last half while the rest of the class watched.

After the mixtures were prepared, we learned the technique to fill the ravioli. We used prepared pâtes (dough/pasta) - rice rounds and squares of gyoza. The rice rounds were used for the salmon mixture. By the time we were finished, they reminded me of potstickers. We had a chance to test the ones below which were very good with the onion, butter, Noilly Prat sauce. 

We used the gyoza squares to make triangles filled with either the mushroom mixture or the pumpkin and chestnut combo. While we were making the ravioli, Valérie was busy preparing the sauces. Once everything was finished, we divvied up the 3 different types of raviolis and sauces and put them into containers to take home. Here is our class (Valérie is second on the right).

Guess what was on the menu for dinner at our place tonight? I cooked the ravioli as instructed and reheated the sauces. Patricia thought all three ravioli were delicious and I have to agree.

I think I would have learned more about the ingredients and the cooking methods if I had understood the language better. Even so, it was a very pleasant way to spend an afternoon. Time permitting, I may take another class or two before I leave. Merci Valérie!