Medaillons de veau Duroc and chicken casserole

I have to warn vegetarians. The following post is not exactly meant for you (for your eyes as well as your mind). The last two days we have been preparing mostly meat: yesterday steak and avocado with vegetable-gambas filling and today chicken. For both dishes we needed to cook first the stocking which takes already a couple of hours. But it's a good way to use all the rests (bones, all ugly parts of vegetables etc). The main thing with the stock is to use first cold water, bring it to boiling and then regulate the heating.

To cook the steak we used clarified butter. Why do you have to use clarified butter? So that butter wouldn't burn. The butter we get from the supermarket can be heated on a pan only to 80 degrees. But clarified butter can be heated to 120 degrees. To clarify butter you need to melt it on a small fire and clean it from all the dirty stuff that comes on the surface. And of course olive oil that I have been using to cook steaks was completely banned. After all, it's French traditional cooking class, not Weight Watchers meeting. With the steak we prepared "turned potatoes". According to chef, I was the champion of these potatoes :). It was actually pretty complicated to make them. Basically you try to make the potato look like thin egg. So we didn't just peel it. It was more like sculpting potatoes. I don't understand why chef always says that in the kitchen you can use everything, you don't have to through away anything. In reality I have never seen so many food thrown away. Must be especially difficult for my classmates who work as missionaries and see a lot of poverty. Anyway, there were a lot of other stuff in this recipe but I won't go any more into detail.
In the evening I went to a cinema. The great thing about Paris is that after a film you can sometimes meet the director or actors. So that the film becomes almost a reality. At least this was the case yesterday. The title of the film was Invisibles. It was a French-Israeli film about two women who were raped by the same serial rapist in the 1970s. So not exactly a fun topic. And what turned out in the end was that the director of the film was actually raped by the same serial rapist. Before she had been making only documentaries and this was her first fiction movie. Actually even in the film Invisibles she had mixed documentary and fiction, so there were segments of interviews with the real women who were raped. The surprising thing was that in the audience most of the women who asked afterwards questions mentioned that they have also been raped. Or actually not so surprising, when you look at the statistics: 1 of every 5 woman is raped or somebody has tried to rape her. Mostly by somebody that she knows. So actually the most dangerous places are not parks and streets after midnight but our own homes.
But back to cooking. Today we focused mainly on chicken. As you can see from this picture we started from the very beginning.

Actually it wasn't so horrible. Ok, I prefer not to look at the eyes of the bird or the animal I am about to eat, put at least his body will be honored with a tasteful plate :). If yesterdays dish I won't probably be repeating many times, then todays chicken could become one of my favorites. Everything turned out just perfect. If we don't pay attention to the rice tower that collapsed just 1 minute before I could take the photo.

So what's the main tip about chicken? When you cook a peace of chicken on a pan, you should always put the side with the skin first and not overcook it. Otherwise it will be dry like in the canteen of the Committee of the Regions (where there is no skin at all).
Bon appetit!