Paris - Part Two

Note: There is a mysterious white space at the top of this post and I have no idea why. Curious.

Ah, procrastination...I know thee well. Thanks to the holidays, travel, and general uselessness on my part, I am just now getting to posting the second set of Paris pictures. With a little luck and a lot of shame, I should be able to get the London ones up with a bit less lag. One of the pleasant surprises of Paris was the day we spent at Versailles. I had almost no expectation for it (it was a lady's choice) but found myself quite entranced, particularly with the gardens. It's an hour or so train ride out of Paris, in a small town that grew up around the palace.

I mentioned when visiting Napoleon's tomb that the French nobles had it coming. There is no clearer evidence of this than the palace at Versailles. The walls are covered in marble or rich wallpapers, and everything you can imagine to gild is gilded. We had a fascinating room by room guide of it, which helped put each over the top room into perspective.

The French must have spent a lot of time looking at the ceiling (if you know what I mean, wink wink, nudge nudge.) Every one of the public rooms had elaborate scenes painted in panels that were framed by gilded base relief carvings. There were so many amazing details here that it really was a marvel. Not only does this shot show one pissed off cherub, but it also has a series of empty golden helmets lining the crown molding, awaiting being filled by future French war heroes. Neat! And a little creepy.

Everything for the French royalty involved public ceremony. Observe the ceremonial bed. The king would wake in his private bedroom, then come to his public bedroom, where lucky nobles would get to help 'wake' and prepare him for his day. Mary and I would do very poorly in this ceremony. Our niece plays a similar game with her Bubba, and when we attempted it we proved too adept at pretending to be asleep and freaked her out a little. Alas, but for that we could be kings.

As gorgeous as the inside of Versailles was, the real stunner for me was the gardens. Most of the rooms had views overlooking the many elaborate plantings and ponds (and puddles, sadly.) The palace sits right on the edge of the town, so from the front appears surrounded by civilization, but from within seems to be nestled into nature. It's pretty amazing to see.

The largest and most elaborate series of gardens was off the back of the building, overlooked by the public rooms. This picture gives a sense of the layout and scale. Behind the photographer (me) is a large courtyard with a shallow pool filled with fountains and scultures. Down the first bank is another large fountain, flanked by two smaller pools and several smaller fountains. In the middle distance you can see a long, rectangle of lawn stretching back. What appears to be woods on either side of that is, in fact, a series of square grottoes, each with elaborate plantings and garden structures. At the far end of that lawn is the Apollo fountain. Stretching back into the distance from there is the cruciform Grand Canal, where the royals would import gondolas from Venice for elaborate parties. The woods on either side of these were filled with more rustic structures, for when the royals had to get away from their hectic lives of pretending to wake up and staring at ceilings.

King Louis loved fountains, and Versailles reflects this. Even scenes that you might not think to immortalize in bronze can be found shooting water out of every orifice. Take, for example, this pair of scenes from the hunt. Particularly inspiring is the fact that the sculptor did not let the fact that he had never seen a bear or mountain lion stop him from creating a masterpiece.

The French are masters of turning everyday things into works of art. Observe the shrub. Throughout Paris, every shrub was seen as an opportunity to express ones inner Picasso. Nowhere was this more evident than in at Versailles. It was like walking through a Dr. Seuss book, in the best possible way.

We spent some time wandering through the grottoes mentioned above, though the rain and cold kept us from doing as much as I would have liked. Of all the ones we walked through, this grotto was probably our favorite (even though it was gated off and we could only look in from outside. Not only does it have the coolest sculpture/fountain around, but it also has the neat arbor all around it and shrubs shaped to look like vases. Well done, France.

The Apollo fountain was the biggest one there, which is sensible because it was modeled after King Louis (the Sun King.) It was visible from most places in the garden and the house, and thus was the only fountain that was always running. The others were turned as the king approached and then off again once he lost sight of them. This lead Mary and I on wild flights of fancy, imagining royal stalkers whose job it was to figure out when he was approaching a fountain and notify the engineers to turn them on. Best job ever. Our day at Versailles was quite amazing, but sadly a cold and rainy one. I can definitely see us returning on a sunny day, and just spending all our time in the gardens where hopefully the crowds are a bit lessened. We didn't get to see the replica of the rural village that Marie Antoinette had built to remind her of home, and that's an omission that just can't stand.

Back from Versailles, we spent the rest of the afternoon in the Orsay Museum. It is housed in an old train station, and even minus the art is a striking place to visit.

The Orsay houses art from an interesting transitional time. It has both very classical works and more modernist ones. With the guidance of our book, we saw art move from one period to the other, which made art history come alive in a way it hasn't for us in the past. There were also some pieces that were just interesting on their own, like this one of a sculptor shown working on a very classical sculpture of a gladiator.

Despite our hotel being a few blocks from the Eiffel Tower, we only managed to get up to it on the last night we were there. We took the elevator instead of the stairs, since we had walked a ton already that day. The tower sits at the head of the Champs du Mars, at the end of which is the Escola Militar. These huge green spaces really were very special, and I could definitely see us picnicking on the champs in the summer and people watching. Along with the millions of other sneaking into our postcard dreams.

Another artsy shot of the tower. At night it is quite brightly lit, and every so often a show is given where colored lights chase up and down and around the tower. It is tacky fun for the whole family; the French must hate it.

Even topiary has its dark side. These shrubs outside of Notre Dame are proof that shaping can't improve every bush.

Our last set of stairs in Paris! You can climb the towers of Notre Dame and get a gargoyle's eye view of the city. Looking down in the courtyard in front of the cathedral, you can see the lighter colored stone which indicates where the walls of the old buildings and roads used to lie. We think that the spire in the distance is St. Chappelle, but we could be lying.

The gallery midway up the Notre Dame climb puts you at the same level as the famous Gargoyles. I am a total sucker for them, and took a zillion pictures. The 'most photographed gargoyle in the world' was neat, but there were so many other ones that caught our eyes as well.

Have I mentioned that I love signs? Because I love signs. Take, for example, these fire exit indicators. They are so action packed! If you could distill a Michael Bay movie into one frame, I believe it would be one of these.

Overall, we had a fantastic visit to Paris. We loved the sights, the food, the pastries (mmm....the pastries) and the overall environment. We will definitely visit again. We may even make another half-hearted effort at learning French.

Paris - Part One

Looking back at the writeup of the Italy trip, I see that I managed to get that posted a week after returning and am quite impressed. For the latest trip to Paris and London, we took about twice as many pictures -- seven hundred and change -- almost as many as our memory card can hold. That's a lot of pictures to post and talk about, so I am going to break it up into parts and post them over time. As we did with previous trips like this, we planned our first day to be lots of walking so that we could fall into bed at 8:00 pm and reset our body clocks to the local time. In service of this, we planned a walk through the oldest part of the city and through several churches in that area. First we had to get there. The Metro stop closest to our hotel was disrupted because of some protesting, so we walked to the next one. Sadly, this one was packed with everyone else avoiding the closer one, and was so crowded with people that a confusing situation was made even more so. The fact that the ticket machines were only in French didn't help. Thankfully walking the next station resolved the issue, since it was much less busy and we didn't feel rushed to vacate the machine. We managed to figure out that the little metal bumper dealie at the base of the screen was actually a roller for moving the cursor. Very odd. Sort of a silver banana instead of a mouse.

The walk started at and around Notre Dame which was huge and gothic and impressive. As is typical of us, silly details tended to catch our eye more than the larger picture. The exposed buttresses on the side were both impressive to see and fun to say. Buttress! It's like female butter! We also enjoyed picking out odd sections from the statuary on the face of the building. Of particular interest were the statues of St. Dennis with his head on a platter in his hands and another of a dude who, for no reason we could gather, was standing on a sheep.

We tended to find some of the smaller, out of the way sites to be more enjoyable than the more popular ones. A good example of this was St. Chappelle. This is a church that was built somewhat in the courtyard of another building, but that had used buttresses (hee!) to make the walls in the chapel almost entirely stained glass. It was an amazing effect to see so many floor to ceiling windows in such bright colors, and we thankfully got a rare burst of sunlight to make it all the more special.

An unfortunate sight on our first day was finding things we wanted to see closed. This happened at two separate parks as well as a memorial to the Jews deported in world war two. I suppose that on a rainy off season Saturday we should have expected as much, but it still became an irritating pattern. Thankfully, after day one it passed.

Paris, like Rome (and London for that matter) straddles a river. Unlike the Tiber, however, the Seine (which I never really figured out how to pronounce, so I just mumbled something different every time) is actually displayed and used instead of ignored. There are dinner cruises, parks that overlook it, and pricey real estate lining it. It also was a very handy tool for figuring out where things were relative to each other.

A site that we enjoyed much more than we expected was the Rodin museum. Going in, we knew little of Rodin other than The Thinker. Seeing a large grouping of his work and reading about each in our guidebook really made it interesting. We also are suckers for gorgeous old buildings and gardens like the mansion he lived in, where the museum is set.

There were several Rodin sculptures that really caught our fancy, but none as much as the Gates of Hell. This was a huge set of doors carved with scenes from Dante's Inferno. It was an enormous piece of work, yet so full of details and personality. We were quite taken.

A theme that began to develop on day two was how much the French royalty loved the French royalty. By the end of the trip I had decided that they pretty much had it coming with the revolution. The beginning of this revelation was Napoleon's Tomb at Les Invalides (yes, I know that Napoleon came after the revolution.) The man was not modest. From the gilded dome and spire to the fourteen nested coffins surrounded by angels and scenes of Napoleon being awesome while dressed as an ancient Greek, the man knew how to brag -- even from the grave. Mary and I pointed out all the great ideas we were getting for each other's memorials, and determined which family members we would put in each of the many alcoves and chapels that Napoleon had put his relatives in.

One thing we really liked about Paris was that despite being ancient and very crowded, it still had a lot of green space set aside. Here is Place Vosges, which was a square that one of the Louises had created so he could be surrounded by the right kind of people. They so had it coming. It was a lovely park surrounded by cute shops and cafes. I can definitely imagine returning to Paris during the much busier summer season and spending our time picnicking in parks and people watching in cafes.

Another interesting theme from Paris was the juxtaposition of very modern elements with very traditional ones. In this case, it's the famed (and sometimes loathed) glass pyramids of the Louvre. We really liked them, and the inverted one in the underground entry area was particularly cool. Throughout the visit, we would see modern art installations in parks or at sites that had a much more classical feel. We saw the usual suspects in our visit, but it was a few less famous (but I am sure well known by those more cultured than us) works that we preferred. The Raft of the Medusa is a scene of despair and madness as the remaining crew of a sunken ship fight for life adrift on choppy waters. How can some smiling chick compare to that?

Paris was home to the impressionist movement, which neither of us cares for that much. Still, how could we not go to see the water lilies in the space they were painted for? Especially because it was on our way and covered by our museum pass? We ended up enjoying these quite a bit, and seeing them in person does make a huge difference. The scale is amazing (some were six feet by twenty or thirty feet.) In this case it was the lack of detail that was interesting. Being able to move in and see the brush strokes, then step back and see the images that they formed was very cool.

More recurring themes! This time, cramped stairwells. We ended up climbing up the inside of four different structures on the trip, the first being the Arc d' Triumph shown here.

The Arc grants some amazing views if you can stomach the many steps to get to the top. From here you could see the layout of the city and find that it actually had some method to its madness. Here we are looking down the Champs Elysee, which is the Magnificent Mile of Paris. This was a day of massive amounts of walking for us and in the distance, behind the partially constructed Ferris Wheel (take that, Eiffel!) you can see the Louvre where our trek had begun.

A rare picture with both of us! Rare for a reason, as I still haven't mastered the outstretched arm self photo. On top of this one with us blocking the arc, I also have several of us with the Eiffel Tower sticking out of each of our heads.

Another great, out of the way sight is the Sacre Coeur. It sits on a rare hill in the Monmarte district, and is worth the climb. The exterior is a striking white, with byzantine domes. It reminded us a lot of St. Mark's in Venice. It is also in a seedier part of town, so the normal vendors of light-up plastic Eiffel Towers were much more aggressive, and were joined by men selling beer. From a six pack. In a brown bag. Still, we enjoyed the church and found a fun restaurant nearby where we got excellent desserts and wine.

The Sacre Coeur was the second climb we did and it afforded some nice, nighttime views of the city. Part of the climb took us up over rooftops of various parts of the church and gave us some up close time with gargoyles and the domes themselves, which we quite enjoyed.

Finally, no trip would be complete without some entertaining miscellany that caught my eye. As great as the Metro system was (once we figured out the ticketing machines) I have to admit that the best part for me was the signage. There were several that I didn't get good shots of (a bunny getting his hand trapped in the door, what looked like the silhouette of Siamese twins,) but this was probably my favorite. It's so detailed! So lifelike! You can easily imagine the poor man flailing as he falls to his death. Also, it is very reminiscent of the credits for Mad Men, which both Mary and I love. Neat!

CSA Week 8

I somehow seem to have gotten my numbering off on these posts. We are in week eight now, but the last post was on week six. I suspect that my catchup should have covered an extra delivery, but let's let sleeping dogs lie, shall we?

More Fennel this week. This time it had more bulb and a little less frond. We made a roasted pork tenderloin with apples and fennel with it, and it was absolutely delicious.

Portobello Mushrooms went into a pasta.

Hey look, it's more potatoes! We used a bunch in a Rosti and are down to just under one bag. Until this week's share comes.

Apparently green beans like the cold weather. We have been getting a ton of them. We made a bean and bacon salad for thanksgiving one year, I think it's time to bust that bad boy out.

At this point in the season, what is left to be said about zucchini?

A small bunch of parsley. For a change, it's small enough that we might reasonably be able to use it.

We plan on stacking these carrots up with last weeks carrots and building a tower to the moon.

Having grown weary of making cucumber and feta salads, I decided to try making a sorbet with these cucumbers. My plan was to aim for a Cucumber Mojito Sorbet, and I based it off a recipe I found online. I swapped out the vanilla in the simple syrup for mint from the rooftop deck, but found that after I mixed it into to cucumber puree, the cucumber flavor was still surprisingly dominant. I ended up picking some more mint and pureeing it into the mixture. This lead to a nice balance of flavors, and flecked the sorbet with tiny bits of dark green. The sorbet has a surprising melon flavor, and is really growing on me. I can definitely see making it again (maybe next week, if we get even more cucumbers.)

These oblong onions appear to be the only kind we are getting this year. Either that, or the normal ones are delayed along with the corn and tomatoes because of the screwy weather.

CSA Week 6

Back on schedule!

The big kitchen excitement from last week was my attempt to make a sourdough starter. I was following the method outlined in The Bread Baker's Apprentice, which involves multiple days of feeding and culling the starter, followed by turning it into a more standard starter (called a 'barm'.) Sadly, this didn't go so well. I made it about halfway through the process (just about to barm) and decided that I really wasn't getting any rise at all. I looked online and got some tips to help with the situation, so I started the process again. This time I rode it out all the way to the barm stage, but when that was supposed to have doubled in four hours but showed no rise in eight, I threw in the towel. Instead I made french bread which was more delicious than I remembered. Take that, sourdough!

We are firmly in summer now (despite the lingering cold) which means we are getting hardier fare. Still no corn or tomatoes, but we'll hoping for a good season (and raiding the farmer's market.)

We got our first potatoes of the year. It feels a bit early for these, and if we end up with more than ten weeks in a row of getting potatoes then we are in real trouble. These are going into a roasted potato salad that we like.

Two huge bulbs of garlic. I mean, really huge.

More onions.

A very small head of lettuce. After the spring's onslaught, we took a bit of a break from salads, so this guy ended up being a nice, fresh reminder of spring.

Chives will get snuck into pretty much every place we can think to. We always find it a challenge to get through them before they go bad.

This year seems to be the year of Green beans and dill. We made a recipe with the last share's beans using dill and goat cheese, and plan to use this one to make an orzo, dill, and fennel salad.

Portobello mushrooms are not an acceptable substitute for meat no matter what the vegetarians say, but they are tasty marinated and grilled.

And so our nemesis carrots slip into the house silently. Again, if we get two pounds a week for ten weeks we are in trouble.

Two small bulbs of fennel with hugely long fronds. These are slated for the bean and orzo salad. Fennel is an odd duck. It has such a strong scent when I cut it, but it seems to disappear into most dishes we put it in. I do like it, but it befuddles me so.

CSA Catchup

With the excitement over the bathroom remodel and pastry camp (combined with my general laziness) I have fallen behind on CSA posts. Let's remedy that, shall we?

Week four to me marked the end of spring produce. We got more lettuces (salads, natch), more berries, and more scapes. The scapes were very long lasting, which is good because we are pretty slow to use them. The last of them are actually going into a stir fry for lunch today. We also started getting hearty greens in week 4, which we actually quite enjoy. These ended up in a pasta dish, though we have many uses for them. The zucchini flow continued unabated as well, and we tried some muffins with a cinnamon topping with some of this batch.

Week five brought more summer produce our way. Zucchini was used as a vegetable, as well as turned into zucchini bread. Cabbage is usually a tough one for us, because most recipes call for at most half a head, and make many many (many) servings. We made a slaw and soup with this head, though half the soup went straight to the freezer. We were super excited to see the first beets of the season. We roasted them and tossed them with feta and onions as we always do, because it's a recipe that never lets us down. It was wonderful again this time. We actually had a similar salad that a friend made for a cookout that put the beets and (in this case) goat cheese over baby spinach, and it was a great combination. We'll try that later in the season when we get arugula, since it would probably translate well. This week also signaled the end of the berries. Alas, poor berries, we hardly knew ye. We love the CSA fruit, since it's usually so perfectly ripe and sweet, but the season can't last forever.

By week six, we'd usually be nearing tomato season. Sadly, this has been a very cold summer, so the summer crops (corn, tomatoes) have been slow growing. We fear that this also means they will be smaller and appear is less quantity, and for that we weep. Tomatoes and corn are two of our favorite produce items, so it's sad that we may see less of them this year. Oh well, at least we didn't get grape leaves. We oddly saw a decline in zucchini this week. It seems a bit early for it to peter out, so I suspect that it's just saving it's energy for a serious onslaught next week. Cucumbers, on the other hand, are coming on strong. One a week is a pretty brisk pace for us, so getting two this week will present a challenge. They'll likely get tossed with feta and cherry tomatoes and served as a side. As always, we keep meaning to bring celery as snacks to work, but fail to do so. The broccoli is going into a stir fry (the great clearninghouse of vegetables) and the basil onto a pizza we are making for dinner tonight. Chard, finally, went into a skillet meal with onions and parsley (which also lasted an impressively long time) with eggs and asiago cheese. It was delicious and woudl actually make us seek out chard again to make it.

The End of the Road

The bathroom is officially completed! As usual, several steps took much longer than we had hoped. The grouting and sealing went well, and there were no surprises there. Each coat of sealant in small areas like this takes less time to apply than to clean up from. A day needs to pass in between coats, and we were aiming for three coats. Luckily, this is a task custom made for weeknights after work. Our first unexpected roadblock was with the light fixture. When we took down the old one, we found that there was no junction box behind it. Putting in a junction box isn't usually too hard, so we didn't think this would be much of an issue. Oh, little did we know. When I started looking seriously at planning the junction box installation, I realized that with the location of studs and pipes it was going to be more off center than expected (and a bit of a challenge to put in.) When we held up our light to the actual location it be in, we found that it was too wide and would be hitting the wall on one side. Back to the drawing board (or lighting store, as the case may be.) It took us a week to find a light we liked, and since that was in a catalog it took another week for delivery. It's these little extra bits that are killer to projects and really drag them out. We had tried to be good about getting everything in advance but alas, twas not to be.

While waiting for the light I put in the junction box. For various boring technical reasons, this was quite difficult, but after creating several jigs and after several attempts, I got it where I wanted it. The light arrived and looked great in the space, so at least there's a happy ending. The light fiasco delayed our painting of the walls, because we needed to patch around the new junction box but I wanted to actually have the light to verify that it was good where it was. I had images of having to redo the box and the patching around it dancing through my head, but luckily those didn't come to fruition. With the patching done, we painted and headed into the home stretch of what we hoped would be simple installations. First up was the vanity and sink. Plumbing projects require saints' patience, and since I know this I always go in planning on having to make several trips to the store. My goal this time was to only have to do three, and I met (but didn't exceed) that goal. Our water shutoffs are very odd sizes, and it took two Home Depot trips and a trip to the real plumbing store (who I really should have just started with) before I got the right bits. With those in hand, I plumbed the various bits together (this was in the afternoons after pastry camp) and got the vanity in place and the sink secured. Other than a drip from a bad shutoff valve (which required a shockingly expensive plumber visit) it went well and everything worked on the first try.

From here on out it was smooth sailing -- The toilet went in without a hitch, the last trim pieces went up cleanly, and all of the towel bars and whatnot fit like a dream. We are very happy with how the bathroom turned out, and generally happy with how the renovation went. We certainly would have preferred fewer plumbing trips and not to have the light issues, but in the end nothing huge and irreversible went wrong, and what else can one really ask for?

Pastry Camp - Day Five

Before we get into the last day of pastry camp, I have to do a follow up on the macarons. After tasting the demo ones straight from the fridge, I had reported them good, not great, and the earl grey flavor to be very mild. Allowed to mellow at room temperature for a day, however, the ones I brought home were pretty spectacular. Now that I have sampled these, I may actually embrace the madness and attempt them at home.

On to day five! Before class I snuck into my office and left a care package for the folks there. We had a lot of pate d fruit for just Mary and I, as well as a ton of macarons. I left some of both of those for the guys, and also some of the nougatine crisp which was a bit too bitter for Mary (though I really like it's sharp taste.)

Out of the first demo, we got going on making guimauve (pronounced gee-mowve, but you can call them marhmallows) so that they would have time to set. When she got to the point of pouring them into trays to set during the demo, she mentioned that if we wanted to we could pipe them into peeps by whipping them a little longer. Exactly one person in class got excited -- luckily you are reading his blog.

Creating the marshmallow was a pretty similar to creating the italian meringue that we prepared as part of the macaron dough, but we whipped it slightly longer to get it to the proper texture. Since my partner wanted to take some actual marshmallows home, we pulled them at the proper texture for pouring and poured half into the prepared tray. After settings these got cut into cubes and dusted with corn starch and powdered sugar.

I let the other half of the mixture cool in a piping bag, periodically testing it to see if it was firm enough to hold its shape once piped. It took a long time for it to get to the point where it could, and left a trail of sad puddles where piped peeps had collapsed. Sadly it held this temperature for shockingly short time, and I was left with just one ok peep. Still, it had been an experiment, and since Mary doesn't care for marshmallows much it wasn't much of a loss to only have one success. If I do these again (and really, why wouldn't I?) then I will whip until the dough holds it's shape and then pipe more quickly. Hopefully keeping them whipping until they get to the right place will let them keep that pipability a little longer next time.

Next up was making our warm chocolate cakes. These are the plated dessert where you have a lovely chocolate cake and then cut in to find that it's totally undercooked. Have I sold you yet? The chef told the story of their creation. A junior chef undercooked the cakes for a large event by accident and the guests loved them. While I know a lot of folks who love these, they are just too richly chocolate for me. The mix was pretty straightforward, though once we baked them we got to make fun chocolate swirls for them. We served them plated with a scoop of the hazelnut ice cream from the previous day's demo and the chocolate swirls. I have to say, the best part was the hazlenut ice cream, which had a wonderful toastiness to it that just stole my heart. I brought home two (frozen) cakes to make later, and I will probably cook them almost all the way set when I make them, to help offset the richness.

We followed the cakes with lollipops. The chef had all sorts of flavorings, but when she used the lime in the demo the kitchen was filled with such a true fresh lime flavor that we just had to go with that. We died our pops green (though I threatened to make them red to through folks off kilter) and then used a neat trigger-action funnel to pipe them onto a pan. This was another recipe that made a ton, so I brought a lot home. Since each group only made one flavor/color, we did some horse trading at the end to make sure everyone got to bring home a variety. It is interesting to compare the caramel from yesterday with the lollipops from today, because even though the lollipops were cooked to a much higher temperature, the sugar didn't brown at all. It's amazing how much difference the amount of liquid you add can make.

Our last two tidbits where cutting and wrapping our chocolate caramels from the day before (again with some trading so that everyone got a mix of the chocolate and the plain) and brulee our creme brulees. The chocolate caramels were actually much tastier than I expected, but I was still happy to have ended up with more of the regular kind. I am a real sucker for caramels, and Mary prefers them as well. The brulee was fun, but fairly straightforward. At this point I was pretty wasted from all the tastings we had done, so I only ate about half of it. It was a little less set than those I have had in the past, but surprisingly light. The passion fruit puree that we added really brought down the richness, though it was still a lot of flavor. Overall this week has been pretty amazing. I have learned a lot of neat recipes, and better understand why they do the things they do. I am excited to experiment with some of the techniques I picked up, and to repeat some of the things that I would never have tried on my own otherwise. It was a great experience, and I am very happy that I did it. I'd suggest the week to anyone with the time and inclination, and will likely look into some of the other classes (bread baking, I'm looking at you.)