Three days with Jacques Pepin

and I'm walking around muttering to myself under my breath in a French accent, hopelessly attempting to recapture snippets of the surreal, fascinating, stream-of-consciousness chatter that comes out of the mouth of that remarkable man.

We've spent the last three days roasting chickens, scarfing duck, trimming asparagus, washing salad greens, snacking on pates and bread and cheese, mincing a million herbs, drinking wine, baking chocolate tarts, candying grapefruit peel, and generally throwing ourselves into the line of fire with Chef Pepin and his business partner/co-conspirator Jean Claude, serving 80 or so guests at a highly popular BU event called Chez Jacques.

The only bad thing about the last three days, the emotional climate of which has varied from uneasy calm to mind-numbing terror, is that I've been battling a loathesome viral throat infection or cold or something horrid like that, making the tasting of Chef Pepin's excellent food sort of difficult. I'm heading off to a wedding in New Orleans tomorrow morning, and I really am supposed to be sleeping this very minute--I have a feeling the twelve varieties of blue cheese I just sampled at my recent cheese class are hindering that process. I did have to jot down a brief note to myself on the blog, though, one that I'll hopefully return to in a few days:

Roast chicken+boiled potatoes+Boston lettuce salad+potato-leek soup+asparagus=totally sublime and deceptively simple.

And: after last night in the kitchen, OH MY GOD BUT I CAN'T WAIT TO GET BACK TO THE BOOKS.