The tail end of a tenderloin is perfect for this dish. Here's why: it's a leanish, still tender cut, but imperfectly shaped and thus unusable in steak form. A 600 gram (1.3 pounds) tail end of tenderloin is our principal ingredient. We'll also want:

200g onion, finely diced
beef trimmings
2 tomatoes concassés
2 tsp tomato paste
200ml cream
50g beurre
an assload of sweet paprika
1 bouquet garni
2 garlic cloves, crushed
400ml brown veal stock
salt, pepper

By week two, we'd all figured out that the way to go was to trim and cut your meat first thing put it away in the fridge. This was often a bloody and/or messy proposition, particularly with duck and fish, and dealing with it at the beginning of class let you wash the cutting board for a clean slate before you started on the vegetables. So, then. Start with your tenderloin, and trim off any egregious fat. (The revelation with fat — animal, butter, or vegetable) — is that it helps release flavours during cooking—after which it's fairly useless. This is particularly true with animal fat and vegetable oil, so in the end classical cuisine doesn't need to be as greasy as we might fear. We usually cook meats in a mixture of butter for flavor and oil to lower smoking point, and then pour off excess oil before using the brownings in a sauce.) Then cut into sticks 1/2-inch square in cross-section and 3 inches long. Season well with salt, black pepper, and a liberal dose of paprika, store in refrigerator. Despite paprika looking exactly like cayenne, it's not spicy at all and deserves — nay, requires — a loose hand or spoon to get that punch of flavor.

Prep the vegetables: Tomatoes get blanched in boiling water for 5 seconds, peeled, sliced into sixths, seeded, and diced. Onion gets finely diced. Garlic cloves get peeled or crushed. Compared to the brunoise, this should be easy-peasy. Moreover, these are for the sauce, which gets strained, so you don't even have to try too hard to make this look pretty!

Warm up your veal stock and cream, each in a small pot. This is so that they won't drop the sauce's temperature by twenty degrees when added. Just keep it there, on the back of your stove on the lowest setting, at the back of your mind.

Now, let's take your meat trimmings and throw them over medium heat with some oil and butter. When they've released most of their natural fat, add the garlic, onion, bouquet garni and sweat until excess moisture is gone. Then add a pour (I warned you!) of paprika, perhaps two heaping tablespoons' worth, the fresh tomatoes, and the tomato paste. Cook until fresh tomato has collapsed.

Now, add the (warm!) veal stock and let this all reduce at a simmer, skimming off scum and grease as it comes to the surface, until it has the appropriate consistency. Sure, if demo ends in five minutes and your sauce is the consistency of lukewarm rain you can fire up the torch... but! A boil is violent; it breaks up fat globules and redistributes them in the sauce, which is both greasy-tasting and artery-greasing. A simmer lets the fat and other garbage rise slowly to the surface and stay there until you ladle them out.

So, simmer nicely for a while and then pour in the cream, and now we'll reduce it to sauce consistency. A sauce coats the back of a spoon. More specifically, the coating should have enough surface tension to maintain a convex bulge at the edge of the dip. Apparently, this is non-negotiable. Too thin, and not only is the taste diluated, but it's visually gross as it will run on a plate. Too thick, and if you've followed proportions for a normal-viscosity sauce it'll be way too salty and stick in your mouth. It took me until the end of week two to nail this down — not that I could always execute, but that I could recognize whether or not it was going to happen for me and apply one of an array of emergency fixes if necessary.

Only after the sauce is reducing, heat oil in a wide skillet over medium-high heat. Fry the beef quickly until just done (perhaps 3-4 minutes?), breaking up into separate batches if necessary to maintain a single layer in the pan.

If you're a lucky duck, your sauce will be finished just after the beef. Pass the sauce through a fine-meshed strainer, using the back of a ladle to mash out as much of the good stuff as possible. Fine-tune the flavor with salt and pepper.

Assemble rice, beef, and sauce on a plate and serve!