Week #3

Finally got into the kitchen this week.

For basic cookery, all we did was peel a few vegetables and learned some cuts. However, I do wish that we could have more time in the kitchen. We keep running out of time because the Chef's lectures go way off on tangents--which then cuts into our kitchen time. But the Chef is thoughtful and wants to see us do well and will therefore provide us with attention as needed.

However, for Garde Manger, we got straight to work today. We prepared various cold sauces. I will post pics in a little bit. There are three people on my team and we did great.

I was really excited to finally get into the kitchen and see what I could do. I loved it.

I made the mayo, remoulade, and tangerine vinaigrette. The mayo about took my arm off! I have made mayo a few times at home by hand, but it never got as thick as I wanted. I just figured that the thiness was the trade-off for making it homeade. Well, I learned today that you have to beat the SHIZ out of it to make it truly thick. And the harder you beat the thing, the thicker it gets and thus the harder it is to beat. Its almost like its daring you to whip it harder--kinda like trying to run harder and harder into the wind. The more you do, the more difficult it gets.

The chef told us not to worry too much about presentation today since we were adjusting to the kitchen. However, we were able to at least make attempts on at least three of our 10 dishes.

So here is something I would hear a lot--"keep an eye on your knives, because they will disappear."

Well, you know what else disappears? Your mise en place! One of the guys on our team speaks Korean and his english is fair. But toward the end of completing everything today, he comes up to me a little frantic and asks where the bread was. When I finally realized what he was talking about, we realized that someone had taken a baguette from his mise en place.

Because all of use needed to prepare crostinis, and since every station had a baguetter, we could not identify the person who took it. Worse was the fact that there were no more baguettes to be found. AND WE STILL NEEDED TO MAKE CROSTINIS! The chef seemed to smirk when I told him--we're obviously not the first that this has happened to

Finally, I don't know if this is what it is like at other schools, but we really only have a few dishes that we could find to make a fair presentation. I don't know what I was expecting, but maybe SOME presentation dishwares. I had to scrounge hard for the ones that I found, but otherwise we had very little.

I realize that in a real kitchen there would probably be LESS dishwares available, so I won't complain.

All in all, it was a good week.