Week 2

"The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you've got to have a what-the-hell attitude." -Julia Child

I apologize for my lack of posting this week. In all honestly, it hasn't been too exciting in the kitchen. Although I know you're all very excited to see this...



I know you've been waiting to see that one. I'll make sure to get another one that includes how great my chefs pants make my butt look. (not). Yes, that is me, in my chef's whites in our kitchen classroom. And yes, I'm aware the hat makes me look like an elf. You can borrow it if you want. This week we made soups on Tuesday (French onion, Split Pea, Farmer's Vegetable Soup and Beef Consomme), preserved food on Wednesday (Duck Confit, Preserved Lemons, Pickled Vegetables and a dish called Branade with Salted Codfish) and today we made salads (Nicoise, a Macedoined Vegetable salad with a basil mayonnaise and tomato fondue, and a bitter green and herb salad). Today was the busiest day of them all, but I still managed to turn out some pretty good dishes. Here is a picture of my Nicoise salad:



Doesn't it look yummy? It was (I had it for lunch.) After all that work, the only injury I sustained this week was the minor loss of some arm hair due to an unfortunate singing incident that I didn't happen to notice until I got on the subway and thought, "Hmm, part of my arm hair appears to be missing and what is remaining looks a little funny...oohh, so that's what singed hair looks like." Let's just hope the same thing doesn't happen to my eyebrows. If you've ever seen my license picture, you know that is not a good look for me.

Since this week was relatively slow, I thought I would take you through a typical day for me at school:

I usually arrive in SoHo around 7:45/8 am after a train ride into Grand Central and a subway ride into downtown Manhattan. I usually go to Starbucks if I have some time to kill and get the paper or look over the recipes again for the day. Sometimes I go to the library at school to take out some books. (The library, by the way, is my personal heaven...it's all cookbooks and books on food writing, I could spend weeks in there reading all the books!) Around 8:10/8:15 I head over to school to get changed in the locker room. It's usually pretty busy by the time I get to the locker room, with women carefully putting on their uniforms: the jacket, the neckerchief, the hat, the pants, the shoes, etc and then gathering their notes and knifes and whatever else they'll need for the day. And it's all done while talking about how many ducks they'll have to debone that day or how much they love or hate a certain chef. This morning I heard a story about someone in an upper level class who decided to fry up a smaller fish found in the stomach of a larger fish they were supposed to be filleting and give it to the chef who promptly replied in a French accent (of course), "What the hell eez thees???"

After changing, I head up to the classroom, where I get my station ready. I grab my cutting board and safely secure it with a wet paper towel underneath so it doesn't slide around while I'm cutting something, then I get out all the equipment from my knife kit that I'll need that day and lay it out on a clean towel underneath my station. I grab a few towels, tuck one into my apron, and then consult the recipes on the index cards I carry with me for what I'll need for my mise en place (meaning "everything in place" in French, mise en place basically refers to all the prepwork needed before starting a recipe). With my partner, we grab all the ingredients we'll need for the day in metal bowls and bring them back to our station.

At 9 a.m. sharp Chef Rogers calls us to the front for attendance, everyone responding to their names with a "Here, Chef." At the end of attendance he greets us for the day and we all respond in unison, "Good morning, Chef." Then Chef Rogers will go through a powerpoint with our lesson for the day and demo the first recipe for us. The chef's station is equipped with an overhead camera that zooms in on whatever Chef is doing and projects it onto a screen so we can see everything Chef is doing from above the dish. After the demo, we're on our own to make the dish. Usually we'll do one or two in the morning, depending on what we're cooking that day and then we break for lunch around 12. At 12, our "family meal" is delivered, cooked by the upper level students who try to think of creative ways to use the scraps left over from the whole school. Sometimes its a success...sometimes it leaves you wondering what exactly it is your eating. For example about a week ago we had meatballs...I took two and they ended up being two different types of meat. Another day we were given a tray of every kind of meat you could carve out of a pig...I decided to pass on that one....I wasn't even 100% positive it was pig and it happened to be the day after Level 2 did organ meats, so it really could have been anything.

Depending on how many recipes we have to make that day, we usually reconvene after lunch around 12:30 or 12:45 and usually have another demo from Chef Rogers before beginning the last recipe of the day. After each recipe is done, we carefully plate it and bring it up to Chef Rogers or Chef Nick to taste. For things like the Hollandaise and Bernaise sauces, they don't taste them, but just check their consistencies. "I cannot eat all that booter, eet ees bad for my heart," Chef Rogers said. Some things though, like salad and cooked vegetables, they need to try to see if we've seasoned it correctly. We usually aren't given much open praise...I've learned that the rule in the kitchen is no criticism is equal to praise. Whenever we're done with our last dish, we clean up our stations and our tools and wait for chef to dismiss us. Then I head back to the locker room, where someone is usually complaining about a chef or how much they reek of sesame oil or how their uniform is covered in duck blood. It's all just a typical day..

Potato day tomorrow! I'm going to be stuffed with pommes frites, pommes anna, pommes dauphinois, pommes, pommes, and more pommes!