After proving my skill in quartering a chicken, filleting a fish, cooking a creme anglaise without curdling it and successfully hand whipping whipped cream and piping it into 6 rosettes and 6 eclair shapes, I am officially a Level 3 student. It's going by way too fast! In just 3 short weeks I'll be taking my midterm practical exam. Besides all the testing, Friday was an excellent day because we managed to convince Chef Rogers to meet us at the bar that everyone usually goes to after school to celebrate our last day with him in Level 2. Yes, sadly Friday was my last day with Chef Rogers...and all of us are pretty sad about it. For some reason everyone was feeling very giddy on Friday morning, either from too much coffee or too much excitement for the coming weekend. The first thing we had to do on Friday morning was take our ServeSafe test, which is a test you have to take to get your food handler's license. It's not mandatory that we pass the test, it's just something they have us take because sometimes it can give you a slight edge when a restaurant is hiring and one person has their certification and the other person doesn't. It was a tedious 90 question multiple choice test that we had to use good old Scantron sheets for and everyone came out scratching their heads a little. They seemed to throw in a few curveballs and no one's quite sure if they passed it or not. I guess we'll find out later this week!
After the ServeSafe exam we had to take our written test for Level 1 which was pretty easy. Then we had some time to spare so we talked with Chef Rogers and took a class picture, which I will post later. In the afternoon we had our practical exam, which was to fillet a fish, quarter a chicken, make a creme anglaise and a creme chantilly, which is just a fancy French word for whipped cream. The fish were slightly decomposing and the whole room reeked of fish as we were filleting them. And if I so much as put a finger on the meat part of the fillet it started to disintegrate, which cost me some points. And the chickens were beyond disgusting...industrial Perdue chickens with shriveled yellow skin and watery flesh. I was able to quarter it ok, but the flesh of the chicken was also slightly disintegrating and when I popped off the leg a huge puddle of water? gelatin? fat? extra hormones and antibiotics that they stuffed in the chicken at the last minute? poured onto my cutting board. So gross. Please don't eat Perdue chicken. I ended up getting a 94 on the practical part of my exam, which is good...but I wish I had done a little better. Next time.
After the exam we all headed over to O'Nieals, the bar around the corner that most people go to every Friday after school. It was particularly crowded last Friday because a lot of people were celebrating...both Level 3 and Level 6 had just finished their major tests and so the bar was filled to the brim with FCI students until 5 o'clock when the Sex and the City tour rolled through the place to drink cosmos. (I guess the bar was on one episode of Sex and the City so every Friday at 5 o'clock they line up 30 martini glasses for the Sex and the City tour that goes around NYC looking at all the places they filmed the show). Most of my class was there because we all expected Chef Rogers to come around and he did! He said it was the first time in 2 years that he went to the bar after school to hang out with students, so we were all quite flattered. We did a few toasts and chanted Rogers several times..."ROJAY, ROJAY, ROJAY." It was very fun. My class has bonded a lot more during Level 2 and everyone is a lot of fun, so we had a great time celebrating our ascension to Level 3. After the bar, we headed over to Chinatown to this Vietnamese place with a few classmates, one of whom, Jane, is Vietnamese and wanted to order us al the specialities. It was very delicious, but I couldn't even tell you what we had!
Thursday was wine day, we spent all day learning about wine and tasting wine. But we were obliged to spit out all the wine that we tasted for several reasons. 1: we would have been drunk. 2: it would have obscured our taste buds from fully tasting the rest of the wines. So I had to spit everything out. A few people tried to sneak in sips here and there, but no one seemed to be drunk by the end of the day. After spending everyday standing and moving around in the kitchen, everyone found it really hard to sit in a classroom all day and listen to a lecture, even if the lecture was on wine. Half of us were falling asleep and the other half were fidgeting in their seats the whole time. But I did learn quite a bit about wine...you might even call me a mini sommelier. Just kidding...I don't know that much. The main thing we were trying to learn was how to pair wine and food together. So to do this we had to experience what foods can do to the taste of wine. We had 7 small cups of lemon slices, salt, salami, smoked almonds, sriacha chili sauce, currant jam and butter. We pretended to be eating things like beure blanc sauce by eating a piece of butter with salt and a squeeze of lemon and then tasted wines to see how the flavor was affected. When we tasted the Shiraz wine we pretended to be eating American barbeque: Salami, dipped in butter, salt and currant jam then topped with a smoked almond. Sounds gross, but it was actually sort of delicious. Especially when we paired it with the wine. Things like acidity, fat and salt make the greatest differences when you're tasting wine. Because wine is acidic, it pares down the amount of salt that you are able to taste when you're eating, which is why chefs have a tendency to season everything extremely well. Chef Rogers was always telling us to add salt, salt and more salt for this reason.
Tomorrow I start Level 3, which will be a whole new ballgame. More on that tomorrow...
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