Malawry

I used to love Scooter Crunches! The Good Humor chocolate eclairs are strikingly similar, so check them out if you haven't already. I wonder why they call them eclairs, they bear no resemblance to any of the components of a real eclair. Speaking of which, I used to adore the chocolate eclair ice cream at the Greensboro, NC branch of Swensen's (back when they made the ice cream in the store and birthday parties often involved tours). I admit to liking orange sherbet Push-ups as a child. I got one a few years ago while on a nostalgia kick and they are truly vile to my adult sensibilities.

There's a Thai grocery in Silver Spring, MD. I think it's on Sligo Ave, either that or else on Silver Spring Ave, close to the intersection with Georgia Ave. It's okay, plenty of prepared products but not any fresh food to speak of. I know there's one in Alexandria, too, which I hear is better. I'd be interested in hearing more favorites. Some of mine include Shalom Kosher on University Blvd in Wheaton for Kosher and Eastern European foods, the Polonez deli I've mentioned in another thread for Polish food in Sil Spring, and the Jamaican Market on New Hampshire Ave in Langley Park for all your Ting and long bean needs. Obviously, I'm a Marylander and I mostly make it to Maryland stores, but I'd love to hear about other cool spots around the metro area.

Researchgal, there is definitely a relationship between the diary and my performance at school. This is partially why I wanted to do the diary, actually. I'm sure I'd care a lot about school and do pretty well at it if I didn't do the diary, but I think I push myself just a little more since I'd rather be proud of what I have to report. I was a lazy student when I was in college. I'm bright, so I was able to be a little lazy and still make passing grades. I'm rather proud that I've left that behind, and I enjoy how engaged I am by my studies. I have been extremely honest about what happens, and I'm not shy about the fact that I make errors and, on occasion, injure myself. You're hearing the good along with the bad, believe me.

I spend about 30 minutes each day compiling the day's recipes and printing them out. I don't have reading on a regular basis, but I try to spend an hour or so a week reviewing topics we've covered recently in On Cooking. I spend more time on this diary than anything else for now, but as somebody suggested early on it has served in part as a study tool. I spent an hour or two a night studying each night last week, except for Thursday when I blew it off and went out for Salvadoran food with my partner, my housemate, and Edemuth. When I cook (mostly on weekends), I typically make at least one recipe I've eaten but not made at school. This, too, I regard as homework, and it's the sort most of my friends have been offering to "help" with since I decided to go to culinary school. My first paper is due a week from Friday, and I have had limited time to invest in researching and preparing it. This is further compounded by the fact that this coming Sunday is a school day and so I won't have much of a weekend free to play catch-up.

Crisco is useful when baking for vegans or those who keep Kosher. I only cook with it when I am preparing food for friends and family members with such specialized diets. (I don't fry, but Mom used to use Crisco for fries and they tasted fine to me.) I do use it regularly for greasing baking pans, and it's the default baking pan grease used at my school as well. I also use Ener-G Egg Replacer to bake for my vegan pals, and once I experimented with pareve margarine. The former has no flavor to speak of; the latter tasted of radioactive yellow. The egg replacer works okay if you're baking something with strong flavors, like lemon or dark chocolate.

What's The Italian Store like, anyway? How does it compare to the Cleveland Park location of Vace? (In terms of pizza and in terms of overall product selection and quality, I mean.) And how's the pizza at the other Italian deli/stores in the area? I live right near Santucci's in the Four Corners part of Silver Spring, but have never checked it out. There's also a couple places in Wheaton I've spied but not visited.

Monday, July 29 I arrived at school earlier than usual because of today’s practical. Chef Peter had told us he’d write up the menu for the practical at 7:55am, but I suspected it might be up earlier and I wanted to be through my daily cup of coffee and mentally alert before then. The menu went up at about 7:45am: Leek and potato soup Ham omelette Glazed julienned carrots Orange salad We weren’t allowed to do anything until 8am, and so I scribbled the menu, a breakdown of tasks, and a list of mise. I also borrowed some paper clips from a fellow student and marked the appropriate recipes in my notebook. (We were allowed to work with our notes if we wanted to, which of course we all did.) My game plan looked like this: SOUP Cut leeks, potatoes: 4-5 parts each Paste garlic, salt Fine brunoise onion: 1 part BG, low on thyme Chop parsley OMELETTE Dice ham CARROTS Julienne carrots Cut cartouche (parchment paper circle to fit the pan) Chop parsley SALAD Make simple syrup Zest orange Julienne zest Blanch zest 3x Candy zest in syrup Peel a vif (remove the pith, top and tail from the orange) & slice At 8am we were allowed to get going. I gathered all my equipment and food products and started in on the orange salad. I set a small pan of water on to boil for the julienned zest, figuring that with three blanchings ahead of me it was probably best to do the dessert first. I cut my orange into slices after I’d peeled it, but I didn’t like the way the slices looked too much. They were thick and blocky looking. I found another orange and peeled and cut it more successfully. I was dreading the potato-leek soup cuts, because they’d been such a bitch when I did it for my team a couple weeks ago. This time wasn’t so bad because I was only making one portion of everything on le menu, so there weren’t leeks after leeks needing to be cut into identical squares. I surprised myself by zipping through the leek and potato cuts, and the carrots came out more quickly and evenly than anything else I’ve julienned to date. What a relief! By the time I’d finished with all my cutting and dicing, the orange zest was in the syrup and cooking down. I remembered my teammate making the syrup and having to cook it for a long time to get it to thicken up and soften the zest properly when we did it in class, so I didn’t watch it so closely. Around when I was finishing up with potato cuts, though, I looked over and it was boiling up angrily. I hastily snatched the pan off the heat and poured the syrup into a deli cup I’d previously sat in an ice bath. I could see cooked syrup clinging to the sides of the pan and hardening, meaning that the sugar was starting to cook in candy stages rather than remaining a syrup. I tossed some water into the deli cup and stirred until the consistency thinned a little bit. If I hadn’t looked up right at that moment, chances are the syrup would have colored (as in caramel) and I would have had to start over. Phew! I got off my game a little after that. I added too much cream to the soup when finishing it, and I wasn’t too hopeful about today’s chances of an A grade when I still have not turned out a perfect omelette. Indeed, I had to pitch my first omelette (the pan was too hot, so the eggs browned before I could begin to move them around), so I lost points on waste. I was worried about the carrots; they’ve been on the menu three times, but I still have not made them personally. Chef Peter’s analysis of my menu: The soup was all wrong. I made a standard-sized bouquet garni, and so the small serving I’d prepared took on a tea-like overseasoned quality. I added too much cream, too. At least my knife cuts were good. The glazed carrots were the best in the class, with a perfect glaze and the right tiny amount of bite to the vegetable. My omelette tasted okay but was a little underdone and was not properly folded. The orange salad tasted great, and the syrup was of a good consistency, but the zest was still a little bitter. I also lost points for the shape of my orange slices: they were a little too blocky and squared-off, but at least they were evenly sliced. After the analysis, I cleaned up and pitched in on dishes and putting the kitchen back together. We took a break, returned for lunch (caesar salad, tomato salad, and sauteed shrimp, all prepared by the students who finished their tests first), cleaned up again, and took another short break. Then we came back for afternoon session, watched a demo on crème brulee, and then we got back our written tests from Friday. My score: 56.5 correct out of 58 questions. The one and a half incorrect questions were about pate a chou, as I’d suspected. I’m quite pleased with my score. We went over the tests together as a class, but I already knew I’d missed what I’d missed and had looked up the correct answers, so there was nothing new in the overview. We capped off the day with another round of chicken backs, and went home. I’m exhausted but glad the first tests are over. Tuesday, July 30 Washingtonian summers are notoriously hot and nasty. Yesterday and today were particularly good examples: temps in the upper 90s, humidity so heavy that even Kathie Lee would wilt, and so on. Some people pay to visit spas; others move to Washington. To celebrate, Chef Peter concocted the following lunch menu for our enjoyment: Pasta carbonara Endive, watercress, and grapefruit salad Flank steak with shallot and demi-glace sauce Fondant potatoes Crème brulee I was teamed with George and Chris for lunch service. Chris vanished to the pastry kitchen immediately to work on the crème brulee and the pasta, and I took the lunch order from the staff and then joined George in the kitchen. I took care of the pasta sauce, the potatoes and the salad. Fondant potatoes are cut like a tournee, except they have one large, flat side so they rest easily on a flat surface. They’re then covered halfway with stock and brushed with butter and baked. Rebrush them every 10 minutes and keep the stock level up. My tournee cut is coming along quite nicely, and soon I had a disposable pie plate filled with evenly cut, domed potatoes. When lunch service came, I gathered the salad ingredients I’d prepared and got ready to toss the salad. I instinctively went back to my notebook to refresh my memory on assembly. George asked, “Why are you doing that? Just make the salad!” I responded, “I want to refresh my memory.” He covered my notebook with his large hand. “Tell me how to assemble this salad.” I gave him my best shot, and he said I was basically right and allowed me to go ahead. After lunch, I checked my email on my cell phone. My close friend from college had emailed me about my diary and said she was surprised by my embrace of the meatier topics at school. She reminded me of when we were in college and I’d occasionally feed a friend on my meal card. I used to insist that anybody who I fed with my resources could not eat meat, because I didn’t want my money going towards anybody’s meat consumption. I’d forgotten about all this, and I’ve been thinking off and on about it since. I’m still not thrilled about eating meat and fowl, and only eat a bite or two most days…enough to taste, not enough to come close to an actual portion. If I try to explain my attitude I realize it makes little sense: I don’t like the idea of eating meat, and I don’t really mentally identify meat as a food substance, yet I’m eating it almost every day and I’m actually quite interested in learning all about its structure and preparation. There’s also little rhyme or reason to my tastes; I really like applewood smoked bacon, but the roasted pork or the sauteed chicken in demi-glace sauce dishes we’ve had didn’t do anything for me. I got my practical exam numeric grade after the lunch break. I earned a grade in the low 90s. Seems to me I am my own harshest critic. Wednesday, July 31 We brought in our notebooks for grading today, because Chef Francois returned from his brief vacation. There’s already a substantial number of recipes in my notebook, and I spent plenty of time checking and double-checking to make sure it was properly organized and all my French spelling was correct. I still have mixed feelings about the recipe notebooks, but I know I did a good job with mine nonetheless. Chef Somchet has been taking some kind of class this week. She has been at the school briefly in the morning and around lunchtime, but she has not given a demo or been available otherwise. Today’s lunch menu included a repeat of the roulade with lemon curd (basically, a jelly roll), and since I didn’t make it last week I went into the pastry kitchen to put it together. I reviewed my notes and quickly assembled the cake, thinking I could go back into the main kitchen and help my teammates if I got it going rapidly. I set up two mixers and whisked egg whites in one and yolks in the other. I folded them together, sifted in and folded some flour, and got my batter into the oven quickly. As I was cleaning up, one of my fellow students came over and started asking me questions about his cake. Then, Chin started asking me, “are these soft peaks?” Next thing I knew, Chin was calling me Somchet Jr, and other people were asking me questions about the cake. I certainly don’t think I’m an expert at pastry, and I suspect I was asked because I acted like I knew what I was doing and I moved quickly. I ended up spending much of the lunch prep time in the pastry kitchen, helping a student whose egg whites wouldn’t whip up and coaching somebody else through making lemon curd. After lunch and break, we had our second session for the sanitation course. Today’s subject: “the microworld,” all about the pathogens that can cause food poisoning. Chris ripped through a lengthy PowerPoint presentation on the subject, and chatted animatedly about tapeworms, faculative bacteria, and other unpleasant topics. I can’t get over how much this guy loves to talk about the nasties. It’s pretty cool. I still find the subject somewhat boring though, and so I took notes to keep myself engaged. Chris let us take a short break after about an hour, and when we did we found a rolling cart with our notebooks on it in the hallway. I checked mine out: I scored a cool 100. Now it’s up to me to keep it up!

I love tofu. I adore Asian preparations of tofu but rarely cook them at home. Most of the tofu I eat I put in sandwiches as a sort of substitute for animal protein, but I've learned to prepare it well enough that I find myself snacking on it if I have any around. The secret to making tofu yummy is removing as much moisture as possible, which makes it more chewy and more able to absorb other flavors. Tofu firmness is indicated by its water content. You may find that "extra-firm" labeled tofu is still pretty squidgy and soft. Remove water content by freezing and thawing (my usual technique), by pressing out the moisture under weight with towels in the refrigerator, or by frying in fat. Use strong-flavored marinades and sauces with tofu, since it has minimal flavor on its own. I wouldn't bother to marinate it unless I'd already dried it out using one of the methods outlined above. Some less-Asian-style things I've done with it: 1. Cook in a spicy vinaigrette and eat with kraut and cheese as a tofu reuben 2. Cook with BBQ sauce and eat with slaw on a bun as a bbq tofu sammich 3. Slather with mustard, bread, and pan-fry as a sort of vegetarian cutlet. This one is also good with tofu I haven't pre-dried, since the custardy texture of the tofu plays well against a crisp hot crust. 4. Bake it with a jerk type sauce and eat with plantains and greens I do agree with Jinmyo that tofu and Italian flavors don't play well together. And Asian preparations really are best, since that's where tofu is meant to be used.

Most days, the demo wraps up by 10am, giving us 2.5 hours to prepare lunch for 12:30pm service. Sometimes, the demo takes a little longer. That's only happened a couple times so far though. On Wednesdays, since we have the sanitation course for the next 8 weeks or so, there will be abbreviated menus and lunch service will be at noon.

The orange salad is one of the first desserts we learned. To make it, zest your oranges and julienne the zest. Blanch the zest three times in plain boiling water to remove the bitterness, and then cook the zest in a simple syrup to infuse the syrup with orange flavor and candy the zest. Peel the oranges "a vif" (or to the skin) and cut into even slices. Remove seeds with the point of a knife. Arrange the slices on chilled plates and spoon the syrup over, using the candied zest to decorate the top. Being allergic to oranges, I have not eaten this dessert. I have made it, though. No salt in the water.

Thursday, July 25 I got chewed out again today on cleanliness. We were coming up towards lunch service time, and my teammate Jonathan had been helping our table by making the dressing for a caesar salad. I finished with everything I could see that needed to be done while he completed the dressing, but I was concerned that he still hadn’t filled the roulade he’d baked for our dessert. So I told him I’d clean up from the dressing while he went to fill the roulade. And I pitched the spatula and whisk into the dirty utensils bin without rinsing them off. (I’ve never made a habit of rinsing off utensils, since they tend to clean easily. I worked dish duty, and I saw for myself that the time invested in pre-rinsing was mostly wasted.) Two minutes later, Chef Peter pulled the utensils out of the bin and stormed around the kitchen, yelling, “Whose are these?” I owned up to it and he bitched at me for several minutes while rinsing them himself (I tried to, but he wouldn’t let me.) Tensions seemed somewhat high to begin with, since there’s so much anxiety about the test. Lunch service was marked by frenetic activity (caesar salad, mushroom soup, fried cod with tartar sauce and haricots verts, roulade filled with lemon curd and served with a fruit compote). Most students, myself included, spent the post-lunch break studying. There was much discussion about the notebooks. I showed my French menus to Chef Francois first thing in the morning, so many people came over to check their spelling against mine. Immediately after the break, Chef Francois came over to tell us that he was going on vacation tomorrow and returning to the school Wednesday morning, and so he will not need our notebooks until then. There was a combination of relief from the unprepared students, and anger from people like me who had put a lot of work into assembly this week. (I was benefited by Edemuth’s assistance; she made all my divider tabs last night.) The afternoon lecture passed in a blur. The rumor mill spat out the following menu for tomorrow’s test: onion soup, omelettes, risoleed potatoes. Nobody knows what the second course might be, or what might be involved in the dessert. (The test is a four-course menu.) One theory is that the dessert will be the orange salad, which involves triple-blanching zest. Friday, July 26 Today’s theme is “suspended animation.” Towards the end of the day yesterday, the sewage system at the school backed up. This morning, it still hadn’t been fixed. So we couldn’t use the bathrooms, and we could use the sinks only minimally (we discarded dirty water into a big trash can for later disposal). This meant no cooking, so I still haven’t taken the practical portion of my exam. We took the written exam this morning, and we’ll be taking the practical portion on Monday at 8am sharp. I think I did pretty well on the written exam. Most of the questions were easy for me to remember. I know I got at least two questions wrong, both about pate a chou. (I hadn’t studied the pastry we’ve covered as much as I’d focused on other lectures.) I had been worried about questions on meat, and spent a lot of my study time going over the primal cuts of beef (short loin, sirloin, rib, chuck, round, plate, flank, and brisket/shank. See, I know them now!) I was disappointed that they didn’t appear on the test. The only meat-like question was about cuts from a flat fish, a question I answered correctly (three cuts include filet, goujon, and supreme). After the test, my classmates gathered in the kitchen and waited for everybody else to finish. We verbally ran down the test together and talked about correct responses, and Chef Peter chipped in his two cents when we couldn’t agree on an answer. (Chef Somchet remained in the demo classroom, supervising the remaining test-takers.) There were a couple cases of chicken backs that needed cleaning, so a bunch of us set up cutting boards and whipped through them. The mood was somewhat cheerful and cooperative. At 9:30am, the last student finished his test, and we still hadn’t had our water problem fixed. (Roto-Rooter ostensibly scheduled an 8:30am appointment for us, but they still hadn’t appeared.) So Chef Peter had no choice but to let us go. He’s starting to refer to us as the “teflon class” since now the notebook deadline and the practical exam administration have slipped right off of us. We will take the practical test on Monday morning at 8am.

Varmint, I haven't really sensed competition yet. We'll see if this is still the case after we get back our first test scores, though. Nobody has asked me to share the contents of my notebook with them. If I was asked, I'd show it, but not for longer than it would take to get a sense of how my book was organized. (In other words, I wouldn't loan out my book overnight or anything.) I'd also share a recipe or two that somebody may have missed if asked. I sense most of my classmates would act similarly. Nobody's interested in copying as far as I can tell. Swissmiss, If I wrote posts every day, then each post wouldn't be as special. Jinmyo, I was serious when I said I think butchery will be exciting, mostly for the reasons you suggested. We'll see what I think once we start actually doing it. Cabrales, it's been a constant struggle to make my recipes conform to the school style. My instinct is to write more eloquently and specifically, particularly since I worked as a technical writer for a year and view recipe-writing as a form of tech writing. In addition to working as a tech writer (I worked on-site at FBI HQ during that job), I worked for the past three years for a trade association as assistant editor. I was the youngest person hired in the newsroom at the Greensboro News and Record (in North Carolina), where I worked weekends and summers for a few years in high school and college as an editorial assistant. (I trained on obit desk, too.) I have always written prodigiously in my spare time but have rarely published beyond what was expected of me as a student or employee.

Fat Guy, don't get me in trouble. We were making pound cake. Not rocket science. The pastry kitchen was not the place for the intellectually sluggish yesterday, when my teammate produced both a savory tart and the dessert. But for a simple recipe like pound cake, it was where I felt I was best placed when I didn't "have my swerve on" (as Chef Peter likes to say). I scaled inside the sink. Other students have scaled inside a trash bag. We will be butchering primal cuts down the road...exciting! I used peanut oil for the chips; this is the default fat used at the school.

Monday, July 22 Our first tests are Friday. There will be both a written and a practical exam, plus our notebooks are due for their first grading. My class has been somewhat anxious about these impending evaluations, and we’ve all been asking one another what we’re doing to prepare. For my part, I hope to review most of my notes, and get my recipe notebook together early this week so I don’t have to worry about it on Thursday. I asked Drew this morning if he’d started on Kitchen Confidential over the weekend. He reported he’d gotten through the intro and the first two chapters. I’m already proud of him. “I actually enjoyed it! It’s not like reading math books or anything.” I felt a little intellectually sluggish this morning, so I volunteered to work in the pastry kitchen rather than cooking for lunch service. I produced four lovely lemon-scented pound cakes. I borrowed a Microplane zester from one of the pastry students, a guy who is a dead ringer for Bill Clinton in his late 20s. The pastry students are starting to recognize me and talk to me more, which is nice. I haven’t really gotten at any of their personal stories yet, but it’s clear they don’t view me as an interloper (probably because I’m humble about their capabilities in comparison to my own in a pastry kitchen). After the pound cake was in the oven, I joined my team in the main kitchen and did whatever could be done for lunch service. (Menu: cream of celery root soup, composed salad of frisee, hazelnuts, apples, and blue cheese, chicken chasseur with spaghetti squash, and the pound cake with a fruit compote.) Once lunch began I ferried out dishes to the faculty and staff members who were our designees for the day. Catherine, the receptionist, is one of my favorite people to feed. She’s so genuinely happy to see me, she’s a pleasure to serve. When I brought her salad course, she said to me, “You seem really happy to be here, Rochelle.” I smiled and told her I’d dreamt of coming to school for years, and I’m excited that it’s a reality. “I can tell.” Later, I brought her a pretty bowl of compote with a mint leaf since she wanted to avoid the pound cake, and she complimented my presentation skills. Chef Peter was at our table for lunch. I found an opportunity to ask him, “What do you think of the state of dining in DC?” He responded, “It’s a helluva lot better than it was when I moved here 10 years ago. For a city its size it does all right. It’s never gonna be a New York, though.” He didn’t say much more, but I don’t think he was holding back, I think he was just distracted. After lunch, I was rotated off of dish duty and onto cleaning the main kitchen. I wrapped up leftover pound cake, and cleaned the reach-in doors and the stove plates. Main kitchen duty is much more pleasant than dish duty, since it’s not nearly as nasty as washing leftover egg dishes. The pastry people don’t use the main kitchen, but they do contribute to the dish workload. (The dish issue is the only thing about pastry students that annoys me, although the faculty imply that there’s an inherent tension between pastry and culinary career training students through things they say and do.) Post-break, Chef Francois came to talk to us about cuts of beef. I now know the difference between a porterhouse and a T-bone steak, and I know where the tenderloin is and what cuts come off of it. Tuesday, July 23 The injury inventory continues to grow. Today I snagged my thumb on the crinkle blade of a mandoline. Today’s lunch menu included potato gaufrettes (waffle chips), and I’d immediately volunteered for the task since I haven’t had a chance to play with the mandoline yet, and also because this was the first time we deep-fat fried. I set up the device okay, and started whaling on a few peeled potatoes. For some reason, they weren’t coming out right. Most of the chips were too thick at one end, and I couldn’t get any good-sized slices going at all…they were all small. I fussed with the machine, adjusting it and testing the blade, and I asked my teammate Kristin to look at it too. Finally, I gave up and asked Chef Peter to come look at it and tell me what was wrong. He tried cutting a few chips, messed with the blade, tried again, and then inspected the blade close-up. “This mandoline has a warped crinkle blade. Find another one to use.” Four potatoes, a cut on my thumb, and a lot of time all to find out it was a problem with the equipment! I borrowed a mandoline from another table and quickly cranked out a big bowl of uncooked chips. Once they were cut, I took a big stack of paper towels over to the stove, where a pot of oil was already set up for frying the chips. I started drying the chips, adding them to the oil, and then turning out finished chips into a bowl lined with more paper towels. I only fried 5 or 6 at a time because I didn’t want to crowd the oil, but I’d cut a LOT of chips and so it took me quite a while to get through them. Chef Peter stopped by and told me some of my chips were overdone. I tasted a darker one and got a bitter aftertaste. I wonder how they make those “russet” darker potato chips you can buy in some stores? They’re not bitter, not really anyway. Fortunately, since there were so many chips, it wasn’t a big deal that some were overdone. Today’s menu was filled with many delicious things: a butternut squash soup, napoleons using the gaufrettes and the gravlax we made Friday with mache salad and a mustard vinaigrette, a zucchini and tomato tart with some sauteed potatoes, and then a Paris Brest for dessert (a ring of almond-coated chou paste filled with hazelnut-flavored pastry cream). “Butternut squash soup” appeared on le menu in English, as did yesterday’s spaghetti squash. I asked Chef Peter, “What’s French for spaghetti squash?” “They don’t really eat it.” So I asked him the same question about butternut squash, and he said, “They don’t eat much squash over there.” I jokingly asked, “So why are we learning it?” I got a face, but no verbal response. I adore squashes (unlike many of my classmates; Chin especially seems to eschew any vegetable after two bites), but I normally identify them with fall and winter eating. I don’t fully understand why things appear on the menu when they do. Some foods seem to go together, but then we have things like two forms of potatoes on one menu (napoleons and sauteed potatoes with the entrée) and foods that are totally out of season at work. Other times we eat things that are dead-on in timing and French tradition, like today’s savory tart with a pate brisee crust. During lunch, my table had a prospective student as one of our guests. She seemed pretty cool, and I had fun chatting her up. She wants to run a catering company, and has already done a few gigs with a friend of hers but realizes she needs training and licensing and so on before making it her career. I wonder what percentage of visiting prospects apply, and what percentage of applicants matriculate at the school? We spent our afternoon talking about the differences between boiling, simmering and poaching, and talking over Friday’s test. I’m nervous but determined to do well. Wednesday, July 24 This morning, I took three rockfish from whole fish to finished plate. I scaled them, gutted them, removed their heads, filleted them, skinned them, seasoned them, floured them, sauteed them, and topped them with a grenobloise sauce I made. We’ve had fish a few times by now, but I haven’t yet fabricated (butchered) any, so I volunteered to take care of it today. It’s very satisfying to work with a dish from beginning to end like that. I feel like I could go fishing and clean and fry my own fish if I wanted to, now that I’ve done it in a kitchen. Scales tend to get everywhere. They come off fairly easily, but they fly all over the place. Rockfish fins are surprisingly sharp, and I poked myself painfully in the hand a few times while I was scaling. I ended up with a few scales in my hair and several scattered across my chef’s jacket, plus a few scratches across my hands from the fins. Once the fish were scaled, I washed them off, snipped off the fins, and cut off the head. One of my teammates cleaned the heads and removed the eyes so they could be used for fish stock. Filleting the fish was easy once I got the hang of it, and rockfish skins come off much more easily than the flounder skins I removed last week. They were cooked the same way as last week’s flounder, and the sauce was the same except for the addition of capers. Excellent eating with the creamed spinach one of my teammates prepared alongside. I’ve learned that if I want to do a certain task, I need to speak up…but once I speak up, people usually acquiesce. People are developing natural preferences for jobs, and they say they want them quickly once we’re broken into teams for the day. I want to learn everything, so it’s hard for me to decide what I want to do, and I’m ending up supporting everybody else rather than taking charge of a task. I’m glad I spoke up about the fish today, because it was incredibly satisfying to eat something I’d handled beginning to end. After lunch and break, we started in on our sanitation class. We’ll be taking a sanitation class each Wednesday afternoon for the next 8 weeks. Once we complete the course we’ll take the National Restaurant Association’s ServSafe certification test. Today started out with distribution of sanitation textbooks (can’t wait to crack those!) and a short video from the TV program 20/20 about E. Coli 0157:H7 appearing in raw vegetables. Our instructor for sanitation, Chris, has been teaching these courses for some time and seems to bring far more enthusiasm to the subject than I imagined possible. He brought printouts of news stories about all these recent cases of food poisoning which he shared with us. It’s not fun to think of the liability and risk that come with feeding people. L’academie does not allow students to take food from the school partly because of the liabilities inherent in cases of improper food storage leading to poisoning. We have a lot to learn about how to keep things safe.

Awww, shucks, guys. Welcome to eGullet, WednesdayGirl. (She's the friend who sent me the e-mail asking how I'm enjoying school, around which I based an entry.) Also, welcome, Teva. KateW, I hope you have time to share how your experience is similar and different once school starts. The same goes for Chefchelle and any other culinary students around eGullet.

I see cleaning as a fact of life. It's got to be done, and it's important enough that the school grades us on it. I didn't mind breaking down Chef Peter's demo, although I minded a little that my classmates abandoned ship early on. I don't think Chef Peter should clean his own demo, because he does indeed spend the time he would invest in that helping students in the kitchen. He does not do most of his own mise, either. A few students report early voluntarily most mornings and do plenty of knife cuts and so on for him. I wonder if they will continue to report early once they feel caught up on their knife skills (it's the same two women each morning). I come in early once a week or so, and I normally assist Chef Peter with his mise if I do so. (I report between 7:30 and 7:40am most days, but that's not really early enough to do more than brew some coffee, tie my necktie, and take some notes.) Rachel, the potatoes were cut extremely thinly on a mandoline. They had been peeled several days before and sitting in water in the walk-in the whole time, so they'd already leached a lot of starch. The paper-thin slices would have lost their remaining starch immediately had they been soaked in water, and the finished dish would not have held together. My classmate stuck them in water anyway, and Chef Peter came by and told him to pitch them and start over. Cooking them in milk may have worked in a real-life situation, but he'd already killed the starch by putting them in water, so it was a moot point. Cabrales, excellent questions about grading. I think the total of written work amounts to 25% of the grade (12.5% recipes, 12.5% papers). Classroom participation is 25 percent, as are the practical exams and written exams. Some things seem to be weighted; for example, nobody earned over an 80 on the first grades we got, for classroom participation. There is no such thing as honors to my knowledge, and I don't know yet whether or not grading makes any difference to externship placement or other future career factors. I can't respond to questions about what the "real world" of restaurants is like with reference to cleaning and dishwashing, since I'm only a student. Thanks for the additional info on umami, Johnjohn. As for what happens to my diary in the future, who knows? It's still a young project, but it's a lot of fun to write. I'm really glad to see so much discussion on this thread, btw.

Thanks for the spelling correction. I don't agree with the dismissal Chef Francois expressed with regards to the fifth taste, which was specifically why I documented it. (Despite my diligence as a student, I really don't take everything I'm taught as gospel.) Lunch service covers: depends on how large the teams are. When we're divided into teams of three, we typically feed five people each: the three on the team plus two faculty/staff/guests. If we're teams of four we usually feed six or seven. We had four guests one day last week (two prospective students and two parents) so everybody had to feed a lot of people. There was the one day in Week 2 when seven people fed everybody (17 students + 10 or so faculty/staff) which was a disaster. We might be better equipped to handle that by now, though. We do not feed the pastry students, nor do we feed second session students when they are in the classroom on Tuesdays. Yes, each day Team 1 cleans up the chef-instructor's demo. That team also gets any leftover mise, which in some cases is quite the benefit. Unfortunately, the one thing that really would have helped me Friday (leftover leek and potato cuts) were totally used up in the demo. I see little point in bemoaning the unfairness of this, since it's a reality and it has to be done. But you can bemoan all you like. Oh, and markstevens: it hasn't come up yet.

Thursday, July 18 Today’s menu was my favorite one so far: gougeres (pate a chou puffs with cheese), grilled salmon with bearnaise sauce, potatoes au gratin, buttered asparagus, and madeleines. I feel like this makes up for yesterday’s veal liver in a big way. Today was somewhat insane in the kitchen, but I found it to be quite satisfying. I was not placed with George or Chin (too bad, I’d liked working with both of them); instead, I worked with two classmates I’d worked with separately last week. Melanie left immediately for the pastry kitchen, since today’s menu included an appetizer using pate a chou and both my other teammate and I had made it yesterday. This left two of us to assemble potatoes au gratin, buttered asparagus, and grilled salmon with a bearnaise sauce. Melanie asked if she could come back and make the bearnaise, since she had not yet assembled a hollandaise (of which bearnaise sauce is a derivative). It didn’t seem like an overwhelming amount of work initially. I offered to grill the salmon since I haven’t yet worked grill or saute station, and I told my classmate I’d do Melanie’s mise en place for the bearnaise. He got cracking on the potatoes while I started some shallots, tarragon, cracked pepper, white wine, and white wine vinegar on reducing. Chef Peter came by just as my reduction was reaching the a sec stage and told me I had too much pepper in my reduction, so I had to go make it over. As I was doing this, my teammate realized there wasn’t any shredded parmesan left for the potatoes. Since he’d already sliced his potatoes, they started oxidizing while he was getting more cheese hunks off the wheel and through the Robot Coupe for shredding. So he had to start all over, and I’m afraid he had to spend his whole lunch service time trying to recover. As a result, I ended up doing almost everything: Peeling, trimming, and blanching the asparagus. Melting butter and separating eggs and chopping herbs for the bearnaise. Seasoning and grilling the salmon. Wiping things up along the table. Retrieving stools for us to sit on. Rolling up flatware in napkins. And so on. I enjoyed managing so many different tasks at once, and I bolted across the kitchen confidently. I had just enough time to get it all done. Everything came out beautifully except for the potatoes, which simply hadn’t had enough time to bake through. (My classmate was pretty upset about this.) Chef Peter declared Melanie’s gougeres to be the best in the class, and he said my salmon was grilled perfectly. I even got the quadrillage (grill hash mark pattern) completely right. Plus everything tasted great. During the post-lunch analysis, Chef Peter got a bee in his bonnet about dishes. He told us we weren’t helping enough with them, that we weren’t rinsing out or stacking our pre-service dishes like we should. He said we were overwhelming the potwasher Juan, and he said he was docking everybody in the class a point off the participation grade. I remembered ditching Juan with my bearnaise reduction pan, the bearnaise dishes, and other nasty hard-to-clean items. I try to be good about helping Juan, particularly since I work dish duty for now, and I felt pretty bad about how I’d treated him today. Still, we’d been snowed, and I don’t usually abandon my dishes like that. Too bad everybody else got snowed on the same day. Chef Peter also handed out the scores from those “life skills” tests we took in the first week. I scored 100 on the reading comprehension and a 96 on the math skills. Most of my classmates were forthcoming with their scores, so when they asked what I got I showed my numbers. Lots of people scored in the 80s on the math skills. After break, Chef Francois combined our class with the pastry class for a discussion about the foundations of taste and some taste comparisons. He’d prepared little condiment cups full of various substances on some trays for us. The cups were labeled “sweet,” “sour,” “bitter,” “salty,” and then four cups numbered one through four. There were also two empty condiment cups and two spoons on each tray. The trays were distributed for us to share with one other student. (I shared with the same pastry student I’d discussed ice cream makers with.) Chef Francois mentioned the umami (meaty) taste, but said that evidence on it is inconclusive and that he doesn’t formally teach it for this reason. We began by tasting the sweet, sour, bitter and salty formulas. (They were all watered down, and were composed of sugar solution, vinegar solution, water with Angostura bitters, and salt solution.) Then he had us switch between sour and sweet, to show how much sweeter sweet is after tasting sour. Then we used the empty cups to mix sweet and sour, and then to add bitter and salt. The resulting liquid had a far more interesting flavor than two or three tastes mixed had carried. After that, he had everybody in the class hold our noses, and then he passed around a brown powder and told us to take a little on our finger and taste it without releasing our noses. I suspected it was cinnamon since it had a slightly barky/bitter/muddy flavor, and because it looked like cinnamon. When he had us release our noses, I inhaled and immediately got a strong aroma of cinnamon and nutmeg. It was a really cool sensation, how sharp and spicy the smell was versus how mild and bitter the taste had been. I highly recommend trying this one at home if you’re interested in understanding the differences between flavor and taste. The numbered cups contained water and then three strengths of salt solution, which we tasted back and forth to see how salt plays on the tongue as it gets stronger and weaker. Plain water tastes almost sweet after tasting a strong salt solution, and salt makes other flavors taste stronger. It will be interesting to take this lesson to the next level, and I intend to analyze tastes in light of today’s lesson over the coming weeks. Friday, July 19 Earlier in the week, Chef Peter warned us that on Friday he’d be running our asses off. “You’re gonna leave here wondering what the hell happened, and I intend that you will feel that way.” As promised, we entered the demo classroom this morning to see a complicated menu waiting on the white board: Potato-leek soup (Le Potage Parisien) Eggs Florentine (Les Oeufs Poches Florentine) Sauteed Flounder Meuniere (La Sole Sautee Meuniere) Potatoes Parmentier Apple Cake (Le Gateau aux Pommes) The soup might have seemed simple on the surface, but it required an annoying number of even knife cuts of potato and leek, essentially a slimmer version of the paysanne dice. The eggs themselves seemed simple on the surface, but a bechamel requires different skills and attention demands than the hollandaise-type sauces we’ve made to date. The flounder seemed easy enough, but we had to fabricate (butcher) the whole fish into fillets ourselves. The potatoes had to be perfectly cubed to cook properly. At least the apple cake seemed fairly straightforward. I was on a team with Melanie again, along with Drew and Kristin. We were Team 1, so we had to break down Chef Peter’s demo…and it wasn’t a simple matter of a few pots and pans. The demo kitchen was smeared with fish scales, dabs of cake batter, Wondra flour, and so on. Most of my team vanished to the kitchen to get started, but I stuck around and made sure the demo kitchen was really clean before starting on lunch service. I even helped Juan process some of the demo dishes. I didn’t like how Chef Peter yelled at me last week about cleanliness, and furthermore I hadn’t enjoyed his dressing-down after lunch yesterday, so I made a point out of getting everything spic-and-span before getting to work. Chef Peter came by as I was spritzing the demo stove with cleaning solution and told me I was a doll, so hopefully I’ll make that lost point back up. When I joined my team, Drew was already in the pastry kitchen working on our cake, and Melanie and Kristin were hurriedly assembling mise for lunch service. Melanie explained that they’d agreed to just assemble all the mise possible before deciding who would cook what for lunch, since there were so many knife cuts and mixtures and things to be set up in advance. I immediately offered to make all the cuts for the potato and leek soup, because I thought it was the most hateful task remaining, and because I need the knife practice. I ended up spending most of my prep time on making perfectly identical square pieces of leek and potato; by the time I finished most of the soup was done, the bechamel was already together, and Kristin was almost finished butchering our flounder. I went over to check on her with the flounder and she asked if I could help her by deskinning the fillets she’d already cut. Taking the skin of a fillet is much easier than it seems like it would be. Chef Peter had weighed one of our whole fish and wanted to weigh the cut, skinned, trimmed fillets we ended up with as a comparison, so I tried to do an extra-good job on those pieces. Once the fish were ready and chilling in the fish refrigerator, it was time to start lunch service. After the soup, all four of us coordinated on assembling the eggs Florentine. And then it was time for the fish course. We all took turns coating the flounder fillets with seasoned flour and frying them. They’re very easy to fry; by the time they’re browned on both sides they’re cooked through. Drew took care of the lemon-nut brown butter sauce; he accidentally burned it and had to make it a second time. The sauce is done in about 45 seconds, so if you aren’t vigilant it burns and you have to start over. The second sauce was perfect, and we all sat down to eat with a sense of tiredness and satisfaction. Drew’s apple cake came out beautifully. He put leftover coconut ice cream from last week’s ice cream bonanza on my plate, and decorated the plate with a raspberry coulis. Drew is one of my favorite classmates. I think he’s the youngest at 22, and he’s one of the least experienced among us. He told me early on that he’s going to culinary school because his friends are graduating from college and starting their adult lives, leaving him wondering what his place in the world should be. He hasn’t done anything he really cared about since high school, so he decided that since he liked to cook maybe he should get it together and pursue a culinary career. He knows very little about the field and very little about serious food, and he hasn’t worked much in restaurants, but he is so enthusiastic and he works so hard that I can’t help but love him. I loaned him my copy of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential when he said he hadn’t cracked a book since high school. I hope he likes it. Lunch service left everybody feeling fairly wrung-out. We had a shorter break than usual, and then we sat through a demo on gravlax and fish stock. We finished the afternoon with another round of chicken back cleaning. I think chicken backs are the culinary school equivalent of a sewing circle: an unpleasant task made less annoying through the enjoyment of fellow students and amusing chatter. I chatted with Melanie and Chin and some other students while we worked over the backs, which made the job easier. Chef Peter came by to chat while we worked, and he made a comment about our lunch menu today: “Three weeks ago, when you guys started, you never would have believed that you’d be putting out a four-course meal like you did today.” Edit disclosure: corrected spelling via Jinmyo

The oldest student in my class is around 37 years old. I think the youngest is 22. We're mostly between 25 and 30 years old. Sure, it's possible to go to culinary school later in life. (I don't know what it means for your career to graduate from culinary school and start out fresh in the restaurant industry at age 40 or 50, though.) You do need to be able to move fairly quickly, and have good motor skills. But I don't think you necessarily need to be young and spry. It certainly helps, but there are probably culinary students in their 40s who could run circles around me...and there are DEFINITELY professionals who can do so that are far older than I am. But then, that's why I'm a student! For me, it's been a clear benefit that I'm bright and studious, and I think that's made more difference to my ability to perform well than my youth. Had I gone to culinary school fresh out of high school or even in my early 20s, I would not be doing as well, nor would I be enjoying it as much.

My partner tries to pay for everything with his AMEX card. Our favorite restaurant close to home does not accept AMEX, which he regards as a nuisance, but it doesn't stop him from suggesting we go there when it's too hot to cook. I don't have any credit cards. I have a debit card with a VISA logo attached to my checking account which I use for dining out if I don't feel like paying cash.

Chef's pants are okay. They're not amazingly comfortable, but they don't chafe either. They have an elastic waist with a drawstring, two side pockets, and a back pocket. They are a checked/houndstooth black and white pattern. Mine are too long, so I cuff the bottoms twice. They don't look too terrible considering all of these qualities. They were stiff initially, but they've softened up after being laundered a couple times. You can buy chef's pants in other patterns and probably other cuts too. I've seen tie-dyed chef's pants, and I seem to recall Fat Guy wearing some chile pepper pants in one of his travel pictures. L'academie expects its students to stick with the houndstooth ones, which we were issued on day 1.

My mention of "inaccessible" came directly from Jeanne McManus's Q&A, in which she described the Food section's approach as avoiding stories that cover inaccessible food experiences (e.g., restaurants and trends in other cities and countries). I happen to agree that a vicarious experience, if well written, can be an informative and enjoyable read even if there's no way I'll ever be able to share that experience myself. And I think that the Post food section holds itself back unnecessarily by sticking to such criteria.

It was regular rum. Myers's rum, to be exact. (My rum!)

The Wash Post finally made it over there. Read the review here: http://eg.washingtonpost.com/profile/97730...ext=restaurants He says most of the same things we observed about service, timing (especially with the wines), and desserts.

I do not get as hot as I would have two years ago, when I weighed much more than I do now. It's definitely hot in the kitchen, but it's usually bearable. The apron makes the most difference to me of all the uniform pieces, and I look forward to removing it at break every day. That and the neckerchief can get annoyingly heavy. At least we don't have to wear hats of any type! The temperature in the kitchen is not overwhelming unless I'm working the grill station like I did today, when I think I could be naked and still find myself soaking a few kitchen towels. I may change my song when we start using the deep-fat fryer, though. BTW, I wear a tank top under my chef's jacket every day. And I bought some cheep Rockport clogs on special at an outlet last weekend, which seem to be working well on my feet so far.