Malawry

L'academie has a fairly strict dress code. Those with long hair are expected to keep it tied back, so I've been wearing my hair in a ponytail daily. (This sucks, since I feel I look much better with my hair down.) Nail polish is verboten, as are heavy makeup, excessive jewelry, extreme hairstyles, open-toed shoes, and so on. Tattoos are ostensibly frowned upon, but one of the pastry students has one on her lower arm that's easily visible when she rolls up her sleeves, and last session one of the students had significant tattooing on his lower arms. I haven't seen facial jewelry other than ear piercings, but I'm not sure on the policy. We are expected to be in full uniform every day by 8am. Full uniform involves the chef's jacket, a neckerchief tied according to regulation (like a man's tie, with the ends tucked under), chef's pants, and closed toe shoes. The apron must be added before doing any kitchen work. And of course hands must be absolutely clean before handling anything in the kitchen.

I don't think somebody should have to know all the things mentioned to be a food writer. I think good food writers, like all good writers, are interested in and engaged by their subject and can convey their enthusiasm through their words. That being said, I think there should be more requirements for writing some specific types of materials, and that given publications should have criteria for the writers they will hire or publish regularly. I do think the Washington Post holds itself back by having such a strong "this could be done in YOUR kitchen" bent. I wouldn't want to see the Post food section become a rant for everything that's wrong with DC dining and food, but I would like to see some perspective and awareness of why DC isn't a destination for foodies like other cities...and why that's a problem. Perspective, in general, seems to be a theme in this thread for what food writers are lacking. But what's the best way to go about getting perspective? I think the process of gaining perspective makes for a great story, and you don't have to be a pro to write well about that. Writing in a bubble, such as the bubble reflected in the Wash Post Food section, is far worse than writing about things that may be inaccessible to the readership.

Consomme rafts are bizarre and extremely cool. Making the mixture is like a child assembling a mud pie, only instead of sticks and leaves it's mirepoix and ground meat. It looks nasty but it works. I look forward to making it again. Rest? Whazzat? I haven't enjoyed as much leisure as I used to, but that's ok. I'm very focused on both school and this diary project, and I'm committed to getting the most out of both experiences possible. This means I have less time to play on eGullet or the rest of the Internet, and it means I see less of my friends for now. I'm fortunate to enjoy so much support in real life. My partner Erin has been instrumental in making sure our social lives don't die a slow death, and both he and my housemate Abi have picked up some of my slack around the house. The other thing I'm lacking on is time for cooking, ironically. I have spent much of my weekends cooking, but on weeknights after school and workout I just want to eat something quick and get cracking on homework and diary entries. I hope that as I learn to manage my time better I can go back to cooking dinner a couple times a week, but I'm coming to terms with the fact that this may not be possible.

Monday, July 15 George is a big guy. He drives a big Suburban-type SUV and likes loud hip-hop music. He’s from Baltimore, where he worked in the restaurant industry for several years. He was sous chef at an upscale restaurant up there when he decided his lack of formal education was holding his earning power and career below where they should be, so he enrolled at my school. He’s excellent in the kitchen, but he sometimes misses things in lecture. He’s good-natured about the ribbing Chef Peter gives him about his inattention during demos. I’ve been dying to work with him since I found out about his history, and today I finally got to be on his team for lunch service due to the shuffling of the class cards. Things happen effortlessly when you’re teamed with George. He instinctively knows how to season a hollandaise, he never forgets about the croutons under the broiler, and he can tell from across the kitchen whether or not those wild mushrooms are properly sauteed. Everything is banged out quickly, yet he doesn’t run all over doing everybody’s work. He gets his teammates involved in the tasks at hand while he makes sure nothing goes wrong. Among today’s enjoyments: whisking the hollandaise while he expertly seasoned it. Piping potatoes for potatoes Marquise while he explained to me why they were coming out lopsided, and having him show me how to do adjust the angle until I piped perfectly. And then there was the ultimate enjoyment: when he tasted my tomato concasse (the one thing I did which he had no part of) and declared it perfect. His approval carries almost the same weight as Chef Peter’s in my book. Lunch was completely on-time, and it elicited no comment worse than “Not bad” from Chef Peter. Despite the magical George influence, I felt I’d learned a lot about all kinds of things: proper technique glazing a fresh fruit tart, how to hold a whisk ergonomically for making hollandaise, how to use a salamander to toast English muffins, and so on. We munched on a composed salad of mesclun, toasted pecans, and goat cheese croutons, followed by more eggs benedict, more glazed carrots, and the Marquise potatoes. The fresh fruit tartlet was a particular delight. My classmate Chin put extra apricots on mine at my request. For some reason, Chin always seems to be teamed with George. He’s quiet and experienced, and like George he is very efficient. Since he is so quiet I haven’t gotten much sense of his personality. He’s very precise with a knife, and his tartlets were gorgeously geometric. Chin works at a dinner house-type chain restaurant on saute station when he’s not in class. Tuesday, July 16 I got my first official feedback on how I’m doing at school today. Chef Peter called me aside about an hour before lunch service and asked if he could speak to me in his office. (He’d warned us late last week that he’d be talking to us individually this week about how we are doing on the class participation grade.) When he called me in he told me I’m doing very well, and that I have one of the higher class participation grades in the class. He said this is because of my attitude and my teamwork. He said I need to work on keeping my station clean (which I knew since he yelled at me about it last week), and he said I need to get my speed up. I was pretty happy with this feedback. He asked if I had any questions and I asked what I could do as homework to help me get my speed up. “Time how long it takes you to tournee a potato. And then try to knock a minute off that time every week. You’ll get faster in no time.” Later, I went and checked my student mailbox. I’d popped a couple recipes in the box for Chef Francois and asked him to look them over and tell me if they were on track. He had returned them with brief comments: “Very good. If anything too detailed.” Nice to hear, since at this point I’ve already invested a good amount of time in writing recipes. Lunch today included consomme, a rice pilaf, a sauteed chicken dish with cream, mushroom, and white wine sauce, glazed carrots, and a crème caramel. I ended up on George and Chin’s team again. I volunteered to do the consomme, since it’s such a classic dish and we haven’t had the opportunity to do one yet. Consomme is a concentrated stock, clarified using a “raft” of egg whites and flavored with ground meat and a mirepoix of vegetables. My raft formed perfectly, and the finished consomme was perfectly seasoned. Everybody came by and commented on its clarity and its strong flavor. George made our rice pilaf after he went to the pastry kitchen to assemble the crème caramels. I’m sorry to report that it was overcooked and gluey, although it did have dead-on seasoning to recommend it. George, Chin, and I all have an inability to cook rice properly (I’d shied away from it for this reason). George isn’t perfect, but I respect and admire him just the same. He seems to respect me as well. He asked to poke through my notebook and then commented on my detailed notes while we were waiting for lunch service. Late in the afternoon, Chef Somchet did a demo on pate a chou. I was very excited to see this demo since eclairs are one of my favorite desserts, and pate a chou is the basis for these delicacies. I look forward to wrestling with the pastry bag tomorrow if I can be the one to make dessert for my team. Later on we’ll get to do fun things like cream puff swans using the pastry dough. Wednesday, July 17 I finally hit the wall on eating meat today. Most of the class seemed to, and nobody gave me a hard time about it, but I still have the willies from my experience. On today’s menu was Le foie de Veau Lyonnaise: Veal liver with onions. I kept an open mind about it for three reasons: my partner Erin really loved veal liver when he ate meat, I used to adore my grandmother’s chopped liver, and I’d promised myself I’d at least try anything that was presented to me. When Chef Peter finished his demo and passed around the plate, I put a piece into my mouth. There wasn’t a strong flavor to it, but it was greasy and left this awful taste and sensation in my mouth. One of my classmates popped a Certs and I actually asked her for one, it was that bad. There was nothing wrong with the liver (I’m sure Chef Peter wouldn’t have passed it around if it had turned), I just found it repulsive. Almost nobody in my class liked it, fortunately, so I didn’t stand out too much in my distaste. I somehow ended up teamed with George and Chin yet again for lunch service (are those class cards being shuffled properly??). The only two major jobs I still haven’t done are saute station (today, that would be the veal liver) and pastry. I am so glad I was able to go make our profiteroles instead of mucking about with the veal liver today…since George and Chin both did pastry this week, I was off the hook. Profiteroles are chou paste baked up into a large walnut size and filled with pastry cream or ice cream (we did the pastry cream version). My profiteroles were a little too large, more like a golf ball, but they were perfectly even and gorgeously browned. I am getting much better with a pastry bag than I was when I was messing about with the Duchesse potatoes for the first time. I’d made a fruit tart over the weekend with the pastry cream, so it was no effort for me to whisk it together in the pastry kitchen. I flavored mine with rum. Chef Somchet suggested I use a tablespoon of rum to flavor a single batch of cream, and I didn’t feel like looking for a tablespoon measure so I just used about ¾ of the bottle’s cap full. Turns out this was more like 2 tablespoons, and I got a lot of ribbing about the strong rum flavor that resulted. Oddly, I didn’t think the pastry cream was that rum-y; I could definitely taste it but I didn’t think it was overwhelming. So then I got ribbed about being a lush too. Heh. After break, Chef Francois discussed various properties of meat with us. He will be talking about meat during his weekly lectures for the next eight weeks or so. Nothing new came across today, but since meat is so foreign to me I look forward to learning a lot in the coming weeks. Chef Somchet promised me that veal liver will not appear again on le menu this session, so I can maintain an open mind about the remaining offal and variety meats yet to come.

That comment about twisting the knife was a joke, actually. Hey Chefchelle, with the sage experience of having been a student for all of three weeks, I'd say there's not much you can do a month out to prepare. You can try a few things, like learning how to hold a knife properly and cut a straight line, at home in your spare time. I did some background reading on French cuisine and on the science of cooking, and the result is that I already know a lot of the things we cover in lecture...meaning I can pay more attention to the demo, which is what I need most. Whenever I think I know nothing, something happens that makes me realize how much I know. Most of the students in my class have some unique knowledge they bring to the classroom, and our instructors are interested in our knowledge if they can learn from it. You're probably no worse off than any other new student, and you'll probably be fine as long as you are enthusiastic and work hard.

Thanks for all the great comments. I have to confess, I haven't seen yet how I stack up academically against my fellow classmates. I know there are folks in my class who never open a book, who are surprised by the extensive and detailed notes that I take, and who moan and groan about the recipes and papers we're expected to produce. Most of those people do a bang-up job in the kitchen, but don't understand the theoretical and scientific processes that lead to a finished dish. I also know there are people in my class who have a hard time grasping basic mathematic concepts, and unsurprisingly, these are often the same people who avoid the pastry kitchen if at all possible. We haven't learned much in the way of math skills yet. I am good at math type skills, but I don't gain much satisfaction from using those skills. Meanwhile I've been interested in and engaged by all the lectures so far, but then I've longed to spend my life focused on food for so long that I can barely believe I get to rub my brain all over it all day. Lucky me! A little math discussion wouldn't affect those sentiments, I'm sure. My academic abilities do not alienate me from my classmates. Perhaps they would if I had an attitude about it, or if I treated my capabilities in the classroom and with the homework as somehow superior to the kitchen abilities of others. I didn't go to school to learn how to write a paper, I went to learn how to cook. I already know how to write, and I completely get the ratios and proportions of various dishes. Some of the people there need more help with those things, but most of them can cut julienne in their sleep. There's nobody lacking in all areas in my class, as far as I can tell. Just today, one of the restaurant guys poked through my notes to see how they compared to his, and another wanted to see one of the recipes I'd shown to Chef Francois so he could see how he should structure his. As for the food, that's a good question. I do not have problems with eating rich foods in summertime. Maybe I'm weird that way. I think lots of "summer foods" like ice cream and potato salad are pretty heavy when you get right down to it. I am eating only a couple bites of meat and egg dishes, and filling up more on the soups and the vegetable sides. We did a composed salad yesterday and I found myself longing to eat just that and dessert for my lunch. Right now I'm really hankering for sushi since the cream and butter are getting a little old. But checking quantities has made it livable so far. I don't go outside during the post-lunch break unless it's in the lower 80s or cooler, so I don't have to face the heat after eating all that food. I thought you were supposed to turn the knife before pulling it out of your hand...? I'm not sure where the crazy glue comes in. We have stuck to American measurements so far. Pastry proportions are given in ounces and pounds.

Thursday, July 11 Two things of interest happened today: I cut myself twice, and a friend of mine sent me an affecting email about my diary. The first cut happened when I was cutting a baguette up to make croutons. I lightly sawed on a cuticle with my serrated knife, but I barely felt it and assumed I had merely nicked the edge. I was quite surprised to look down a minute later and see blood flowing from my finger. I didn’t get upset or anything, I just asked Chef Peter where to find bandages, covered it up, and put on a glove. A few minutes later, I’d finished cutting the baguette and I popped some clarified butter into a saute pan to cook off the croutons. A classmate from another table came by and asked for some of my butter, and since I was holding a chef’s knife I absently popped my knife into the container to lop off a knob for her. The sharp knife went straight through the butter, through the wall of the plastic container, and into the web of my hand between my thumb and index finger. I yelped and instinctively pulled the tip of the knife out of my hand. And then I got really angry at myself, so angry I had difficulty preventing myself from crying. It took me several minutes to staunch the flow of blood, and by the time I did and put another bandage on my hand I’d missed a lot of the work for lunch service. One of my teammates asked me what had happened and I simply said, “I don’t want to talk about it.” I was afraid I’d explode if I did, I was so angry. I had to go back later and apologize to him and explain what had happened because I’d come across as short, even though I knew he was only expressing concern. After lunch (potage egyptien/yellow lentil soup, quiche lorraine using our excellent pate brisee, and duchess potatoes) and dish duty we took our daily break, and I checked my email on my cell phone. A good friend of mine had sent me a message saying that she’s been reading my diary online, but she can’t tell from it whether or not I am enjoying school. She asked if I still thought it was the right decision. Very good questions, and ones I turned over in my head all day. Here is what I wrote her tonight in response: “I am not exactly enjoying things right now, but then I'm not sure I expected to. I had figured the first month or so would be hard. It's a major life adjustment, and there's a lot of skill I need to acquire through repetition (especially knife skills). My lack of facility with a knife has meant that I am so focused on getting better it's hard to focus on anything else, and so I make the occasional stupid mistake. I like the fact of being in school, love my classmates, thoroughly enjoy the lectures and the tastings. But I am not yet spending much time actually cooking, and I am a little frustrated with my slow learning curve on kitchen skills. The people in my class come from such different backgrounds that it's hard to compare myself to them. I lack physical skills, but I have greater academic facility than many of my classmates, and things like writing recipes and papers are total cake for me. I knew that the hard part would be getting up to speed in the kitchen, and once I'd broken through that to the point where basic skills not stress me out, school will become delightfully fun. But until then, it's a day to day thing how I feel. Today was particularly frustrating since I cut myself twice, and I think reading your email after that colored the way I reacted to it. Tomorrow I may feel great about school, who knows. I certainly don't think it was a poor decision, or that I don't belong there. I belong there as much as the next person. “ After today’s break, we spent some time working on the Bastille Day menu for Chef Francois. Every year, Chef Francois makes a big deal out of a fancy menu for Bastille Day, and has students help him prepare, plate and serve it. I would love to work on Bastille Day festivities this weekend, but I have a long-standing out-of-town commitment and therefore will not be able to go. I trimmed and cut two boxes of shiitake mushrooms as my contribution today. Here is the Bastille Day menu: Assorted hors d’oeuvres Asparagus and sorrel vichyssoise with crabmeat Jumbo sea scallops with fennel compote and lobster broth Ravioli of duck and foie gras with artichokes Roasted squab with wild mushrooms Potatoes anna Bastille day dessert 2002, petits fours As an end-of-the-day treat, the pastry students prepared an ice cream buffet for us. Two long tables were set with about 10 ice cream, sorbet, and granita flavors each, plus there were other frozen desserts such as souffles and bombes and homemade ice cream sauces and maple pecans and so on. One of my classmates referred to it as her childhood dream, all those plates of ice cream in bowls of ice waiting for us. It was the first time I’d really talked to any of the pastry students. I discussed scones with one woman, and quizzed another on how she’d made the praline ice cream I particularly enjoyed. One of the students was considering purchasing the same Krups ice cream maker my partner and I recently gave our close friend Edemuth, so I talked with him about my experience with the machine and we chatted a little about the science of ice-cream making. As things were winding down, I happened to be chatting with Chef Somchet and I spontaneously asked her, “What do you think of the state of desserts in DC?” She looked at me but didn’t say a word in response. After a long pause, I smiled and asked, “No comment?” She looked relieved and said, “Yes, no comment.” I hadn’t realized she might react that way, and now I have all kinds of questions in my head about why she didn’t want to talk about it. Who better to ask than a pastry instructor in DC? Friday, July 12 We had a morning demo today as we usually do, but after the demo the students who will work Bastille Day will be helping Chef Francois, and the remaining seven students are expected to produce lunch for the whole school. This might have been a simple matter if we’d been given a simple menu, but today’s menu involved gratineed onion soup, our first chicken dish (bonne femme, with a bacon/pearl onion/cocotte potato garnish), glazed carrots, and even a fresh fruit tart. The seven students cooking were divided into two teams, and we got started around 10:30am for 12:30 lunch service. I was on the team of three, and I successfully lobbied Chef Peter into having the team of four break down his demo. (Normally team one breaks down the demo, and we were team one for the day.) We immediately lost one team member to the pastry kitchen, where she worked with Chef Somchet on two fresh strawberry tarts. My remaining classmate and I got cracking on the rest of the menu. She wanted to work with the chicken, so I started with slicing onions for the soup and then tourneeing the cocotte potatoes while my onions started sweating. The other team was at the next table, frantically doing the same things. Somehow, it didn’t occur to us to reject the team assignments and work together as one large team until the other team got really far behind on their onion soup. Chef Peter wanted to avert disaster, so he had my onions combined with theirs and one single vat of soup made. Soon we had two people working on the chicken, one person managing the soup, and other people sauteeing lardons of bacon and coloring potatoes in pans. Then some of the Bastille Day volunteers finished up, so they came over to help us. I ran about doing whatever I could see that needed to be done: setting up trays of ramekins for the soup, reminding those near the stove to watch the potatoes, washing my classmates’ knives when they got too busy to clean up. The whole operation started to get that teamwork feeling. Everybody knew what they were doing and how to get it done. We were all “in the zone.” Lunch service ended up being close to 1:15pm, but nobody seemed to mind. Even Chef Peter didn’t give us a hard time about our lateness. After lunch and cleanup he even gave us a short break before we returned to the kitchen to do more prep work for Bastille Day. I peeled a bunch of potatoes for the vichyssoise, and then it was 3:30pm and time to go. I felt disappointed that the day was over, because I’d enjoyed the energy in the kitchen so much.

The AWOL classmate still has not appeared. I assume we are down to 17. Steve, good question. Nobody has been competitive yet. It helps that we haven't had to deal with scarcity so far. Dish towels are the only really scarce resource. Chef Peter has mentioned that we will experience more scarcity of foods later on a number of times, and he's said we'll quit being so buddy-buddy when we're fighting another team for a scrap of red pepper. I have not shared my notebook contents with my fellow students. Frankly, I don't see much utility in doing so. Only Chef Francois grades the notebooks, and only his opinion ultimately matters to me. I don't feel insecure about my recipe-writing skills and wouldn't feel compelled to share my recipes with my classmates to see what they think. Rachel, my tournee is improving. I was working on some yesterday to help catch up my teammate who was doing the potatoes, and Chef Peter came by and complimented me on my even cuts. I didn't look up when he did so because I thought he was talking to my teammate, but then he said, "I mean you, Rochelle. Trying to make you feel better." And indeed, I did.

Unfortunately, the egg dishes we have learned to date have not been particularly humorous. If things change, Cabrales, you'll be the first to hear of it.

At home, you can steady your cutting boards by wetting a kitchen towel and setting your board atop it. I do this at home, where kitchen towels are not at as high a premium. At school, I don't think they had enough kitchen towels for everybody to have one when they had classes of over 20 students. They're that scarce. So they use paper towels. I haven't cut myself yet, while tourneeing or cutting anything else. Let's hope it stays that way!

Monday, July 8, 2002 I think I must have left a part of my brain on vacation when I got to school Monday morning, because I had a totally dull-witted day. Well, maybe not totally dull-witted, but I could see things that needed to be done a certain way, see why they were or weren’t working…yet when I tried to execute these things I failed almost every time. I didn’t fail miserably, but it’s extra-annoying to fail when you know better than the work you’re producing. I left home at 7am and arrived at school at 7:40, giving me just enough time to get my neckerchief tied, fix a cup of coffee, and copy down the information on the white board concerning today’s lesson. Chef Peter entered and rang the bell to start class at 8am on the dot. First up was further detail on the concept of mise en place. Chef Peter reminded us that it’s important to be organized about setting up your mise en place, and that forgetting something leads to getting woefully behind later. He suggested that we spend a few minutes developing a game plan when we broke up into teams for fixing today’s lunch, and told us that doing so would save us a lot of grief later. Then he started discussing omelets, which were on the menu for today’s lunch. First he mentioned the differences between cooking omelets in cast iron and in nonstick pans. He explained the importance of seasoning cast iron properly. He had a cast iron pan on the stove when class started, filled with two tablespoons or so of salt. He said that to properly season a cast iron pan, you heat it with salt for 20 minutes or so, shaking it occasionally. The salt turns gray and picks up black specks of crap from the pan. After you dump it out, you rub the pan with a little olive oil using a cloth or a folded-up paper towel, and then it’s seasoned and ready for omelet cooking. A student asked about seasoning a pan by rubbing it with oil and then baking it. He said that would work too, but using the salt allows you to get up any stray blackened bits and that’s why he prefers this method. Nonstick pans don’t require seasoning and take less oil, but they work just as well. He explained some omelet fillings that we will be preparing today: Cheese, usually gruyere or another nonoily melting cheese, or parmesan Ham; remove the skin and cut into small dice Caramelized onions (he mentioned that anything with Lyonnaise in the name contains onions, and said you could call an onion omelet an Omelette Lyonnaise) Mushrooms sauteed in butter Fresh herb: 90% parsley, 5% tarragon, 5% chives, all minced He taught us the difference between scrambled eggs and omelets: scrambled eggs in the French tradition are broken and combined in advance with cream, cooked very slowly in butter using a hot water bath (bain-marie) to form tender curds. Omelets take about 30 seconds, are made from eggs broken and beaten to order without cream, and allow for a light, fluffy, soft texture. To get the right consistency, you whip the eggs well so there are no big ribbons of egg white, and you do it at the last minute. Chef Peter then turned his attention to our other dishes for the day: a basic vinaigrette, used to dress a tomato salad, and some turned potatoes. (Horror swept through the class as we learned that we were expected to turn potatoes for today’s lunch. I felt a little better prepared since I’d actually practiced over the weekend, plus I had my new tourne knife to assist in the process.) The vinaigrette is composed of three parts olive oil to one part red wine vinegar, seasoned with salt and pepper, beaten right before adding to whatever salad it’s dressing. There are also emulsified vinaigrettes, but we didn’t learn any today. The tomato salad we were expected to serve with lunch is simply peeled sliced tomatoes, topped with brunoised shallot, salt, pepper, and the basic vinaigrette. The potatoes are turned in the rissolee size (three to a standard-sized potato), blanched in water, dried, browned in peanut oil, and then cooked in the oven for about 20 minutes until soft in the center. They’re then tossed with butter and chopped parsley. The recipe is simple in every regard except for the fact that the potatoes are supposed to be a certain size and shape which new students notoriously find difficult to achieve. Finally, Chef Peter showed us how to make an omelet properly. He put the seasoned cast-iron pan over fairly high heat and added some peanut oil. Once it was at the smoke point he cracked some eggs into a bowl, added some cheese, and rapidly whipped them with a fork. He added a knob of butter to the pan at the same time as the eggs and used the fork to violently bash about and scrape up the eggs. Once they were about half-set he stopped the harsh, back-and-forth motion and started using the back of the fork to push undercooked egg towards the edges where it could cook more quickly. He then used the fork to fold over one edge about a third of the way, tapped the pan on the stove lip to move the unfolded edge towards the tip of the pan, and folded that edge back onto the omelet. Boom, he tipped it onto a plate, a perfect rolled omelet. He added three of the rissolee potatoes and passed the plate around so we could all taste. The omelet was cooked “Baveuse”, slightly runny and soft in the middle, with no browning to the egg whatsoever. He banged out a couple more omelets (a good thing, since I’d missed most of the first one when I looked at my notebook as I scribbled furiously), and then he dealt our class cards in groups of three for us to go into the kitchen and replicate these dishes. I was placed with the same guy I’d been paired with for soup-making Wednesday plus a friendly sort of woman I’d talked to over lunch last week who waits tables in a well-known Northern Virginia restaurant. We went into the kitchen and, as I said, I mostly zoned out. I volunteered to do the potatoes since I wanted to play with my new knife. I did a passable job with the potatoes, and the practice was much-needed, but I would have been ultimately better served by only doing some of the potatoes and then helping with some of the other tasks. I ended up doing almost nothing besides tourneeing potatoes for lunch service. My team took a break during setup to join one other team of three to learn how to take orders from the faculty and staff for lunch. (Students prepare faculty and staff meals every day; the last few days were an aberration.) Each of the six of us took turns asking a staff member what they wanted for lunch, a moderate challenge since we were trying to use the French pronunciation for the menu items. Once everybody’s order was in, we assigned two faculty members to each student team and told the team what had been ordered. (Most people designated omelet fillings when placing their orders, and some people asked for no potatoes or requested extra salad.) Once lunch service rolled around, everybody on my team tried to avoid making the first omelet. My female classmate went first because I was unable to decide whether or not I wanted to go first and because the man on my team seemed a little too scared to make the first attempt. She was too ginger with the eggs in the pan, so they browned a little bit around the bottom and were a little too dry when she finished. I felt confident I’d do better, because I had seen where she had gone wrong and believed I could fix those problems. I think I did do better than her when I took the next turn, except I had a hard time getting the far end of the omelet shaken to the back of the pan so I could make the second fold. Because it took me so long, the bottom of the omelet browned, and so the finished omelet had a golden color to it. I need to stop being so careful and just make it happen. Much to his surprise, my male classmate turned out a perfect onion and gruyere omelet on his first try. Golden, fluffy, tender, a little soft on the inside. No browning, folded evenly. He is my new hero. We each attempted a second omelet (my second came out much like the first, much to my chagrin), and in between we snacked on bites of omelet and rissoleed potatoes. (The potatoes came out beautifully browned, by the way, and they weren’t at all overcooked…an accomplishment when you consider that they weren’t exactly evenly turned.) After lunch, we were shown a piece of paper with our names broken down into teams for post-lunch cleanup duties. I was placed on dish detail with about four other students. I’ll be doing dishes with these people for two weeks. I’d worked dish detail on Wednesday, so I knew how to operate the dishwasher and took charge of loading up dishwasher trays and so on. I spent a lot of time standing about drying dishes. There aren’t enough dish towels in the school to go around, so my towel got really wet after a while. Seemed like about 10 minutes after we started, people started drifting off, and next thing I knew it was just me and Juan, L’academie’s hired pot-washer, working on the last of the dishes. My back was a little sore and I really wanted to sit down, but it didn’t seem fair to stick Juan with the last of our mess, so I stayed with him. He was kind and after a while patted me on the back fondly and told me he’d finish up alone. I gratefully went and sat in the student lounge for most of the rest of our post-lunch break. After break, school director Francois Dionot came to teach us, which he will do most Monday afternoons. He lectured on dairy products, mostly the differences between milk, half and half, heavy cream, whipping cream, table cream, and crème fraiche. He followed this up by talking some about our recipe notebooks, and explained the minimal level of detail we are expected to produce for our recipes. I rewrote my onion soup recipe, which I have pasted below: La Soupe a L’oignon/Onion Soup Onions Whole butter Garlic BG White wine Chicken stock Sea salt White pepper Caramelize onions in butter. Season with salt and pepper. Add BG and garlic. Deglaze with wine. Add stock and simmer. Remove BG and garlic. Season with more salt and pepper. Tuesday, July 9 This morning’s demonstration and lecture seemed pretty short. We talked about soups and a little bit about eggs, all of which was fairly straightforward. School is beginning to become a routine at this point; everybody is starting to get comfortable and understand what they need to do on a daily basis. We may have already lost a student. One guy was absent both yesterday and today, and unless he has extenuating circumstances I suspect we may have seen the last of him. Ironically, he had attempted to start the program six months ago, but he’d dropped out because he got sick early on and decided to try again in July. I hope he is okay and that he returns to class tomorrow, ready to learn. I already feel protective of my fellow students, and I want us all to succeed. Chef Somchet, the pastry instructor, came to show us how to make an orange salad this morning. There’s a strange and humorous dynamic between Chef Somchet and Chef Peter. Chef Somchet is direct and intelligent, but she’s also very sweet and generous. Chef Peter is also direct and intelligent, but he’s a bit of a jokester at times and Chef Somchet seems to bring it out in him. One of my fellow students mentioned that the two of them seem like they should have their own cooking comedy show, since they clearly enjoy teaching together so much. After the demo, we started our kitchen work by preparing some chicken backs for stock. There were three cases of chicken backs and we had to cut off all the fat and scrape the innards out of them before starting on today’s menu. I knew that there would be a point when I’d become intimately acquainted with raw animal flesh, but I hoped to put it off for as long as possible. Still, it turned out to not be all that bad once I got past the first two or three. Removing the fat was all right, but scraping was pretty bad. Most of the backs still had kidneys attached. I was okay with this until I had one kidney refuse to budge. When I tried to scrape it off it ripped in half. At that same point, one of my team members was talking about how nasty some of her restaurant work cleaning soft shell crabs was, and between her story and my bloody chicken kidney I nearly yarked all over my cutting board. I simply put down my knife and looked away for a moment, and then I washed my hands and touched my face briefly to steady myself. I rewashed my hands and went back to work on the chicken backs with no further issues. Once we finished with the chicken backs we got to work on today’s menu: carrot soup, omelets, chateau (tourneed) potatoes, and the orange salad. I was paired with two female students. One immediately said she wanted to prepare the potatoes since she had not adequately practiced tourneeing. The other student and I were delighted to hear this, since we had both spent the previous day’s food preparation time tourneeing. I handed over my tournee knife for my classmate to try out, and then I got to work on the soup. The soup was easy and fun to put together. Since the whole mess is pureed, I didn’t have to be careful about my knife cuts, which felt liberating after my lack of success with julienne, brunoise, and tournee cuts to date. Nothing burned, or overcooked, or overreduced, or otherwise got messed up. I found preparing our soup to be relaxing, almost meditative. In between working on the soup, I did most of the work for the orange salad. My new peeler did a great job of taking the peel off the oranges; hardly any pith clung to the zest, and what little was there was easily scraped off with my paring knife. I cut off the pith from the oranges while losing almost none of the flesh, and then I sliced the oranges and arranged them on dessert plates. I julienned the zest; Somchet came around while I was attempting the julinenne the zest and pulled out some cut pieces that were too large. “This, I don’t like.” She showed me a thinner piece I’d cut. “This makes me happy.” By this point, I was almost done with julienning the zest, so there wasn’t much I could do about my fat strips. I tried to pull out the largest ones and cut them down. Then, I blanched the zest three times to remove any bitterness, and then one of my teammates made a simple syrup and candied the zest in it. Chef Peter was one of the two guests assigned to our team for lunch. I poured out the finished soup, and we garnished it with cooked julienned carrot and a parsley leaf. Chef Peter declared it excellent, except for a minor lack of salt. I loved it…much better than the version I’d made over the weekend to use up my carrot trimmings. Thick and creamy without being overwhelmingly rich. While we were dishing out soup, Somchet appeared in the kitchen with a sheet pan of focaccia she’d just pulled out of the oven. It was topped with fried basil, parmegiano-reggiano, and dollops of ricotta cheese. Chef Peter brought a heaping plate of it to our table for enjoyment with the soup. After the soup, we got started on the omelets. Somehow I ended up with the task of preparing Chef Peter’s omelet (he requested mushrooms and gruyere). I didn’t successfully turn out a proper omelet yesterday, so I was nervous about my ability to execute a perfect one today. Indeed, the first one I made was undercooked, and wouldn’t fold properly. I ended up eating it myself and preparing a second one for Chef Peter. The second one folded up okay, but he said I hadn’t properly beaten the eggs…there were small ribbons of white showing on the top of the omelet which he pointed out to me. “Nice seasoning, though. Tastes great. Nice and soft on the inside.” Nobody seems to add enough salt for Chef Peter, so that at least brought me some satisfaction. I was sorry that my orange sensitivity meant I couldn’t eat the orange salad, because it looked and smelled lovely. Chef Peter complimented my orange slicing, but then he too commented disparagingly on my julienne skills. “Who julienned this zest? Or, I should say, who attempted to julienne this zest?” I owned up to it, and he sympathized that the zest is oily and hard to cut properly before reiterating that I need to do better at it. I acknowledged I need to spend more time practicing and working on it. After cleanup and break, we heard a lecture from Chef Peter on the different types of pepper, and then he conducted a fat tasting. He’d dished out individual tastes of the following oils: peanut, soybean, canola, corn, grapeseed, safflower, extra virgin olive, pure olive, walnut, hazelnut, almond, sesame seed, and an infused white truffle. He also passed around melted clarified butter and browned butter. We were given pieces of baguette to use for the tastings. I hadn’t realized that there is a difference between the flavor of soybean oil and safflower oil, or that you can really taste the corniness of corn oil and the peanut in peanut oil. They’re not strong, but they’re definitely there. The hazelnut oil was definitely my favorite. One of my classmates said, “Ooh, it’s like Nutella!” when she tasted it. I started imagining salad dressings and ingredients as soon as I put it in my mouth. Dried cherries, frisee, and hazelnut-white wine vinaigrette sounds pretty good. Wednesday, July 10 We started talking about mother sauces today. Lunch includes eggs benedict, so we started off our discussion with the hollandaise mother sauce. Anthony Bourdain would be pleased to hear that we were taught to never hang on to a hollandaise for more than two hours due to food safety concerns. “If you have a four-hour service window, make it again halfway through or take it off the menu.” Hollandaise sauce at L’academie is safe to eat since it’s pitched before it gets truly nasty with bacteria. Hollandaise is a testy sauce to make since it has to be warm, but not too warm, and it requires a lot of whisk work to keep it emulsified and happy. Chef Peter made it look fairly simple during the demo, but of course we knew it wouldn’t be that way in the kitchen. I was placed with the same female classmate when we broke out into teams, plus a guy who I hadn’t really talked to yet. Le menu: potage Dubarry (cauliflower soup), eggs benedict, and cocotte potatoes (the smallest tourne size we’ve learned). My female teammate wanted to make the soup since she hadn’t touched the carrot soup we’d made yesterday (I’d made the whole thing, and she was on my team.) My other teammate wanted more practice with tourneeing potatoes, so we happily let him do most of the cutting. We started a pot on low heat melting some butter so we could clarify it, and I helped cut mirepoix of garlic, leek and onion for her soup. Butter takes a long time to clarify properly. Once it’s separated, there’s an annoying number of small bits of milk solid floating on the top, and you have to remove as many as humanly possible with the use of a ladle. You then have to pour off the clarified butter from the precipitate on the bottom of the pot, being careful not to get any of the goop into your clear yellow liquid. We kept taking turns fishing out milk solids and it seemed like an eternal task. Fortunately we clarified extra butter, and hopefully we won’t have to do this next time. I took care of poaching some eggs for us and putting them in an ice bath to hold until service. My eggs came out beautifully. Chef Peter tasted my poaching water and declared it the only water in the class which had enough acid (white wine vinegar) and seasoning (salt) to poach eggs properly. Everybody else came around and tasted my water so they could see how it should be prepared. I felt proud of my water, plus a little pathetic that I like to be complimented on plain water with vinegar and salt in it. Our hollandaise was coming along when Chef Peter stopped by and started barking at us about the state of our table. “Nine knives and two peelers and three cutting boards and five empty deli cups at a single table, and nobody cutting anything! What is this?” We frantically put things away and wiped down surfaces. I saw a man I’d never seen in the background carrying a clipboard a minute later and realized he was probably the health inspector. L’academie’s health inspection normally takes place around May, but it hasn’t been inspected yet this year, so we knew an inspector might show up any day. I think that’s why Chef Peter freaked out about the state of our table. It was cluttered but not that terribly messy. Soon it was time for service, and we sat down with our soup. Chef Peter declared it too thick, and made us go to a couple of the other tables to check their consistency. (The other students were flattered we were checking their soups, of course, but we were a little embarrassed. My classmate overreduced the soup because it was initially too thin. At least it packed a lot of flavor for a white creamy soup.) After our soup course we reheated the eggs and assembled the eggs benedict. I forgot that you’re not supposed to take an egg off your slotted spoon between when you remove it from the water and when it goes on the English muffin. As a result, we had to peel them off the paper towels I’d set them on, and Chef Peter came by and tut-tutted at us again. At least our hollandaise was smooth and rich and correctly seasoned. After break, we had our first real pastry lesson. Tomorrow’s menu includes quiche lorraine, so today we made our first pate brisee, or broken pastry. Somchet demonstrated how to use the scales to weigh out flour and butter, and then showed us how to cut the flour and butter together with some salt to make a sand-like texture. She spooned in seven tablespoons of ice water and showed us how to scrape the dough together. There was lots of grumbling and furtive looking-about as she finished the demo; clearly, my classmates were largely not happy about pastry work. On the other hand, I was glad we were learning some pastry skills and didn’t mind the work at all. We each made one batch of pate brisee and wrapped it in plastic. I look forward to rolling it out tomorrow.

How long ago did you live nearby? I lived in Dupont for about three years in the late 90s. I was so angry when Blue Plate closed. They weren't trying to do anything fancy, but they consistently turned out top-notch versions of classic dishes. I like Johnny's Half Shell, which now occupies that space, but I miss Blue Plate a lot. Hm, this has nothing to do with pizza. I like pizza!

Where on earth did she get the idea to hit those two places? There's a reason they don't make too many headlines. They both serve overpriced, underwhelming food. I didn't read the article (nor am I familiar with the writer), but I'm not at all surprised by her experiences. Why didn't she do some homework and go someplace decent? There are good eats in DC, and even decent service experiences. The only reason to go to Galileo is to eat in the Laboratorio, and as for the Willard, well, I might go for tea with some girlfriends, but only if somebody else was planning it.

I'm a jam aficionado. I buy new jams all the time and sample them. I had a Polish friend over for lunch today, and we chatted about Polish jams. She mentioned a rose preserve I need to try. Not rose hips, rose petals. Apparently it's a special type of rose that has a bitter pithy "white" on the petals which must be removed before putting the jam by. She spreads a thin layer on her homemade cheesecakes. I told her about the Aronia jam I'd picked up recently at the Polish deli in the next burb over. (Here's a thread about the deli: http://forums.egullet.org/ibf/index.php?ac...4bda8f21e659963 ) I purchased some ginger preserves at a "gourmet" market some time ago and we cracked it open on Thursday when I broke in my new waffle maker. Heaven is a hot crisp waffle slathered with ginger preserves. These were made by Wilkin & Sons. The cubes of ginger were gorgeously yellow-gold-translucent on top of the brown waffle. My favorite jam of all time is the black raspberry from Ferry Landing Farm in Virginia. The farm owner sells at my local farm market. It's dark and sour and just sweet enough and really thick with crushed fruit. The season is kicking in and he says his wife will start cranking it out soon. I can hardly wait. What are your favorite jams? Why? Where do you get them?

My feet are fine so far, but my shoulders got a little sore from practicing yesterday. I might make it downtown to check out clogs today. I bought a U-shaped peeler and a tourne knife at Sur La Table yesterday (they gave me a 10% student discount, yay!). The peeler is one of the OXO Good Grips ones, which I thought would be easier to grasp when wet. They were both super cheep. Hey Nick, we weren't taught to turn the potato as we make tourne cuts. Wouldn't that lead to a "swirly" pattern on the finished potato? I'm all curious now. The finished tourne Chef Peter showed us, and the finished one shown in the On Cooking textbook, both show straight sides. The love and support here and at home are phenomenal. Besides supporting my decision to go to school and pursue my dreams, my partner and my housemate seem amenable to all the carrot soup and hash browns I'm making from my practice vegetable trimmings. (I hope they still want these foods after a month or two of veggie scraps!) I appreciate all the kind words. I've dreamed about doing this for years, but I never dreamed I'd have so many people rooting for me along the way.

Jinmyo, I learned that trick today actually, thanks. A sharp peeler will be even better for keeping the job neat. I think the ones at the school are beyond sharpening, they're so bad, but it's good to know I can sharpen the one I'll purchase myself to keep it in good shape. I don't know yet if I can use my diary for studying. It's not designed as a tool for that, although it might help me codify information I'm learning since I will explain some things as I write my diary. I won't put all my recipe notes in here, and I've already skipped over several techniques we've learned that didn't seem interesting enough to bring here. Knife grasp: Thumb and forefinger at hilt, grasping blade, straddling spine. Rest of fingers curled around handle. This might be wrong, though. It's the grip I learned when I took the recreational knife skill class I mentioned, and Chef Peter has not corrected it, but IIRC it's not exactly what we were taught in class. Will have to check on Monday.

Fresh Fields sells both salted and unsalted Lurpak butter. I'm a little nervous about the flavor punch the salted version must pack! Wilfrid, any butter that is as expensive and small-packaged as Lurpak, especially any butter that is sold near the cheeses instead of with the "regular" butters, counts as "yuppie" butter in my book. Jaymes, I dunno if that's true about buttah, but you use of "bettah" amused me.

A few responses to questions: Bux, there's a paid externship as part of the program. It starts in December. The school helps me arrange it, but where I go depends largely on my interests and where I can get to easily from a geographic standpoint. My plan is not to worry about it for the next month or so, and then to start trailing here and there to see what a few kitchens look like. Meanwhile, I try to peek at kitchens when I dine out, and sometimes I harangue a tour or an introduction to the chef (or both). Stella, the people I spoke with who tried to talk me out of school believed it wasn't a good investment of time and money. "Why don't you just go badger a chef to hire you and learn that way?" Lots of people do learn that way, and that's wonderful. I just thought learning by going to school would work better for me, for the reasons I listed in my introductory post. I have read Kitchen Confidential, and it was helpful and interesting. So far I have worn my DMs, and they have done fine for me, but then I haven't spent more than a couple hours on my feet to date. I may check out some clogs this weekend.

Monday, July 1 I received a letter from the school recently telling me where to go on the first day of school, where to park, what time to report to campus, what to wear, and what to bring. I’d seen the school before, so I knew I would have no trouble finding the appropriate classroom. It’s a small place. I arrived at school about 30 minutes early on Monday morning. I remember approaching the back door, where we were told to enter from the student parking lot, and looking at the door handle. Another phase of my life was on the other side of it. I smiled and turned the handle. I thought I’d be one of the first there, but when I got to the demonstration classroom where new students were gathering I saw almost half of my class had already arrived. We are a class of 18 students total. We all sat quietly, waiting for things to start. Faculty members drifted in and out. Two women to my right were talking animatedly about some kind of Puerto Rican dish with a plantain crust surrounding pork. Nobody else was really talking. About 10 minutes before starting time, school director Chef Dionot came in and told us that there was coffee or tea available and pointed us towards the beverages. At 10am on the dot, orientation began. Chef Dionot introduced all the faculty and had us introduce ourselves. He then began explaining the major components of our education: showing up and actively participating in the classroom, and compiling recipes at home (which is most of what homework we are expected to complete). He spoke at length about the importance of the recipe compilations, explaining that they serve as a self-written map of how to take food and make a finished dish out of it. After about 45 minutes, one of the academic deans came in and gave a PowerPoint-aided presentation on school and classroom policies. Then, the admissions director presented us with our goodies: uniforms, books, and the much-anticipated knife kits. The uniforms included three embroidered jackets, four aprons, two pairs of chef’s pants, and three neckerchiefs. The knives included a chef’s knife, a carving knife, a boning knife, a serrated knife, a paring knife, scissors, and a steel, all in a black carrying case. Books include On Cooking: Techniques from Expert Chefs by Labensky and Hause (overall reference with many illustrations and photos, a very large and heavy book), The Meat Buyers Guide by the North American Meat Processors Association (which is almost all pictures and is a good-sized spiral bound volume), Le Repertoire de La Cuisine by Louis Saulnier (a slim volume filled with basic cooking references), and The French-American Market, Kitchen & Table: A Bilingual Dictionary of Food by Spencer. Our primary instructor for the early part of the program, Chef Peter, came in after we’d been issued our materials and did a brief chat about some of the tools we’ll be using and how they differ. He discussed the differences between a china cap and a chinois (a chinois has a finer mesh), and explained why you want aluminum pots for some applications and stainless steel ones for others (aluminum heats quickly but stainless steel is not as reactive with foods). He also talked about the difference between VitaPrep blenders and basic bartenders’ blenders (the VitaPrep are more powerful, plus they have the naked-chef advertising campaign to recommend them), and other similar distinctions. “You might want to remember this” was his cue for us to write things down, and he warned us that he’ll say “it depends” in response to our many questions which do not have clear answers. It was almost 12:30pm by this time, and we were getting hungry, so I was glad when he said he was going to do a brief plating demonstration and then it would be lunchtime. He wet two paper towels and placed a cutting board atop them, explaining that the paper towels prevent the board from sliding about, and placed a roasted pork loin atop the board. He used his fingers to place some asparagus in the center of a dinner plate, and then carefully scooped some basmati rice into a round atop the asparagus. He sliced three small rounds of the pork and arranged them fanned against the rice. Finally, he used a small ladle to put some of the sauce for the plate around the edges of the asparagus and rice. He explained as he did these things that when people pay $20 for a plate of pork loin that costs $4.95 per pound, they expect you to do something nice with the way it looks. He repeated “A little frou-frou, a little chi-chi” frequently. He talked about how meats need to rest after they’re roasted before carving if you want the juices to stay in each portion. He commented on the contents of the sauce (they included soy sauce and passion fruit), and he complimented the recipe and technique for roasting the pork. He explained that if you dribble sauce on the edge of a plate, you use a kitchen towel to push the dribble into the intended puddle rather than wiping along the edge of the plate where you’ll just spread the dribble into a thin patina of sauce. He told us that it’s usually easier to do a nice presentation of an odd number of items than it is to do an even number. He said normally a restaurant would finish a plate like this with a sprig of some fresh herb or other. His finished plate was simple but quite lovely in appearance. He then shooed us into the main kitchen for lunch. The faculty and instructors had laid out a casual buffet comprised of the pork, the sauce, the rice, the asparagus, baguettes, butter, and an assortment of fresh cookies from the pastry program. We all took plates and served ourselves. As I have posted previously on eGullet, I’ve been working on transitioning meat back into my diet. I optimistically selected two small rounds of pork loin, and loaded up on asparagus and rice. The pork was cooked medium-rare (Chef Peter: “Trichinosis isn’t a serious concern any longer.”) and the sauce was salty and rich. The asparagus and rice both tasted of butter and salt, but they weren’t at all overwhelmed…the rice was especially tasty with the pork sauce. The baguettes are great: light and airy inside while blessed with a substantial, chewy crust. And I thought the merengue cookies were great. (The chocolate spritz, on the other hand, suffered from a bit of dryness.) Over lunch, I sat at a table in the kitchen with some of the other women from my class. One of them is a mother and restaurant owner who lives in a resort town four hours away; she’s staying with her in-laws during the week and going back to her kitchen on weekends. Another is a dietician who is interested in moving her career more towards institutional food service. A few people are refugees from the collapsed tech sector (one had left MCI WorldCom to start school not too long ago). There are also a few people who work in restaurants already and want to earn more pay and prestige. Two people had formerly worked in the same restaurant together, so they knew one another and got together to gossip about it. There are also people who have worked as mechanics, a former member of the Navy, a longtime nanny, and a few younger folks with high school educations but little to no work experience. The group is fairly gender balanced. We cleaned up our plates and such after eating and then we enjoyed a 30-minute break. I used the time to flip through my new books a little, and I chatted with some of my fellow students about who they were and why they’d enrolled. After the break, we reconvened for a school tour. Chef Peter took us into the main kitchen first, which has a bank of stoves and grills along one edge and several work tables staggered in the center. He explained the importance of turning on the exhaust hoods before starting the stoves, and told us that we’d have to take apart a stove and relight it if the hoods were turned on later (apparently this makes the pilot light go out). He showed us where refrigerators are: a side-by-side style “reach in” for fish plus a walk-in for dairy, fruit and vegetable products are by the main kitchen. The walk-in also serves as a reach-in, since there are small glass doors built into the side which can be accessed without walking into the body of the refrigerator. There’s also a table loaded with spices, oils, and other flavorings in the main kitchen, and racks holding Vita-Preps and Robot Coupe food processors. Our tour continued past the walk-in to where supply storage, including disposable paper supplies and cleaning supplies, and the dry storage are located. Dry storage includes flour, salt, excess seasonings and oils and other flavorings, the limited canned goods used at the school, and so on. “The chocolates are on the left. Don’t eat too many,” Chef Peter said. (He pantomimed sneaking chocolates as he said this.) Around the corner there’s a men’s locker room, a women’s locker room and student lounge, and then the academic offices. The pastry program students (who are only at the school a few days per week) were in class in the pastry kitchen, so we didn’t get a chance to peek at it. After the tour, we filed back into the demonstration kitchen (which, by the way, had long tables with chairs behind them facing a long counter with stoves built into it and a mirror overhead). We took a reading comprehension test (which was ridiculously easy) and were told we could leave once we finished. I left the school at 3pm. Our only homework assignment was to read the chapters on professionalism and sanitation in the book On Cooking. Tuesday, July 2, 2002 I didn’t know how long the commute would take, so I left home at 6:30am. I arrived at the school at 7:15am; I would have been there at 7 except I’d stopped in a hardware store to buy a lock for my locker before going on to class. Only one other student was present, and Chef Peter of course was already there and working. I asked if I could help him in any way and he suggested that I put away the onions and carrots that had arrived with that morning’s deliveries. I did so as quickly as possible (nothing like lifting 50lb bags of root vegetables first thing in the morning) and then asked him if more assistance was needed. He said no, so I got a cup of coffee from the beverage station beyond the locker rooms and sat down. I finished my reading assignment (physical contaminants include hairs and metal shavings; chemical contaminants include cleaning solutions and drain cleaner type items) and watched as the rest of the class filtered in. Chef Peter set up some vegetables for himself at the front of the classroom, and then he wrote down some information on a whiteboard which I copied down. This information included a basic outline of knife types, the vegetables we’d be cutting, the basic cut types for vegetables, and the basic cut types for potatoes. Once 8am rolled around, he rang the bell to start class. We started off with a demonstration of how to tie our neckerchiefs and our aprons. The neckerchiefs are large cotton squares, which we fold down and then tie like neckties. I’ve never worn a necktie, so I had a hard time figuring out how to do it and needed a fair amount of assistance. I don’t think it looked too neat when I was done. The aprons are the around-the-waist sort, not the kind with a strap behind the neck. We’re supposed to fold the apron over to shorten, and the strings pass behind our backs and come back around tie in the front. I like the crisp look we have with the aprons, jackets and pants on, though I could take or leave the neckerchiefs. At least we don’t have to suffer with toques or other hats. The morning’s lecture consisted of a brief overview of the topics we’d read about last night and then a full discussion of knives plus demonstrations of the basic knife cuts. Chef Peter went over the materials knives are made of and what the parts of a knife are. He showed us a carbon steel knife, which I have never seen. They are not considered safe in this country because they discolor most foods, but they keep a great edge. The morning got more interesting when Chef Peter started demonstrating classical knife cuts. First up was a julienne: he took a fat carrot, peeled it, and cut off a 2.5” chunk. He then squared it off by cutting pieces off of the edge. Then he cut even 1/8” planks off of the squared carrot. Then he cut the planks into 1/8” strips. This is the classic julienne: when you look at it from its short end, it should look like a square, and it should be tiny. To make a brunoise, you cut the julienne strips at 1/8” intervals to make tiny cubes. Seems simple, but it’s incredibly hard to do, as I found out later in the day. There are also specific methods for creating a brunoise cut from onions and shallots. These are methods I had learned before when I took a recreational knife skill class, and I was proud that I understood the concept already and was later able to execute an even onion brunoise (although the cubes were too large). Other cuts include a mirepoix (rough dice), paysanne (hard to describe, sort of like the 1/8” planks cut into 1/4" strips and then cut into triangles or other shapes), and jardiniere or batonettes. There was less time spent on discussing these cuts than on the julienne and brunoise. In addition to the julienne and the brunoise, we learned how several potato cuts should look, including pont neuf (large rectangles), frit (slightly smaller rectangles), and so on. Chef Peter demonstranted the use of a mandoline to get crisp or chip cuts and gaufrettes (waffle chips). Finally, the dreaded tourne, or turned cut: cocotte, rissolee, and chateau cuts, the three sizes of barrel-shaped cut potatoes (in order from smallest to largest). The tourne is supposed to have seven even sides and be tapered at the ends and thicker in the center. I’ve heard a lot about it and it seems pretty hard to do evenly. There are beak-shaped tourne knives you can use for doing it, but you can also use a paring knife. Finally, Chef Peter showed us how to make a studded onion and how to make a bouquet garni (hereafter referred to as a BG). The onion is used for flavoring light colored soups and sauces, and a BG goes into all sorts of soups and sauces. Studded onions are slit, the slits are stuffed with a bay leaf, and then you use two cloves to “pin” the bay leaf into the slit. BGs consist of a few peppercorns, a bay leaf, a pinch of thyme, and some parsley stems wrapped up in a bit of cheesecloth and tied with kitchen string. I tried hard not to get mixed up with all the cuts, but I was worried about my ability to execute any of them. Once the demos were over we were told to set up stations for ourselves with two carrots, two stalks of celery, two potatoes, a shallot, and an onion. We were to peel our vegetables and get them ready so we could practice cuts after lunch. Once we were released to set ourselves up I began hustling. I was convinced that I’d be efficient and clean, and since I’d put away carrots and onions in the morning I knew where they were kept (not everybody had seen exactly where such items were from our tours). I swiftly collected a cutting board and two work bowls from the dish area, and set up two damp paper towels under my cutting board as we’d been shown to anchor it. I collected and cleaned my vegetables and set out my paring knife, my chef’s knife and my steel from my knife set. The school only has a few peelers for all the students to share, so while I waited for my turn I peeled my onions and shallot with my paring knife. Chef Peter came by and lifted my cutting board. “Two damp paper towels, Rochelle.” I protested: “They’re on there, they’re just sticking to the underside of the board.” Chef Peter smiled. “I see. There’s one in every class,” and then he wandered off. The school peelers are terrible. Dull and rusty and old. It was hard to control them, so I ended up with bits of carrot all over the place once I finally had my turn at peeling them. I knew I’d need to keep my work area clean, and I managed to avoid getting much on the floor, but I felt I was swiping up bits of carrot for far more time than it took me to peel them. I plan to buy my own peeler this weekend. As it was, there were no skills required to speak of for setting up my “mise en place” (food and equipment set up, so everything is in place and ready to go), and since I’d hustled I finished rapidly. I helped the student who was stationed next to me with my extra time, peeling a carrot and wiping up potato scraps for him. I knew that when we practiced our cuts after lunch I wouldn’t feel so ahead of the game, so it was nice to able to be fast about the easy stuff. As soon as we were done with our mise en place, we took our lunch break. The faculty prepared our meals again: steak, potatoes au gratin, buttered steamed broccoli, and brownies. I ate a small piece of steak and lots of potatoes and broccoli. The potatoes were salty, cheesy and browned. I sat with some of the guys who had worked in restaurants during lunch. One of them, who had been a sous chef before coming to school, told me that he never cooks in his spare time. “I just eat whatever’s around. I don’t want to cook after spending 60 hours a week in the kitchen.” He clearly enjoyed having the faculty prepare lunch for us. There’s a break after lunch every day. I spent most of my break walking around seeing where things were: checking out the spice inventory (they stock Italian sea salt, fleur de sel, Hawaiian sea salt which is an intriguing red, Kosher salt, and more), the contents of the paper product boxes and the identities of the small boxes and jars in dry storage. I also investigated the walk-in refrigerator and nosed around dish storage to see where to find those items. Chocolates are indeed on the left when you enter dry storage, and no, I didn’t sneak any. It’s interesting that there’s such a laissez-faire attitude towards eating at the school. The school does not run a restaurant, so all the food is for the students, faculty and guests to eat. It seems to be okay to snack on carrots while you’re cutting them, and nobody stopped one of my classmates from packing a couple brownies to take home to their spouse. After the break it was time to practice our knife skills. I’d had an inkling that these might be difficult for me, but I was rapidly cowed by my lack of ability. I’d set up near the restaurant guys, who quickly piled little foam plates with beautifully cut carrots, onions and leeks, all even and tiny. I was struggling to make even cuts just for “squaring off” my carrots. The planks I cut for julienne and brunoise were thicker at one end than the other, and when I tried to shave bits off of my planks I usually overcorrected and ended up having to shave bits off the other end. When I cut my planks into small julienne matchsticks, the ends looked triangular or trapezoidal instead of square when inspected head-on. It was hard going. I tried to be slow and deliberate but found that I didn’t do much better when careful than I did when I just tried to get the job done and over with. Even cutting pont neuf, which are large blocky potato rods, was difficult for me. Chef Peter came around to check on us, and the student next to me (who was having as hard a time as I was) asked him to redemonstrate cutting planks and juliennes from celery. I went over to watch as he worked, and he showed us how to even up the planks via shaving with the knife, plus how to remove the riblike ends from the inside edge of the celery plank. The extra demonstration helped a little, but not much. When Chef Peter checked out my julienne and brunoise samples he didn’t look too impressed. I wasn’t shy about trying the tourne…everybody would have a hard time with it, I reasoned, and I may as well get started on messing around with it. I cut a peeled potato in half and started pulling off strips with my paring knife. The potato got smaller, and smaller, and smaller until I had turned my potato half from chateau sized to rissolee size to cocotte size and finally into a beleaguered narrow scrap. I tried with two more potato halves and didn’t do much better. There were far more than seven sides to my finished potatoes, and they didn’t taper cleanly from the center to the ends. I tried not to get too stressed out about the knife cuts. I have a long weekend ahead for practicing, and I wasn’t the only one having problems. Just the same, I wished I was better at least with cutting the planks, and I had to focus to avoid getting frustrated. Several of the students were having similarly difficult times with their cutting skills, and we all tried to help one another as best we could. I peeled extra potatoes and carrots for other people, and was delivered onions when somebody else ran off for more. Still, despite the camaraderie I was glad when things ended. Again, I was very quick with cleaning up my mise en place, and was able to spend time helping others clean up and put away their materials. After our cutting practice we took a math exam, the second component of the comprehension and skills test we’d started yesterday. And then I left class for the day. Homework: we were told to read the chapter in On Cooking on knife skills. Wednesday, July 3 Today is the first day we will be cooking: we are expected to produce onion soup, and eat it as a part of our lunch. The temperatures are in the upper 90s outside, which is not good onion soup weather, but I’m eager to get at it anyway. I just want to get into the kitchen, since that’s where I feel I have the most to learn. I left home at 7am today, and arrived at school at 7:25. It’s a light traffic week in DC since Congress is on leave and a lot of people are out of town. There were about 6 students there when I arrived, most of whom were working on their knife skills or helping Chef Peter set up for the morning’s demo. I asked Chef Peter if he needed help and he asked me to take some large plastic containers of chicken stock and put them into a stockpot, and then set the stockpot on the stove over high heat. I had to ask for assistance but it didn’t take me long to get it done, and I remembered to turn on the exhaust hood before starting the stove. There was nothing else that needed to be done after that, and I didn’t really have enough time to set up, practice knife cuts, and clean up before class, so I got a cup of coffee and had a seat in the demonstration classroom to wait for class to begin. At 8:01am Chef Peter greeted us and asked me what time it was. “8:01.” He grimaced slightly. They’re pretty serious about being on time here. No student has been late yet, but I know it will happen, especially in September when the city fills up and traffic gets crazy again. A whiteboard was already set up with a list of what we’d be learning that morning, and Chef Peter had a pot of water simmering and another pot of oil set up along with mise for our soup demo and so on. Chef Peter began by thinly slicing some onions for our soup. As he did so he explained that thinner slices have more surface area, so they will cook darker and caramelize more completely than thicker cut slices. He put some butter in a pot and melted it over medium heat, and then he added the onion slices. He talked a lot about the difference between sweating, sauteing and searing (he was sweating the onions). He explained that you need to keep listening to the sound of the onions cooking to help you get a sense of when they need to be stirred and when to add ingredients. He talked a lot about caramelization, the thin brown bits that stick to a pan which you can then deglaze by adding a liquid and scraping them to loosen them up. Caramelization and deglazing help you build the flavor in a dish. Once his onions were starting to brown, he deglazed his pot with some water. He cooked the onions and water until they were “a sec,” or completely dry and starting to caramelize again. He repeated the deglazing with water, and again cooked the onions a sec. Finally he deglazed one last time with white wine. By this time the onions were completely wilted down and turning into a tangled mass, and they were a dark golden brown color. All along the way, he added salt and ground in white pepper, stirred to keep the onions off the sides of the pan where they could burn, and added other flavoring ingredients (a BG and a slightly smashed garlic clove, which he removed after the wine deglazing). Eventually he added chicken stock, skimmed the fat and foam that rose to the top, and let the soup simmer for 15 minutes. He passed it out in small portions for tasting: very salty and peppery and sweet and rich. This was what he wanted to see from us. In between working on the soup, Chef Peter demonstrated how to blanch various foods. Tomatoes are blanched to remove their skins. Green vegetables are blanched to parcook them and make it a faster job to prepare them when somebody orders them in a restaurant. Bones and meats are blanched to remove impurities such as blood before using in stocks. Potatoes are blanched so they can be stored outside of water and so they will cook more quickly and evenly when somebody orders them. I was already familiar with blanching for the most part, but I took lots of notes to make sure I could keep it all together. Since we are expected to write recipes for every dish we cook, I took lots of notes to help me write my recipe for onion soup. I coped down almost everything Chef Peter said to do for the soup. Here is what I wrote, verbatim: La Soupe A L’Oignon Onions Whole butter (not clarified) Garlic BG White wine Chicken stock Sea salt White pepper Peel onions. Remove root and slice finely; the more finely, the more color your onions will introduce during caramelization. Slightly old, softer, sweeter onions tend to work best. Melt butter on medium heat in pot. Add onions. Sweat over moderate heat. Onions will turn clear and a little brown. Season with white pepper and salt. The bottom of the pan should turn brown. Stir so none of the onion sticks to the side of the pan using a heatproof spatula or a wooden spoon. Add enough water to cover the onion by 1/4 to 1/3. Stir to release brown bits from bottom of pan. Add BG. Reduce a sec. The color in the pan will develop more quickly. When it’s dry, add the same amount of water again. Add whole garlic clove that has been lightly crushed and peeled. Add more S&P. Taste to see if you can taste S&P, adjust seasoning. Reduce. Color should be well developed. Cook a sec. Remove garlic when it starts to break up. Deglaze with white wine. Add enough so that it covers the bottom of the pan and comes partway up the onions. Reseason if necessary. Cook a sec. Bring your chicken stock to a boil and cut back to a simmer in a separate pot. Add stock to pan. Stir to release solids. Taste and adjust seasoning. Bring to a boil and reduce to a simmer. Foam or scum may rise in pan; remove with ladle. Use bottom of ladle to stir surface and force the impurities to the edge, and then scrape up and remove with the ladle. Simmer for 15-20 minutes. Remove BG. Classically served in a ramekin. Use one half onion per serving. Once we tasted the soup, Chef Peter pulled out a deck of cards that he’d previously prepared with our names on them. He shuffled them and then dealt them in pairs. I was paired with one of the younger students. We went into the kitchen to make our first onion soup. I set up our equipment while my partner retrieved the foods, liquids and seasonings we’d need. I got to work on peeling the onions and as soon as he came back we started slicing them. I think we sliced ours too thickly, but they were thinner than some of the other students’ onions. I wanted to work quickly because I wanted to get a prime spot on the stove for our soup, and indeed we were the second team to be ready to hit the stove. We followed the procedure above for the most part, although the edge of the pan got a little too black because we waited too long for the second deglazing. I think my partner was a little intimidated since he didn’t know much about food or cooking in general before starting school, nor did he have much kitchen experience, and so I found myself guiding and coaching him. We managed to get our soup ready in the hour we’d been allotted. Chef Peter came by to taste it when we finished up. His verdict: we needed more salt, but otherwise it was a good soup. Our soup was darker than about 2/3 of the soups other teams prepared, which I thought was good since our onions were probably too thick. My partner and I agreed to work on our knife skills over the long weekend so we could make a thinner slice next time. Once our soups were ready we ate lunch. The faculty prepared some cold cuts, a tomato-olive salad, a tossed salad and a cheese tray to go with our soup. I’d had enough meat by that point (I don’t really eat much meat, and I ate more this week than I have in about a decade) so I made a cheese and salad sandwich instead of eating cold cuts with my soup. Over lunch I talked to some other students about what we’d do over the holiday weekend. We all professed interest in practicing knife skills. One person had a new boyfriend who has a boat, so she said they might go for a long sail, and another person planned to play golf despite the Washington heat. Nobody planned to go downtown for fireworks, what with the security. As we were washing up from lunch, the school’s director Francois Dionot started nosing around the remaining pots on the stove and sampling soups. I went over just as he was about to taste the one my partner and I had made. He saw me approaching and asked, “Is this your soup?” “Yes, Chef Dionot.” He ladled some out into a small ramekin and tasted it. “It’s a little too acidic. Either you added too much wine, or you didn’t cook it a sec once you deglazed with the wine.” I nodded. He kept sipping at his ramekin. Then he started fussing with the ladle in the pot. I asked, “Would you like the rest?” “Yes, please. I love onion soup, it’s one of my favorite things.” I poured out the rest of our soup into his ramekin and he slurped it up. The acid must not have been terribly bad if he chose to polish our soup off. I was pretty happy about this interaction. As we were scrubbing down the kitchen, my partner from the soup came over to me and asked me some questions. He said he was too shy to ask Chef Peter but he thought I could help. He was having trouble understanding why you blanch a tomato for only a few seconds when a green vegetable blanches for a few minutes, and so on. I explained the distinctions, and gave examples and tried to help him understand the hows and whys. He seemed to get it a little better and thanked me for my help. It’s nice to be able to teach somebody else something about food. All in all, it was a pretty good day. School let out once we were done cleaning up from lunch as a holiday treat. This weekend: buy a nice peeler and a tourne knife, and practice, practice, practice!

Edemuth and I cracked open the Aronia jam this morning during our butter and jam sampling blitz. (See "Buttah" thread for more details.) I suspect the brand is the Polish equivalent of Del Monte...an inexpensive national label of condiments. It was sweeter than I hoped it would be (I thought it might be more tart than sweet, mostly since it was labeled "Reduced Sugar Jam" on the pasted-on English label). It wasn't bad though...the fruit is small, the size of a fresh currant, and there were many whole pieces in there. The jam was somewhat sweet and mildly acidic, and it was a gorgeous dark purply color. The fruit tastes somewhere between blueberries and cranberries, but much closer to the blueberry side. Goes nicely with Lurpak or Plugra butters, but then doesn't everything?

My buttah explorations continue: A couple months ago I found some Burro Occeli (sp?) at Dean and Deluca's Georgetown/DC store. I bought it and carted it home and immediately smeared some on a slice of baguette. It has a sunnier, almost grassier flavor than my usual Plugra. The subsequent weekend I melted the rest of it and fried some fresh sage leaves in it and used it as a sauce for some homemade spinach-ricotta raviolis. My brunch guest was appropriately impressed. The packaging was really cool too, which it should be for butter so obscenely expensive as this stuff. Yesterday Edemuth and I visited Fresh Fields and I successfully lobbied her into picking up Lurpak instead of some Plugra for her kitchen. This morning I again successfully lobbied her into bringing her Lurpak up to my kitchen for a tasting. The medium of choice: Pepperidge Farm "Toasting Bread," a decent relatively-blank white bread that crisps nicely in the toaster. We compared my Plugra with Edemuth's Lurpak and the Lurpak wins, hands down. It's got a nice cheesy, cultured/aged flavor to it, yet it's not too strong. Edemuth said she thinks Plugra on toast requires salt, but she thinks Lurpak doesn't (we were tasting unsalted versions of both butters). We raised our toast pieces to Priscilla and Yvonne Johnson for guiding our butter choices. I still think I'll stick to Plugra since it is so much cheaper than Lurpak and other yuppie butters, but the Lurpak is definitely worth picking up next time I have company over and want to impress. We also tasted a bunch of jams, but that's a subject for another thread.

Welcome, Chefchelle. I wonder how long it will take people to confuse us? Jinmyo, I'm not sure I want pics of me in my new cooking threads circulating online, but I'll consider the idea.

Thanks for all your kind thoughts. The school has not given me any guidance about advanced reading or preparations. I have read quite a bit in the past year to help me prepare (and because I'm simply interested in the subject, of course). Selections included Escoffier's cookbook and McGee's On Food and Cooking. I do not know what books I will be issued, but I look forward to finding out. I have paid a "supplies" fee which includes all the books I will need, as well as a nifty knife kit complete with carrying case. These items will be issued along with my chef's jackets and pants on Monday. I own a very nice knife set, but I am glad I won't have to cart it around with me (I am sure my home knives are better than the ones they issue, but that's okay with me.) As for photos, I have no specific plans to take any pictures, since I am terrible with a camera. I make no promises, but I will consider it if there's widespread interest in visuals.

I'll "answer" to either. Much as you yourself do. I have indeed considered my footwear needs. I know it will be hard to adjust to being on my feet initially, but I also know from personal experience that I'll be fine within a week or so if I have the right shoes. The school has not yet given us guidance on footwear. I took note of the shoes I've seen people wearing in kitchens and I have some ideas for what to try. I own Doc Martens and black sneakers and will probably try both before I take the leap and invest in chef's clogs, since if something in my current shoe collection works I'd rather save the money for eating out. I saw somebody in a kitchen once wearing Birkenstock clogs, and those might be the next thing I try if the DMs and the sneakers don't work/aren't acceptable. When I have trailed, I wore the DMs. One important thing I have tried to do is get my body ready for this experience. I exercise daily and try to lift weights to keep my muscles in shape. In the past few months I've put myself through some paces with testing my endurance. I expect some muscle fatigue and figure I'll do well if I can just avoid injuries. I'm not a total klutz but I'm not always one of those folks with a keen sense of my spatial environment either.

Ever wonder what it’s like to be a culinary student? Me too. My name is Rochelle Reid Myers. I live in Washington, DC. I am starting a one-year professional culinary program at L’academie de Cuisine in Gaithersburg, MD on Monday, July 1. A few years ago I started considering larger questions about the direction of my career and personal interests. About a year ago I started toying seriously with the idea of pursuing a food-related career. Looking over the jobs I’d had, I realized that all but one of them had involved either food or writing in some sense. It seemed logical to bring my twin interests and skills together into a single career. So I decided to move my publishing career in a food writing direction. I’m genuinely interested in all kinds of things related to food. I might like to do some kitchen work to continue learning. I like the idea of teaching people about food, which is something I do already. I spoke to many people working in food-related jobs that seemed interesting before deciding on this direction. They included a cookbook ghost writer, a newspaper food features writer, and an Italian wines expert who has a long history of freelancing. I read books such as Michael Ruhlman’s The Making of a Chef on the experience of the program at the Culinary Institute of America. I spoke to people who worked as chefs and line cooks. I asked them all how they started doing what they do, why they enjoy their work, and what they thought somebody interested in doing similar things should do. I have not yet spoken with a food writer who has a formal culinary education such as that afforded by a degree or a period working as a stagiare in a restaurant. I also have not yet spoken with a chef who thinks culinary school is an essential part of my future direction. So why did I decide to enroll? I think it will be nice to take a year to intensively study my new field. I want to be able to speak the language and gain the respect of chefs and other professionals on their own terms. I want to have some time to develop connections with people in DC’s culinary community without trying to make a living at the same time. I am tired of my former work in publishing but don’t yet have the tools I need to move into my new job. I want better knife skills, and I want to learn French culinary techniques. I only applied to one school. I chose L’academie de Cuisine because it is located near Washington, where I live. I am not at a point in my life where I want to leave Washington. There are a few other options for culinary education locally, but L’academie carries the strongest reputation and has the added benefit of being extremely well-connected to DC’s upper level restaurants. I like that the academic program includes a six-month paid externship. I visited the school and liked the people I met, and the students I spoke with spoke highly of their experience. I also spoke to an alumnus who was working in the kitchen where she had externed, and her recommendation carried significance for me. My application was well-received and school director Francois Dionot seemed to like me fine after my interview, and I liked that he seemed both serious and passionate about food and his school. I did not hesitate to send in my deposits and order my chef’s jacket and pants as soon as I was accepted. I’ve had many people try to talk me out of going for a culinary degree. I am reminded of the traditional Jewish approach to interested converts: a Rabbi is supposed to turn one away three times before accepting them. I’m fully willing to hear arguments about why this is not my best path and ideas about what a better path would be, but they’re unlikely to change my mind. School starts Monday, July 1. I will be in class daily from 8am to 3:30pm, Monday through Friday. I know a lot of the things I will be learning, but I don’t know what order they will come in except that the early part of the program focuses on knife skills. Classes wrap up mid-December and I will begin my externship immediately thereafter. During the six-month externship I will return to school every Tuesday for additional classwork. I intend to keep this diary at least until the externship phase of the program begins in December. I look forward to your comments and questions, and hope to give those of you who are interested a glimpse into the life of a culinary student.