ZenTaurus

Today, I discovered a tragic gap in my cooking knowledge. I love how sauces add to meat, and so I want to have a few different sauces for each kind of protein, for whenever I have a cut of meat that just needs to be extra delicious. So far I've got a mushroom cream sauce that's wonderful for steak and beef, a beur blanc for white fish and most anything with lemon for salmon and other pink fish, and chicken is just an amazingly forgiving protein, everything from lemon, to spice or curry, to a cream sauce can work with it. Today, however, I was scrounging supper with a friend, and we only had pork chops, and I realized that, not being a huge pork fan, I had totally neglected to learn any sauces that go with pork, and i couldn't think of a single thing from what we had or had access to that would taste right with it. So, does anybody know a really killer sauce that works with pork?

Thank you Mike for seeing this before me and saving me the trouble of digging through my book collection. I knew I had read about something like that in a roald dahl book, but i couldn't remember which one. On a side note, this sounds absolutely delicious.

I was just wondering if i could get some input on culinary school, and whether it's worth it or not, from the perspective of both students and people who have hired for a kitchen before. To those who went there, did what you learned help you? and was it worth the investment of time and money? and for the people hiring, is that a real plus to someone who wants a job in your kitchen, or not so much?

This thread reminded me to go out and grab a box, and i'm currently munching on them with some pepperoni and cheese, a perfect midnight snack. thanks for the inspiration!

Matty, thank you so much, that was exactly what I had been looking for (it also hit very close to home, as I'm coming to the the same college/real-life juncture you were before you decided to leave o_0)

As a fellow college student, I'm obscenely jealous of your daughter from reading about all the wonderful things you're sending her. Food-wise, you're doing excellently, although you might want to ask her what she's liked the most and least of the care packages so far, as personally i've gotten a few excellent surprises and a few completely redundant ones (my parents are under the impression that ramen is some sort of rare delicacy, unobtainable within a 100 miles of my campus) that are just sitting in my cabinet. As far as soft TP goes, I can personally vouch that it would be appreciated, as most schools seem to have entered into bulk-purchase deals with sandpaper factories to save some cash. Sending protection...no no no no no no no a thousand times no. Colleges know perfectly well what we get up to, getting protection on campus if it's needed is never a problem. That being said, keep up the good work!

Thank you all so much for your responses, I couldn't have asked for better ones. Vice's post definitely is a good question, however, and I'd even take it a step further. You've told me about the general, what is possible, what isn't, what can be expected, etc. Now talk specifics. Tell me about YOUR cooking career, from the moment you first picked up a chef's knife to where you are today. Did you go to culinary school? Did it all start with a fateful bake sale back in 2nd grade? Did you drunkenly stumble into a kitchen job during your youth and never leave? what have you loved, hated, what parts do you miss the most, and what are you still aspiring to? Lay it on me.

I'm currently 18, a first-year in college, and I'm just wondering if I could get some answers about a question that has been bothering me for a while now. I love food, I always have. I love eating and trying new and different foods, finding and trying new restaurants and different ethnic foods, cooking, baking, learning new techniques in the kitchen and seeing how mixtures of different ingredients work or don't. I love the smell of food, the sight of it, and above everything else, I love seeing someone take that first bite of food that I've prepared for them and just close their eyes with a look of happiness. I've never worked in a professional kitchen before, but I am going to this summer come hell or high water. Up until a few years ago, I had the (blissfully ignorant) dream of "learn to cook well, find out my favorite area, be it baking, french cuisine, seafood, etc., and open my own restaurant/cafe/bakery/shack on top of a volcano accordingly" Then a few years ago, I read Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, and generally started taking an honest look at what the profession would be like. The above plan got crushed pretty quickly when the general consensus seemed to be "get ready for years of soul-crushing poverty, minimum wage, and wrecked knees, and then when your body finally gives out from endless 80-hour weeks, you're out of the industry and out in the cold" Not exactly the most cheery portent out there, no? Then, maybe a year ago, I started to lurk the forums here and saw so many examples of people of all ages who were in the industry and loved it, despite all the hiccups (i.e. the triumphant return of those old favorites, soul-crushing misery, powdered kneecaps, and minimum wage) Even with all this, food is what I want. Food is the only thing that I am passionate enough about to honestly see myself spending a lifetime at it and still loving, despite my best efforts to convince myself otherwise when I read kitchen confidential and the other uniformly negative resources. tl;dr = start reading riiiiight...now! My real question then, is whether it is possible or not to make a life out of working with food. I want it to be, more than anything else in my life right now, I want to be able to be around food my entire life, and without starting to hate either it or myself along the way. (then if it is, hopefully I can figure out how, as well, haha) So...is it?