Field Day for Skye!

Today, Chef Carpenter said 2 of the sweetest words I've ever heard when he started his lesson: "Potato Cookery". :-D

Anyone that really knows me, knows that potatoes are probably my absolute favorite food. It's SO versatile!!! You can cook them 50 different ways, and each one can taste different.

Today, we made some rockin' Pommes Dauphinoise (dau-fin-nowa). Basically, potatoes au gratin. Cream, thinly sliced garlic, greuyere cheese, salt, pepper - what's not to love?? Delish!

Then, we moved onto Pommes Anna. That was pretty cool. We had to peel a few potatoes, and turn them into cylinders (for both dishes, actually). I cheated and used the vegetable peeler to assist with the cylindrical shape. Well... maybe not "cheated", so much as "was smarter and quicker than the rest of the class." ;) Hey - gotta put that $1k knife kit to good use!

We had to slice these cylinders into PAPER THIN slices. That was a little more difficult than I thought it would be, but I got it done. A small non-stick pan is first coated with a little clarified butter. Then you begin to layer the potato slices. One in the center, then around clockwise, then counterclockwise. Then salt & pepper. Just several layers of this. Then it goes onto the stovetop, over fairly high heat. You want to brown the bottom layer of potatoes. It stays on the stove for 7-8 mins, then into the oven for about 15. EASY, and beautiful!!!

It was a good day :)

Tomorrow's supposed to be hell, as well as Friday (another test day). I'll keep you posted.

So much has happened since I last wrote on here!

Friday, I had a huge test. Took the entire class time. It started out with 6 pages of writing and recreating each of the recipes from last week. Step-by-step, all ingredients, amounts, cooking times, everything. It was very tedious. I'm not one of those people that takes tests "down to the wire", either. I ALWAYS have extra time, but this time... no. I finished that portion with 1 minute left. I don't like that kind of stress. So, the second part of the test was knife skills. Ehhh... I did ok. Then, we had the remainder of the class to recreate 3 dishes from the week, and present them to Chef Carpenter for our grade. Overall, I made an 88. I'm not pleased with it, but it'll do.

Saturday, a friend from school and I decided to go in for "Skills Enhancement" class. It's 4 hours, in a much smaller group, and you can work on whatever you're currently doing in class for practice. We went to work on our knife skills. Yep - that's right. Four hours of peeling and cutting potatoes. Well... I can do a pretty quick tourne' now :) And, it's got 6-9 sides! I'm getting better ;) While I was there, the chef that was in the room started talking to us and giving us some pointers. He stopped me and asked me where I was from. Then he wanted to guess... He said, "You're either from South Carolina, North Carolina, or Georgia." (eyes rolling).... "Nope." I said, "I'm from the state with the BEST food." Then he said, "Follow me." So, we walked into his office and he had Louisiana posters all over his wall, and a bumper sticker from Prejean's in Lafayette stuck to his laptop. He said, "I should have guessed Louisiana." He apparently goes every year for Jazz Fest.
So, later on, he asked me to follow him again. We walked down the hall into a huge walk-in refrigerator. This is where they keep ALL the food for the school. He pointed to a couple of cases of clams and oysters and told me to take all I wanted. We had just discussed seafood, and he said that these needed to be cooked before Monday or they would go bad, and the school would just throw them out. I gladly took the clams, but I'm not a big oyster fan. I know Daddy would have had a field day, though :)

I took them over to Beth & Chris' on Sunday, and we fried some, baked some, and made pasta with the rest. It all turned out really well, but my favorite, of course, were the fried ones. I've posted a pic of all the clams. They're in a huge roasting pan. There were A LOT.

I've got a few pics up here... One is rice pilaf, which apparently I'm pretty good at. And one is Risotto Parmasean - that, as of today, I ROCK at!!! Wonderful complements today on that. :) Pretty good, for only my 2nd time making it.
Another picture is of us all gathered around a table trying to identify many different kinds of grains/rices. That was on the test Friday, too. Pretty difficult.

OH!!! Tofurkey! It's real! I saw it in the grocery store, and had to take a picture. Hilarious.

Yesterday, several of us from class went to a special gathering with celebrity chef, Eric Ripert. If anyone watches "Top Chef," he's been a guest judge on the show. He's got a great new book that just came out that goes through all the ins and outs of the kitchen. Not so much a cookbook, but a book for real "foodies." I ordered it online last night on half.com :)

This week, we started sauces. It's pretty strenuous. So much going on, and each one has to be perfect. Several of them start out with a roux, though, and I've got that down pat!! :) So, all my roux-making is going well. Chef told us though, that this will be the week that the majority of the class will want to drop out.

All I know is... I'm not going anywhere.

Ratatouille!

Several things were accomplished today.
1. I did not cut myself. Yay! Success! ...though, I can't say the same for a few other classmates.
2. Learned braising.
3. Identified a dozen different kinds of fresh herbs.
4. Made glazed baby carrots.
5. Made ratatouille. Seriously.

I've got a picture up of us gathered around a table examining the herbs. There were about 3 out of the 12 that I couldn't identify. Still learning...

We braised endive. It. Was. Gross. Endive is very bitter, and the way we cooked it didn't help any. Apparently, I cooked it the way they were looking for, but good Lord - what a waste. It was mainly to show us the technique, not the flavor. I didn't even take a picture of it. It wasn't too pretty anyway.

The glazed baby carrots... ehh. They were alright. I'm not a fan of sweet foods, especially foods that are normally savory, like carrots. And, peeling those little suckers was tough! I need to cook mine a little longer, but I felt like I couldn't because the sugar in the pan was going to turn into caramel! I'll have to figure out how to balance all that.

Ratatouille. Pretty cool. Total vegetarian dish, but I liked it. It's full of eggplant, yellow squash, zucchini, red and yellow bell pepper, onion, garlic, basil, and tomatoes concasse' - which means, peeled, seeded, and chopped. All the veggies are about the same size, and sauteed.

I was pretty impressed at how much I enjoyed it. :) Who woulda thought... this 'meat & potatoes' girl, liking this vegan dish??

Blanched Spinach & Tourne' Potatoes

Today, we started on the complicated knife cuts. Yesterday was pretty simple with the dicing of the celery, onion, and carrots for the chicken stock. I can dice until I'm blue in the face. But, the cuts today - they will be the death of me. We received a set of really great knives from the school, but the ones that they want us to mainly use is the French Chef's Knife. With my tiny hands, it's like I'm wielding a machete! I feel like I'm going to cut off a limb. Pray for me.

There's something that one of the guys in the class has been talking about with hatred for weeks now. Tourne' potatoes. Already, I'd like to shoot the Frenchman that came up with this crap.

It's a shape that we have to cut: 2 in. long, 3/4 in. in diameter, and 7 sides. SEVEN SIDES??!! What was this guy thinking?!?! I've attached a picture of the little devil knife we have to use for this technique.

I think MY "tourne' potatoes" have 47 sides, actually. I couldn't get them the right shape OR size, but no one could. I've attached a picture of the ones that were decent enough. We were also taught the blanching technique with some fresh spinach today.

Tourne' Potatoes & Blanched Spinach

• Tourne' some potatoes - if you dare.
• Steam them for about 7 minutes, until they are fork tender.
• Heat 1 tbsp of clarified butter in a saucepan, and add the steamed potatoes.
• Cook them for about 6 minutes, until they are JUST starting to get some brown caramelization on them.
• In the pan, sprinkle with salt & white pepper & very finely chopped fresh parsley.
  

DONE. Easy, after you've cut up the potatoes... and your fingers.
As far as the blanched spinach goes...

• Bring about 4 qts of water to a rolling boil. Heavily salt the water.
• Rinse the spinach very, very well. Pick off all the stems.
• Add the spinach to the boiling water in a basket of some sort (we used a fryer basket)
• The spinach should only be in the water for about 10 seconds!
• Pull it out and immediately put it into a bowl of ice water (ice bath)
• Then, put it onto some paper towels to drain, but don't mash it up when you are moving it around. You want the leaves to stay in tact. Also, you're draining it very well, so there's not a puddle of green water on the plate.

This wasn't really a "meal", but it was showing us these 2 techniques. We had to plate it up and present it to our Chef Instructor. He said that my spinach was good, and the potatoes were pretty good for my first time. He picked out the one that was the best and told me to try to make them look more like that. We'll see...

So, today was the second day of class... well, actual class in the kitchen. I've got a pretty cool instructor. He's mellow, and well spoken. There are probably 25 people in the class, but we're divided up into two groups, and we each have an instructor in the room. The instructors spend the first 1-1.5 hours going through lessons and demos of the day's dishes, and new terminology and techniques that will be used. It's intimidating, to say the least. We're all gathered around, looking at him fly through the lesson, and then we're on our own to recreate it. Yesterday, we just made chicken stock. No biggie. It's a little more involved than chicken stock I've made in the past, or seen Mama make, but still very manageable.

There are boxes in the back of the room that are full of chicken bones. They're purchased that way - it's not scraps from another class or anything.

• Each one of us will get out 5 lbs of chicken bones, and put them in a stock pot with 5 qts of COLD water, or about 2 inches over the bones.
  
• Then we cut up the mire poix (meer-pwah) (celery, onions, & carrots). It's 50% onions, 25% celery, and 25% carrots. All are chopped into a small dice.
  
• Before adding the mire poix, we skim off all the crap that has floated to the surface (that's the chef's term, not mine). Mire poix goes in.
  
• Then, we make a sachet to go into the water. This consists of: 2 bay leaves, some parsley stems, a few peppercorns, a sprig of thyme, and 2-3 cloves of crushed garlic. All this goes into a square of cheese cloth, and tied up with butcher's twine, then it's thrown in as well.
  
• The water should simmer, and never boil.
• And chicken stock should cook for 3-4 hours.
  

That's pretty much it. After that, we combined ALL the stock each one of us made into 2 huge pots, and actually let it simmer overnight. It will be put up in the fridge and used for future soups and sauces that we will make.

Not sure if anyone was actually interested in this process, but reliving it will basically help me study, and that's the way this blog will be sometimes :)

Here's the deal...

I realized that there's an awful lot going on during my first few days in culinary school and I don't want to forget any of it. Also, there are quite a few people that have been asking what, exactly, I've been doing in class. It's pretty interesting, I have to say. It moves REALLY fast. I'm basically earning a 2-year degree in 1 year, so everything has to move twice as fast as normal.

I've been in school for 3 weeks, just started my 4th week. The last 3 weeks were spent in a classroom setting going over sanitation/safety/nutrition/first aid.... you know... things I'm not really interested in :) We learned about botulism, salmonella, e. coli, staph, listeriosis, etc. By the end of class, you're basically scared to death to eat anything. It was too much science for me - and anyone that knows me, knows that science is NOT my strong subject.

The second Monday after class, they brought us to the fine dining restaurant that the school runs, for lunch. The school has a fine dining restaurant and a quick-service cafe. Students do all the cooking. I'll be in there towards the end of my term. Well.... lunch was AWESOME! We had 4 courses, and I enjoyed each one.

First Course: Amuse Bouche (French term, one-bite appetizer, to get your mouth ready for the meal, just a 'teaser' bite). It was shrimp ceviche on a cucumber round. FYI - ceviche consists of raw fish/shrimp marinated in lime or lemon juice, which is supposed to "cook" it. Mmm hmm - right. But, I ate it, and it was good. I thought the cucumber overpowered it a little, but it was good.

Second Course: Greek salad with grilled shrimp. It looked so good, I started eating it as soon as it was placed in front of me. I didn't even remember to take a picture :(

Third Course: Grilled venison (deer), with herbed mashed potatoes and grilled asparagus. One word: YUM. This was wonderful!!!

Fourth Course: Dessert. Pumpkin cheesecake, with vanilla bean ice cream, and some sort of crumble. It was beautiful! BUT... I don't eat cinnamon, and this was FULL of it. Oh, and the ice cream - please. Don't eat that either. But, there were 5 other people at my table that fought over that plate that I gladly gave up as soon as I took my picture. I just love how they drew a pumpkin on the plate out of chocolate, and filled it in with caramel. Genious!