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...