A long time coming...

I know, I know...I've been gone forever and you know that I can't possibly be out of the kitchen this long. So the truth is this, I've been overwhelmingly busy cooking. Do you feel betrayed that I haven't shared this with you before now? I'm sorry...I truly am. But, I'm here now and ready to tell you about how I'm finally fulfilling my dream of going to culinary school. I personally think that's a brilliant excuse for my absence. Hopefully, you agree and we can get past this.

I started culinary school 3 weeks ago. Before you ask...No, I have no idea whether this means I'll quit my day job and work full-time in a restaurant. The only thing I know is that going to culinary school is just something I have to do. So here's the deal...

We have 3 classes a week. The first week was mostly administrative stuff, including meeting our career advisor. This career advisor might be a problem for me...I'm not a huge fan. She laid out how we'd all be making salads for the first year out of school all for a measly $8 an hour. She also said we should volunteer at food banks and build our resume. Well as lovely as that sounds where in our schedules of full-time work and three nights of school does she think this will fit? In my opinion, a career advisor should make you feel excited about your future in the industry, but this woman just terrified me about my future. I'm not saying I wanted her to paint this unrealistic picture of how lovely working in a restaurant kitchen will be. I'm just saying maybe wait until the second month to give us a reality check instead of being a killjoy in the second class. The next class was equally upsetting, as it was all about sanitation and horror stories about how sick you can make people with contaminated food. I totally understand the necessity of the lesson, but all the same it's tough to stomach!

With week 1's less than exciting classes behind us, week 2 began with knife skills and a substitute chef instructor, who rather than teach us decided she'd just set us loose on some poor unsuspecting veggies. With these veggies, we threw together a salsa and then the chef yelled at us to clean up quickly since she'd been there since 7am. Um chef, we've been at work all day too. Also, since it was the first time we actually made anything none of us had any idea how to clean the kitchen. Needless to say, I was left wondering whether I picked the right school as my classmates and I buzzed around the kitchen trying to figure out where to put everything and how to use the dishwasher.

These fears were quickly laid to rest when our normal chef returned to us the next evening and taught knife skills, herb identification, and cheese identification. In that lesson, we diced potatoes, julienned carrots, and minced parsley until it was a "green wind". The green wind stage of parsley is very intense...It takes a good 5 minutes of constant knife movement. I have to admit that the next day my arm felt like it was going to fall off. During the herb identification, we learned the most common herbs and tasted each of these. At the end of class, we tasted about 20 different types of cheese from soft to crumbly to aged to blue. I went home that night and fell into a deep slumber with a happy belly full of cheese.

The next class we had our first quiz on sanitation and herb id. I'm happy to report that I aced it...woohoo! After our quiz, we had a lecture on culinary math (conversions from various measurements and upping a recipe that serves 4 to serve 10, etc). Then we had more knife skills...this time around we did a small dice of potato. We blanched some broccoli and green beans and par-boiled the potatoes and fried them in some butter. Yum!

In the next class, we had greens identification (useful since we'll be working in salads for a year!) and cleaning techniques. We julienned red and green cabbage and then wilted them with salt in a colander to remove the excess moisture. Once these were wilted, we made a mayo based green cabbage slaw and a red wine vinegar slaw with the red cabbage. I loved both of these slaws - for the green cabbage slaw we added champagne vinegar and fresh dill to it - I really think the dill added so much to this and I'm definitely putting fresh dill in all the slaws I make from now on. I also will be making a lot of slaw this style all summer. Each group also prepared one type of cooking green (kale, swiss chard, and collard greens). My group did the collard greens - we began by frying some bacon and then cooked the greens in the fat until they were fully wilted.

Our collard greens with bacon and our green cabbage slaw

The next class we had a lecture on the kitchen brigade system, the various positions in a professional kitchen, purchasing ingredients, and finding sources for ingredients. Then we discussed eggs, cut more veggies to continue honing the knife skills, and then tasted different cooking oils. We then each cooked 3 scrambled eggs in 3 different fats. According to chef, eggs should be moist, soft, and salty likes a strangers lips...I'm not so sure I'll be able to look at eggs or strangers lips in quite the same way anymore.

MMM...Strangers lips

Our next class is when the real fun began. We fileted three different fish - a flounder, a red snapper, and a mackeral. With the flounder and snapper fish bodies (mackeral is too oily to use for the stock), we made a fish stock. Then, we used this stock along with some veggies and the flounder filets to make a fish stew with tomato and a touch of cream. We also had some of the mackeral sushi style, since its a very good sushi fish (news to me but holy mackeral!).

One Fish - Flounder

Two Fish - Red Snapper

Three Fish - Holy Mackeral

Flounder Filets

Mackeral Filets

The fish stew had a lovely fish flavor from the homemade fish stock. The flounder filets were added at the last minute and cooked quickly in the stew at a boil. We got to take the rest of our filets home to chef up anything our little hearts desired. Red snapper cooked in parchment with thyme and tomato anyone?


Happily, this fish class put me in full "this is why I'm going to culinary school mood" (as you can see but all the photos I snapped I was very into it!). The class was so much fun that I hardly noticed it was 10pm when I was sampling a bowl of fish stew and mackeral sushi!

Stew on this delicious fish stew

I hope you all have forgiven this overdue post in exchange for the start of my overdue dream...