Summer Break!

We're on summer break this week, a welcome respite from class.  We were in the cold garde manger room for the past six weeks, for garde manger and for international, but when we get back we're starting off in Ventana, which is the fine dining restaurant on the school premises.  We'll do 6 weeks at Ventana, 3 in back of the house and 3 in front of house - so I'll get to see whether I can still wait tables worth a shit.

Ventana's schedule is bananas.  Class starts at 3:30, not the normal 5:30, and goes to 11pm.  I got special permission from my boss to leave my day job early in order to make it to school on time, provided I stay up on my work and put some hours in on Saturdays.  Kinda sucks but I had no other choice; I had already pursued tons of avenues at the school, talking with the head chef, the director of admissions, the VP of student affairs, I really tried to make this work without having to affect work, but it wasn't possible.  Some of my friends have strict jobs, like veterinary jobs and demanding office jobs, project management, I just hope they can make it work like I did.  I still feel like I'm about to enter a whole new circle of hell here, with 10 additional hours of school per week.

Ventana has a nice menu, and it'll be fun to be in a kitchen, rather than a lab.  Our labs have lacked time pressure and the urgency of a kitchen, as well as the teamwork and need to stay organized.  Messes have been okay in lab.  Poor communication has been okay in lab.  None of this will work in a restaurant setting, you must execute, communicate well, and be clean.  Some students will do just fine, but there's a few who just might shit themselves.  And Ventana isn't anywhere near as high pressure as other restaurants.

But all that's for next week.  What's amazing is that everything is working out.  Every obstacle has worked itself out with some faith, some creativity, and some elbow grease.  Staging, scheduling, externship, my real job, the kids, Ventana.  Everything has worked out.  To me that is proof positive that chasing a dream is worth it, and that it'll work itself out.  Having faith is an idea that has fallen out of vogue with my generation, but there's something to be said for optimism.

because, you know, Batman.

Batman and friends.

my mise en place for miso soup

L dicing tofu for miso soup (he's the one who threw up shish kebab)

L's amazing chicken adobo

Cooling brown veal stock

Morocco was a riot

Turkey and Morocco tonight, big bold flavors of lamb and honey, cumin and lemon, onion, bulghur, and fig.  We made lamb tagine and couscous, the tagine turned out so good, very rich with tender lamb. 

Another group had kebabs of lamb, onion, and peppers.  As they cut the lamb, a pile of fat trimmings grew, which we'd normally throw away.  Tonight though, my friend L decided to skewer the fatty trimmings, grill it along with the kebabs, and eat it for himself.  He grills this fat on a stick, for some fucked up reason devours this fat on a stick, and thinks nothing of it, end of scene.

Later, we eat, and chef makes a strong Turkish coffee for us (I had four of them), and the food is one of the best we've had since day one of International.  All groups nailed their dishes tonight, and we tore up the food.

We're finished, and we're cleaning, and normally L is in the dish pit with me but today he's gone.  Then he shows up holding his stomach, and in his Filipino broken English goes "I needed some help, buddy.  I threw up my food."  He puked in the bathroom because he ate too much.  Tells me all about how the meat in his puke was in cubed chunks.  We all lost our minds laughing at him.  This class is overflowing with inside jokes and shit talk, and now we've got another classic.

International so far

This class is educational but not the most engaging.  Each night we visit a different country's cuisine, last night we visited Greece and tonight is Lebanon.  We have four dishes, sometimes five, to make as a class.  Chef assigns a dish to a group (we have a group of four), tells them how many times to multiply the recipe, and once we all have our dishes we're off.  The drawback of this is that at least one group each night will get a dish that is very easy to make, regardless of volume, and ends up having spare time.  For instance last night we were assigned a salad, consisting of red onions, cucumbers, tomatoes, garlic, feta, and oil and spices.  This is nowhere near enough product to fill up the time for the four of us.  My teammate S used the time to cut perfectly perfect brunoise of the cucumbers, which passes the class time but is nowhere remotely representative of the actual time management of a real kitchen's pressures and expectations. 

I bring textbooks in and study recipes with my friends to fill the time; last week I practiced my tourne cuts on potatoes for an hour.  So there are certainly things to do, constructively as well as otherwise.  And at the end of the night we have a family style meal, where we all eat our fill of the country's food.  And no matter how slow this class is in some parts, I am super appreciative of the fact that I get to sit with my friends and eat new food each and every night.  Like last night, I had like three pieces of baklava that my friend J's team had made.  So that's cool!  Even a half-assed culinary class still beats watching mindless TV at home.   

The homeys sauteeing spaetzel

R making spaetzel

International class in underway

Day one of International, same big honking class, same chef instructors.  Very cool vibe in this class.  Each night we'll cover cuisine of a different region, and we make a handful of dishes, then we all sit down together and have a huge family style meal.  So last night while most people are watching Daily Show or Jay Leno, me and my homeys were sharing a meal in the style of mother Russia: prune perogies, borscht soup, salmon roe blinis, Hungarian potatoes, and cabbage rolls. 
My team made the prune perogies, the pasta dough practice was valuable. 
So after prunes, beets, and cabbage at 10pm last night, I just hope I don't shit myself today.  Oh - also got news that for the final we're doing a mystery basket.  Each student'll get something slightly different and we have to bang out a 3 course meal.  Gonna rock.

Piper looking fresh dressed in Target

Sent from my iPhone

Garde Manger final sucked

I was in a crap mood last night, which didn't help my focus for the final.  I had a what am I doing with my life moment right before we had to make the mayonnaise - if you're going to have a minor existential crisis, don't do it right as you're whipping up an emulsion; whisking oil is an existential crisis in its own respect.
Anyhoo I got over it and did good on my mayo, one of my friends who is an amazing cook could not get her's to form and she turned in an oil slick that smelled like lemon.
He let us loose after the goddamn mayonnaise, and we built caesar dressing, french style croutons, red pepper coulis, and a vicchysoise (sp?).  The coulis and the vicchyssoise have a similar process, kinda - in that garde manger classroom the tables aren't right by the burners, which also merits a little angst because you're running back and forth further than normal.  In the other kitchens, burners are only a pivot away. 
Basically I'm just trying to create an excuse for burning my croutons the first time - which I totally did.
In the end I got great grades on my vishyschwaze and my caesar (19s), a good grade (17) on my mayo, and a 15 on my coulis - docked me 5 points because there were a couple black flecks of blistered red pepper skin in my coulis, and he said that can bitter it up.

The written final was gnarly.  Just gnarly.  2/3 of the class finished in 10 minutes - they gave up and bailed.  Me and three others stayed and grinded that damn thing out.  Probably not going to get me a scholarship to CIA based on that performance, but at least I didn't give up.  And I know they gave up because they were turning in some blank-ass pieces of paper, probably ready to hit the bar.

Hell yeah its the weekend.  I cleaned out the garage this morning and put all Marcel's stuff front and center so he and his homeboys can have air hockey tournaments this summer.

Our canapes

Trying this from memory, I'll try to get them all:
We made
* a puff pastry curried chicken
* a wild mushroom tartlet
* a puff whiskey shrimp
* a goat cheese peppers
* a tuna confit
* a proscuitto mascarpone melon
* a deviled quail egg
* a salmon mousse
Overall, pretty yummy stuff!  We did well.  Tonight is the garde manger final.  He has us doing basics, like mayonnaise, red pepper coulis, caesar salad.

Our canape presentation

This mirrored presentation showcases 8 canapes we have made this week.  Our group created everything you see here, from the tartlet shells to the melon cuts.  I'll go through each canape soon.  (Formally, canape means a 1 to 2 bite open faced sandwich -- which can assume a variety of shapes and presentations.)

Sent from my iPhone

Last Week Livin Large

Monday through Thursday last week were all about spreads and forcemeats.  We made a chicken liver pate that was honestly real yummy.  i was not sure at all whether I'd like it, but yep it was good.  We also made a vegetable terrine using thin grilled vegetable pieces and gelatin. 

Since making pates and terrine, I've read a couple references to vegan pate.  Honestly I have no clue how to make these, but I think they'd be more complex and flavorful than the gelatin-based ones.  I have no problem with the flavor of gelatin, other than the fact that it is limited. 

Another forcemeat we made, the country style pork pate.  This pate was shaped in a mold and contained a rabbit tenderloin running down its center.  We then wrapped the molded pork with a pate dough and baked the sumbitch. 

The fourth big forcemeat from last week, the chicken gallantine.  This one was gnarly: fabricate a whole chicken, separating the bird from its skin, leaving the skin 100% intact.  Process the meat; reserve the breasts and isolate the legs and thighs.  Pate up the dark meat, along with gelatin, chicken livers, and seasonings.  Hammer the breasts into one thin rectangle o' flesh and slap it on the chicken skin.  Spread the pate onto the breastmeat, then roll it up nice and tight so that the outside is like a a big thick cylinder of chicken skin, like a skin football.  Wrap the gallantine in cheesecloth, then wrap that in plastic wrap, then either roast or poach.  We roasted, due to volume, but poaching is more traditional.

Once the gallantine is cooked, unwrap it and then it gets three thick coats of a 'chaud froid', a Bechamel-based gelatin outer coating. 

So then on Thursday we took these forcemeats and arranged them on a massive oval mirror.  Each one required eight identical slices and a thick solid base.  We had to display the slices in a fancy, curved order, and we also had to show our rabbit rillette, the rabbit forcemeat we had done earlier on and packed in a rammekin and topped with a layer of duck fat. 

My friend L took a few pictures of my group around our mirror; I need to plunder her facebook and get the pictures of our display.  It's rad.

Then on Friday, we got to 'relax' with some old school cooking, only this evening was timed.  We had a couple hours to fabricate a chicken, execute batonnet and and julienne cuts on some carrots, do a bunch more shit, baste an airline chicken breast, serve a pilaf and carrots au buerre, and then once it's all done drink beer in the parking lot with your friends.  We're actually not graded on the parking lot part, but if I were to grade us, I'd say we execute it like pros.       

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And on to the next one!  This week we are doing another mirror display on Thursday, and we're having our garde manger final on Friday.  This week's mirror is for canapes and tartlets.