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.