My right thumb...

...is on its way to looking like a chef's thumb.

When you shape things into footballs, the edge of your paring knife inevitably ends up smacking into your thumb. No deep cuts or anything, just the little nasty ones that are less then a papercut but really suck when you have to squeeze a lemon.
Anyway, this will hopefully scar up nicely and help build up resistence to heat, cuts etc.
One down - nine to go.

OK, no more talk about footballs. Saturday we will prepare stocks!

A little note to the knife and gadget freaks out there: I will go get myself a bird's beak paring knife today. Our instructor uses one and it makes tournage a lot easier.
I'll propably get it at Broadway Panhandler where all FCI students get 10% discount. DANGEROUS! I'll let you know what else they'll talk me into buying.

Stress 2.0

Maybe last night wasn't so stressful after all, just very overwhelming. Today as I reflect on last night I'm not sure that I learned everything that was taught. But: I'm going over my notes and it's slowly coming together.
I now realize that my plan to work a regular work week and attend school 3 nights a week is not going to fly. There's just too much reading, practicing and experimenting to do.
But it's all good. I want to learn as much as I can, and next time somebody asks me to shape anything into the shape of a football it will be a football not a rotten banana.

A little taste of stress...

Ok, so compared to a working chef school is a cakewalk, but: I think today we came somewhat close to having some stress.
We first continued learning about vegetable cuts. This time "tournage"...that's when you take a carrot, turnip, potato or whatever else you might have lying around and turn it into little football-shaped cuts. This is PRETTY HARD! They're supposed to be even. If you have 20 little potato footballs they all must be the same size.
Well, they weren't. Not in the beginning at least.
Then it came time to cook the stuff - mind you everything had to be done at the same time. Here's what we cooked.

- carrots
- turnips
- artichoke
- string beans
- peas
- potatoes
- pearl onions

I couldn't believe it myself but everything ended up on the plate at the same time. However, not everything was done to perfection and while my plate looked beautiful not everything tasted quite the way it should have.
But it looked nice. And it tasted good. But just not quite perfect. Next time.

Just before class was over we got a little surprise written test. 10 questions 10 minutes. What do you call a pan with straight edges? Sautoir. What temperature range is considered the "danger zone" when it comes to bacteria? 40 - 140 F. We'll know on Saturday if I got them all right or not.

Now I'm going to crash. Hard. More tomorrow.

This article is very interesting... http://www.restaurantdoctor.com/ehc/nytimes.html