As you can see in the picture to the right, that was my first attempt at the cutting skills final.  We know what cuts we have to do and how long we have to do it so on our 2nd adult day today, I went through the whole final.  I completed it in about an hour and 40 minutes.  And Chef Ron came by and checked it all.  I have a few things that I need to perfect on my celery and potato chateau but he said I was way about failing, which is 75 or below.  If we get below a 75 we have to repeat the class.  Not good.

I have a lot of studying to do this weekend.  Next week is finals week with 6 tests over the course of 3 days.

I don’t have much else today, just happy that I got my cutting skills final practice round out of the way and ready for the week ahead.

All the girls start the AIDS Lifecycle this Sunday.  They’ll hit LA next Saturday!  Good luck guys.

Today was “Adult Day” as Chef Ron calls what we have in store for us today and tomorrow.  From 7 am - 9:15 am we have our sanitation class, take our quiz and get ready for the next one tomorrow.  Then from 9:15 am-noon, we have all that time to do whatever we need to do.  This includes 1 of 3 activities:  practicing for our knife skills final (which is highly recommended), working on our paper and research project for our sanitation presentation next Friday, or getting out the 82 herbs and spices and revisiting them and testing our knowledge for that final next Thursday.

Today I chose to do 2 of the 3 activities.  I worked on my Chateau potato cuts for the first 2 hours.  My right hand was cramped by the time I was done but I managed to get 5 done to complete my preliminary cuts done.  Then I went up to the main kitchen counter with the boys to go over the 82 items.  Oh yeah, in between that, I found waiting for us in the student lounge, fresh made donuts and a Charlotte Russe cake, which is kind of like a cheesecake but oh so much lighter.  It was all delicious.  I love being able to eat sweets like this at 10am and it’s okay.

Tomorrow i’m going to mimic the final knife skills exam.  My buddy Philip did it today in the 2 hour time frame and was told that his cuts would probably warrant a score of 96 (out of 100).  He was very pleased, as I would be.  So we have 2 hours to do our carrots, celery, orange, green pepper, spinach and potatoes.  The Chateau potato cuts are obviously going to be the hardest to do, but tonight I practiced and got 4 pretty decent one’s done in about 20 minutes, which is good for speed and accuracy.  

I think i am fairly confident in all the cuts, but need to just practice and practice this weekend.  And tomorrow i’ll do a run through of the final exam for next Wednesday and see how he grades me.  If we get less than a 75, we have to repeat Culinary Skills 1…..that’s not going to happen.

As far as the identification by sight and smell is concerned for the herbs and spices, I think i’ll take Brendon to Whole Foods this weekend and give him the list of ingredients, make him go find them and bring them up to me one by one so I have to tell him what they are.  That could be a fun game!

Tomorrow is Friday….though as much as I’m looking forward to sleeping in again like last weekend, my body has become accustomed to getting up earlier than I ever have in my life and I find myself restless by 8:30 am and have to get up so I can let everyone else sleep in.  We’ll see how this weekend goes.

So I wanted to take a minute and just talk about something that is near and dear to my heart.  That would be the AIDS LifeCycle, the yearly bike ride from San Francisco to LA….585 miles over the course of 7 days, all to raise money for AIDS.  This year, I think the ride maxed out at a record 3,000 riders.

I did AIDS LifeCycle 3, and this year, there is quite the contingency of my pals doing the ride and I couldn’t be prouder.  Elena, who is on her 13th (right?) ride will be the mentor for Nicole, Beth B, CBass, Sue, laura lo, all our baby pirates doing the ride….and of course Houston, Kurty, Kruser and Berto who will be joining them as well.

They start the ride this coming weekend, June 1….and as hard as it is, it’s the best 7 days you’ll have with a sore butt.

If anyone is interested in donating to the cause, please visit:

http://www.aidslifecycle.org/index.cfm

Good luck girls….love you all, so proud and ride safe……’on your left!’

One would think that in numerical order, since we started on the 19th, being a Monday, that today, Day 7 would actually be a Tuesday.  But in fact, it’s really a Wednesday because of Memorial Day holiday.  Which also means 1 less day of class, which leads me to the fact that…..FINALS for both my first 2 classes are next week.  And tomorrow is Thursday and ya….you’re getting the panic mode right?

So next week we have our Cutting Skills final on Wednesday, in which we have 2 hours to perform the following cuts:

12 pcs (pieces) Bell Pepper Julienne

1 orange, segmented

6 leaves Spinach, Chiffonade

1/2 onion cut Medium dice, demonstrating the onion method as well

12 pcs Celery Batonnet

12 pcs Celery Small Dice

18 pcs Carrots Julienne

24 pcs Carrot Bruniose

Simple right?  Ok, so here comes the tricky part.  With just 7 Russet Potatoes, we have to perform the following cuts:

5 each Chateau’s…..what’s 7 minus 5?  2….yes….just 2 potatoes.  That’s all we have left to do this:

8 pcs large dice

12 pcs medium dice

12 pcs Paysanne

Now do you see why i’m a bit uneasy?  And also why I brought home 15 potatoes to practice on tonight?  I’ve got everything down, now in the next 4 days of class and over the weekend, i’m going to do the final over and over again, as we only have 2 hours and a limited number of veggies to use.  If I practice, i’ll be fine….i just have to get the hand movement down on the silly Chateau’s, which is basically taking a potato, cutting off all ends of it till you get a rectangular, and then making that rectangular into a 7 sided oval shape thing.  So much easier said than done.  Chef Ron said at 50 potato’s he got to complain….at 200 he finally got it.  

Here’s my question for everyone reading this.  I dare you to find me a restaurant that’s using a chateau potato in a dish.  Go on…..find me one.  At which case I will go to that restaurant and shake the hand of the chef that cuts those darn chateau’s.

One of the other tests we have next week is on Thursday and it’s identifying 82 different herbs and spices, and some vegetables….that everyone should know.  I’ll do a seperate blog on this and list them out so you can see what I’m talking about.  Anyway….time to relax, watch today’s episode of Ellen and study a bit more.

I have to start this blog by saying HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my dear friend BILLIE back in San Francisco!  Love you pal!!!  And miss you dearly.  Enjoy your day and know I’m thinking of you.

After a 3 day Memorial day weekend, getting up at 5:25 am wasn’t all that easy.  That and I was awake at 2:40 am, 4:05 am, 4:55 am, all the while thinking I had more time to sleep.  When the clock said 5:24 am, I decided to get up before the alarm buzzed loudly waking Lisa and Brendon and Alex as well.

My morning routine is as follows:  shower, dry hair, put on uniform, gather books in backpack and walk out the door with a Red Bull.  I’m not sure I mentioned in previously blog entries that we can’t wear earrings, rings, makeup (though minimal is ok and by that for me I mean a tad of eyeliner and i’m done), and we can’t wear perfume.  Combine that with having to wear the same thing everyday, it makes it easy to get up and get out the door by 6:00 am.  I also have several food items packed in my backpack as well to get me through the morning.  Once I get to school at 6:20ish I do Tai-Chi in the adjoining kitchen room with one of the other chefs and other classmates for 10 minutes.  Then I make sure my apron is ironed (each classroom has an ironing board and a hot iron for students), and then I sit in the student lounge and just breathe for a moment and have my yogurt.  My redbull lasts til about 7:00 am when we have brigade.  This means that at 7:00 am we all have to be standing in a line alphabetically with our uniforms on and our homework in our hand.  Chef Ron then checks us off and we proceed to start the day.

Today we had over an hour and a half to do practice our cuts.  I succeeded in doing on my potatoes the following (all with a perfect 3 score):  large, medium (i got a 2), small dice, the alumette and paille.  The last 2 cuts are basically the Julienne cut only on a potatoe.  Paille is a fine Julienne.  We only have this week and the beginning of next week to master these.  All our finals for these 2 classes are next Wed, Thurs and Friday.

I think this weekend I’m going to practice over and over again the exact cutting final that we have to do.  We already have the worksheet on what is expected so I’m going to mimic it exactly so when I do my final, i’m totally practiced.  I’m gonna be honest though.  I’m having an issue with this one particular cut of the potatoe.  It has to be oval shaped and 7 perfect sides, tipped at the end.  Practice, practice and more right?

Ah, it’s Friday and the start of a 3 day weekend.  And the end of my very first week of culinary school.  So far, so good, i’d say.  Little did I know that today is also “cake” day.  I don’t know yet if every Friday is said day, but if it is, there’s going to be a lot of happy little culinary students running around on Friday afternoons.  

What happens at school, is that you have all these different kitchen classrooms going on at the same time, each at different levels in the curriculum.  So one class might be doing a creme brulee, another may be making pizza and fruit salad, and yet another can be perfecting a tiramisu cake.  Why mention all these random foods?  Well….because that’s what we got to enjoy today!!!  When food is prepared, it usually makes it’s way to the student lounge, which is the centerpiece of all the classrooms.  There, food is laid out on tables each marked with what it is, what the ingredients are, what time is was finished and the date, so no food sits out longer than necessary.  

Then, it’s free for the taking.  The guys in my class came back from a visit to the student lounge with piles of cakes on their plates….i think Andrew had 5 different types on his little plate and proceeded to eat it all.  Not being a big desert eater, I made my own plate, but wrapped it up to bring home to Lisa and Brendon.  

What’s even better sometimes is when the pastry and baking class chef comes in to announce to our class they they have just made pizzas and fruit salads and would we want to partake?  I don’t even think he got the question out and i was already flying through the door behind him piling 4 different varieties of pizza on my plate.

Now, what I find interesting is that when I’m getting a slice at Marchello’s in San Francisco, or Cybelle’s Pizza in SF, or even just going to Ken’s Artisan Pizza (the best pizza in the world) here in Portland, i find that I don’t tend to venture far past the margherita pizza or a simple pepperoni.  YET….WHEN IT’S FREE AND HOMEMADE…..I’ll eat whatever they threw on it for practice!  I had one with sausage and peppers and olives and onions….and another with smoked ham that had just come from the butcherie class down the hall….but a basic pepperoni or cheese pizza was no where to be found.  And I tell ya, that pizza was tasty!!

I praised my fellow culinary peers, thanking them with onion and tomato sauce on my chin and a mouth full of yummy ‘za, as I walked back out the room to class and one last lecture before we were let out for the 3 day holiday.  If every Friday is like this, i’m going to be happy.  Oh wait, i’m already happy.  I’M IN CULINARY SCHOOL!  Have a great weekend and I’ll be back on Tuesday for your next installment of “A Day in the Life of Culinary School.”  1 week down, 29 to go!

Hi mom, dad, Marnie and Erik!

I’m tired….and I nicked my fingers 3 times today.  I think everyone was running for bandaids today.  The chinois of spinach got all of us I think.  That and my pal Gene was edging his knife on the steel and put quite a nice gushing gash in his thumb.  Mine weren’t bad, just a bit off the tip of my thumb that ironically didn’t even bleed!  I think it’s because it was the thumb I had chopped the tip off before with a papercutter when I worked at PowerBar and it’s got that fake skin on it anyway.  Just a thought but might have something to do with it.

WE WENT TO SEE INDIANA JONES today at the 4:40 showing.  So great!!!  Those are some of my favorite movies from when I was a kid.  We took Brendon, who’s 12, and that was about how old I was when the first movies were originally coming out.  

Today we got a demo on cutting for the zesting the orange and cutting wedges into them, how to julienne a green pepper, batonette on the celery and then the potato.  We have to large, medium and small dice it, then also do an allumette and paille on it.  Which is basically a fancy way of saying “julienne of potatoes” and “fine julienne of potato”.  

Tomorrow is our first quiz in our food safety and sanitation class.  We have to know the bacteria’s and illnesses that people can get from eating improperly cooked or handled food.  

So, one of the other Chef’s in the kitchen adjacent to ours leads Tai Chi every morning in his kitchen classroom at 6:30 am.  It’s a 10 minute session and everyone can go, but it’s mostly his students and some from our class.  I went this morning since I got there about 6:10am today to get everything ready, and it was actually very refreshing. I had always heard that stretching in the morning helps your body wake up and get ready for the day.  I would have to agree after this morning.  It felt good to feel the muscles in my body again.  I’m going to plan on doing it every morning with my instructor, Chef Ron.

Oh, I don’t know if I mentioned that I went to the Wednesday Farmer’s Market yesterday with Philip and Gene from my class.  It’s only 4 blocks from school and it was fun to go down there with my fellow chefmate’s and hear them talk about the food like I usually do.

Dicing, slicing, julienne, mirapoux…..yes I did all these today.  We finally got to do mise en place, which means put everything in it’s place, aka set up your workstation and start cutting.

Chef Ron did a demo of 4 different cuts that we got to practice with today for about an hour and a half.  We have a practice sheet of all the cuts we have to learn to do, the quantities, then as we think we have them done, he comes by and judges them to see if we are exactly of the right measurements.  Julienne is 1/8″ x 1/8″ x 2 1/2″ in length.  So these are itty bitty long rectangles with perfect squared ends.  Tougher than it looks.  I got one that was perfect.  ”Now do 24 more and you’ll be done”, says Chef Ron.  Needless to say I brought about 6 carrots home tonight to practice.  We just have to have them all signed off on in the next 2 weeks to be ready for the cutting skills final in 3 weeks.  Everything is pretty straight forward, it just takes a lot of practice.

There were 2 new things announced today in class:  1 is a Thai food class/competition in 3 weeks and the other is being 1 of 8 people on the cooking team that represents the whole school in state and national cooking school competitions (kind of like a sports team in college, only we just cook against each other).  

For the Thai class:  There is a Thai Master Chef coming to our school to do a 1 week Thai cooking class with some of us (everyone will sign up for it so it’s based on a lottery as to whether you get into the class).  At the end of the class, there is a competition and the top 2 that create the best dish get a FREE trip to Thailand in September to train over there for a week with the master chef!!!!  Obviously this would be amazing.  I’ll keep you guys posted if I get into the class.

For the cooking team:  This year’s team will be made up of our class because we are just starting, we can be trained and competitions start end of July.  So, of the 14-15 of us in the class, 8 will make the team.  6 as teammembers and 2 as alternates.  Obviously this will require and extra 3 hours a day of training outside of class and competitions that are apparently pretty intense.

Me being the collegiate athlete and ever so competitive…..first thing I said was “bring it on.”  

So today was like Christmas at culinary school.  Why you ask?   Because we got our knife and tool kits!  I love my kitchen gadgets and little did I know what all we were going to get.  I thought we would just be getting knives…..OH NO….

We had to all go up and get a SUITCASE full of everything you could possibly need to use in the kitchen.  And I mean EVERYTHING.

We got knives, melon ballers, spatulas, a pastry piping bag, a set of tips for the piping bag, one amazing wine opener, levelers, paring knives, chef’s knife, a santoku knife, a great whisk……literally all the kitchen tools that a chef needs.  Needless to say I’ve been like that kid in the DisneyWorld commercial at nights when he says, “i’m too excited to sleep.”  

Tomorrow we get to finally start chopping.  We have to have a ruler to measure all our cuts perfectly.  Chef Ron says start out slow so we can get the precision down, then as we get better, we start to go faster.  Otherwise, i’ll be losing a finger.  And I kinda need those.

We studied stocks today and got into reductions and glazes, but tomorrow, we finally get to get into the kitchen.  I know….FINALLY???  It’s only been 2 days.

Still happy in Portland!

So I got up this morning after a night of sleep I wouldn’t really call sleeping. I was nervous most of yesterday, mostly just butterflies and a bit of anxiety. I felt like I was starting high school again, going into the unknown, outside of the comfort level, is my uniform on right, do I look dorky, I have to find a locker, where’s my classroom (kitchen), am I going to make friends…..all those kinds of questions ran through my head the last 24 hours.

So I finally decided at 5:20 am to just go ahead and get up. I had to be on the Max (that’s like the BART for my pals in San Francisco) at 6:16 to get to school by 6:40.

First day rundown:

-got stuck in the freight elevator with Steph from Kansas, also a 1st year, because we had mistaken it for the ‘passenger’ elevator that would take us from the 4th to the 5th floor. We were stuck on the 2nd floor which was under construction and this guy kept wanting to get on the elevator with us with 2 wheelbarrows full of broken up concrete. So we went all the way to the 1st floor and found the ‘passenger’ elevator up to the 5th floor.

-during break, got stuck in the stairwell between the 5th and 4th floor with Carol, who’s in my class, and we couldn’t get back in. We had to go all the way down stairs, outside, back up the ‘passenger’ elevator to the 4th floor, then found the ‘good stairs’ to take us up to the 5th floor.

Really? Stuck in both on the 1st day? Not bad eh? Thank god I was with 2 other people in both situations because I might have freaked out. Apparently one girl was so nervous she couldn’t make it up stairs!

Today was mostly introductions, expectations, the meet and greet, etc. Chef Ron is our instructor for the 1st 3 weeks covering Culinary Skills 1 and Food Service Sanitation. He reminds me of Nathan Lane. Hilarious and blunt and passionate about what he does. My core group is 14 people, of which only 4 of us are girls. We have some of the Patisserie group in with us for the Culinary Skills class from 7-9:40.

We got all 12 books today and the knife kit and knife roll comes tomorrow. We get to start slicing and dicing on Wednesday! Apparently we go through 1500-1800 lbs of potatoes in less than a week and we contribute a lot of compost to the environment, which is good.

Quote from Chef Ron: “There really isn’t anything new that is going to be invented. Everything is out there for us to play with. I mean, isn’t that all we have to do anymore is dick around with stuff?” This coming after the discussion on eating blue cheese and chocolate together. Our job now is to find out what works well together, try new things and experiment.

Brendon, who is 12, really wants me to tell you that my chef instructor mentioned poop today on a number of occasions, because we were discussing bacteria and food safety. Brendon also says hi.