S...is for Stocks & Sauces

Week two was all about stocks and sauces. They say your knife skills combined with how well you make sauces is the measuring stick of a chef. If that's the criteria, so far so good!
Stocks were a piece of cake. Pretty nasty, but easy to make. Let's just say that cooking school isn't always glamorous. Rubbing down veal bones with your bare hands is just plain gross. And de-fatting chicken back isn't much better. Especially if your chicken backs still have some feathers in them like mine did. Although worse than either of those is getting out your bones from the 40 lb box. You've got to stick your bare hands into 4-6" of blood. Did you ever think I could be so brave??? I didn't.
Sauces on the other hand are much less gross. We used the stocks we already made, so there was no unnecessary carnage in sauce-making. There are 5 mother sauces: Espagnole (brown stock base), Volute' (white stock base), Bechamel (milk base), Hollandaise (butter base), and Tomato (I bet you can guess the base for that!). We turned each sauce into 2-3 secondary sauces, which made quite a few by the end of the week. I sailed right through most of them.
Hollandaise was my one rough moment. It is the perfect sauce. Mostly it's just butter and egg yolk. You've probably had it on a steak or eggs benedict. Hollandaise is a very tempermental sauce. If you get it too hot you scramble the eggs, if it's not whisked fast enough it doesn't emulsify and "breaks", and if it is not hot enough it won't thicken. So you've only got about a 10-15 degree range where it come together properly. I really didn't want to break my sauce, so I was VERY careful. I added 8oz of melted butter, literally one drop at a time and whisked in. I was so overcautious it took me 45 minutes to make my sauce. That's 45 minutes of straight, rapid whisking. I truly thought my arm might fall off. Give that one a try sometime.
Well, turns out I was trying to be so careful I ended up ruining my sauce. I whisked my stainless steel bowl so hard that I whisked little flecks of the metal right into the sauce and turned it gray. Which means that it is un-servable in a restaurant. Sometimes, being cautious in the kitchen bites you in the backside. Julia Child says, "No fear in the Kitchen". I guess I should have listened and not been so afraid to make a mistake.

K...is for Knife.

Week one was all about the knives. We got a SERIOUS set of knives on the first day of school. The "don't mess with me in a dark alley" kind of knives. They even come in a briefcase...very official. We then spent the majority of the week learning how to use them.

Little did I know, I've been holding a knife wrong my entire life. And wow, it is so much better the correct way. Not to say I don't have a nasty blister from so much chopping/cutting! A knife should be held with your pinky, ring finger, and middle finger on the handle of the blade. Your pointer should should cross the top of the knife at your hand/finger joint (the place of my dreaded blister!) and wrap around the bottom of the knife and your thumb should rest on the blade. I used to put all my fingers on the handle. Or some people extend the pointer on the spine of the knife. Tsk, tsk!
Your left hand (or non-dominant hand) should make a "monkey's paw" to avoid chopping off a fingers. And so far I haven't even cut myself once yet!

With my knives I can now do uniform and accurate julienne, fine julienne, batonnet, brunoise, fine brunoise, small, medium, and large dices, rondelle, oblique, bias, and tourne' cuts. And probably some others I forgot. It is much harder than it sounds.

"Chef "(that's what we call our teachers) says that the true measure of a chef is by how good their knife skills are, and how well they can make sauces. He then told me I had by far the best knife skills in the class. Who knew?! I was doing this for fun, and apparently I'm kinda good at it! Or everyone else really sucks.

Either way, don't mess with me. I've got knives.

U....is for Unflattering Uniform

Seriously, I would like to have a conversation with whoever invented chef uniforms. I realize that they are designed to protect the chef, but I don't think they could come up with anything more unflattering if they tried. I mean the coat is sorta cute. Especially if I could wear it with jeans or leggings or something. But no, I get to wear them with black and white checkered pajama style pants. I feel like a clown. I wear and XS and feel like I accidentally took my husband's pants. I mean checkered pants is a fashion statement that didn't even look cool in the 80's (that's how you know it's really bad). And I really thought I left elastic waistbands in my toddler years.
And the shoes. Wow, they deserve their own paragraph. There is nothing fashionable, attractive, or sexy about chef shoes. They are all black, hard-soled, non-marking, non-skid pairs of ugly. Think black nurses shoes. Or worse, some people wear Crocs. Morally offensive and wrong - do not get me started on those.
Then throw on a goofy hat that I have to stuff ALL of my hair up in (there's a lot of it!), and a neckerchief with a windsor knot, and an apron.
Put it all together, and what do you get? A Hot Mess.
One Unflattering Uniform, coming right up!

C...is for Chef

Because in 9 short months, that's what I'll be. Tomorrow a new chapter of my life unfolds as I attend my first day of Culinary School. But why culinary school you ask? Well, simple. I love food.
I know it may seem strange to go to culinary school when you have no intentions to open a restaurant or to ever work in one for a career, but I just love food. I want to be the world's best home cook. And I want to spend my time doing something I love. But mostly, I want a new challenge. And why not challenge yourself with the same thing that becomes the reward?
Am I nervous? You bet. Am I excited? Absolutely. Do I sometimes think maybe this was a crazy idea? Yup.
After being a stay-at-home-wife (no kids) for the past year, this is going to be a huge lifestyle change. And I might even be terrible at it. But I'm going to give it my best and hope that my enthusiasm for food makes up any gaps in skill.
So, this will be my diary of my adventures in cooking school and all things food. I'm sure there will be some horror stories (whole raw fish give me the absolute willies!), some triumphs (let's hope I get pictures of those), and maybe even a few meltdowns on the kitchen floor, but mostly of wonderful food!