W...is for War Wounds

Some days the kitchen seems more like a battlefield than a place to make food. That has certainly been the case this week. I "earned" my first battle scars, and I'm sure there will be many to come. We all knew it was only a matter of time!

Monday I gave myself a nasty little burn on the top of my right hand. I was opening the 475 degree oven to get out my french onion soup (which was perfection, btw) and bumped it on the outside of the oven. That's the trouble with a commercial kitchen. It's not like at home where I could put my face on the outside of my oven and barely have it warm the skin. Commercial ovens get crazy hot and they are entirely made of metal. Touch it anywhere and you'll get burned. Also, you don't get to use hotpads in a commercial kitchen....those are for housewives (gasp!). Instead, you just use a little tiny side towel. I'm well on my way to being able to elude the FBI by not having any fingerprints left. And then I completely seared my tongue on the soup. Just getting my taste buds back today. Maybe by tomorrow food will taste normal again.

Tuesday was even worse. I filleted my own finger!!! I had been dicing onions and was going to put my chef's knife down (8" blade and VERY sharp) and just sliced open my left pointer finger. And boy was it a bleeder. It actually spurted blood. One girl even almost threw up after seeing it. Chef was afraid I was going to have to get stitches, but we finally made it stop bleeding. We threw a few bandaids on, a latex glove and put me back to work. I didn't even cry. I then proceeded to make the world's best veal consomme...one handed. Not to mention a rocking Caribbean black bean soup and a perfectly balanced vegetable soup.

I guess the scar count is up to 2. Wonder how many I'll have by the time this is all over?

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.