Week one

The first Day (Tuesday because of the holiday) was mostly getting to know our instructor, Chef Sayre, and what lies ahead of us. He went into detail about the coming weeks and what we would do the following day as well as what would be expected of us. It was a bit intimidating but i was pumped!

The second day was a big eye opener as to just how frantic it can be in a kitchen and all were were doing was learning knife skills by chopping different vegetables! Mainly what was causing the panic was us not knowing our way around the kitchen yet along with a shaky grasp of proper preparation before starting. The French phrase "mise en place", meaning "putting in place" is used to label proper preparation of both the ingredients and the chef that will be using the ingredients. If our mise en place isn't done correctly before we start things can go awry very quickly. Things did eventually get done but things were spilled, food was wasted, and I learned this wasn't going to be easy at all.

The third day we finally got to cook! In fact, we got to cook 3 different vegetable dishes at the same time! I was still struggling with my mise en place as all of the students scrambled to get ingredients and do initial preparation of the vegetables. We had prepared some minced garlic and shallots the day before but when i got around to collecting what i needed the containers were empty which meant i had to go get some more and prepare them as well. This lead to me running over my alloted preparation time so I had to prioritize some vegetables that needed to start cooking and finish the rest while they cooked. Because of this i couldn't concentrate on the vegetables cooking and came very close to burning a few things and did burn my cabbage but not so badly it couldn't be salvaged. Despite the challenges dishes did turn out edible but not perfect. the cabbage had the right taste but my knife skills were off and some of the cabbage was too thick too cook enough and didn't produce the right texture. Some other mistakes include forgetting to season one dish with pepper and salt and adding the finishing fresh herbs (finely chopped parsley) to the wrong dish! Fortunately, I didn't get discouraged as i knew that if i wasn't making mistakes i wasn't learning.

On day four my Mise en place came together a little better. the Fact that the recipes were simpler helped quite a bit too. We prepared some vegetables for roasting and others for grilling. For the roasted vegetables we were told to pair up. My partner and I misunderstood the direction to pick a fresh herb to season our vegetables with so we ended up with two herbs, rosemary and chives. As Chef Sayre performed the demo we realized our mistake and asked him how we should handle it. He said to come to an agreement between the two of us. so, after a smell test of the two herbs together, we decided to try both and just halve the amount of herbs we used. The Vegetables to be roasted were rolled in a bowl of extra virgin olive oil and our herbs and put into the oven. While the roasted for 30 minutes in the oven we had to go grill the rest of the vegetables. We only had one grill in the kitchen so there was quite a line. So, my partner got in line while i went back to our station to do a little clean up, begin preparation for blanching some broccoli and tried to keep tabs on the time. After 15 minutes my partner had managed to get his veggies on the grill and came back long enough for us to mix the roast vegetables a bit and add some salt & pepper which we forgot earlier. Back in the oven they went and back to work we went. I managed to take into account the time we had taken the roast vegetables out of the oven into the time needed and after a quick check decided they were done. I presented them to Chef Sayre and found I had cooked them quite well but Ii hadn't seasoned them enough with S&P so the heat and texture was right and the taste was there but it didn't have the pop of flavor that his demo vegetables did. After all this and a bit more waiting i was able to get my turn at the grill. I did well on my sliced vegetables and my bell pepper but failed on my green onion as i had them laying across a hot spot at their thinnest point and let them burn while I payed attention to the demo of the Blanching and shocking of broccoli. I let my grilled red bell pepper cool while i prepared for the blanching. once it was ready i put on some glove and began to peel the charred skin off the pepper. I was so amazed at the aroma. I never knew it could smell so good! After that I set to work on turning the broccoli into spears (removing leaves and odd edges to make it more visually pleasing) but I had a problem. I had put too much water in my pot and it was taking way too long to boil! After removing some of the water it still didn't seem to want to boil and i was running out of time so i put it in and hoed for the best. It turned out under cooked as i thought it would but i learned a valuable lesson from it. don't use more water than you need to submerge the vegetable! oh, and i forgot to season with S&P again...

That's it for now. Next week starts off with some salads and a written test.