Four Ingredients to Heaven

I haven't said much about Level 3 and now that we are eleven weeks into it and I've regained a slice of my confidence back, I can talk about it. One of the first things Chef Veronica told us about Level 3 is "this is where a lot of people start to question, 'what am I doing here' or 'do I really want to do this' because it starts to look more and more like a real work situation and reality hits." 

Reality. Like bringing in two dishes per night at timed intervals. Like having to prepare two recipes the day before and create a timeline for completing each recipe so that you can multi-task and get your four perfect plates up to the "judging" table when they are being called for. Like exact plating, "hot food, hot plate, cold food, cold plate" and also doing this with a partner who may or may not agree with your timing and instincts.

The first few weeks did not feel good. My partner was a woman who was just joining the class after a leave of absence of several months, so I didn't have the easy familiarity I'd established with most of my young classmates. And whatever confidence I'd built up during levels 1 and 2 flew out the exhaust fans as my partner and I brought in sloppy dishes, late dishes, overcooked, undercooked and misplated messes all while trying to get used to Chef V's tougher, dryer, less playful teaching style.

But something happened right around week 8 when I was due to take on the dessert station and do Pot de Creme as one of my solo dishes for the night. Pot de Creme is pure alchemy. It embodies the magic of cooking for me. Just 4 simple ingredients.

A few basic steps. Some heat, a little bit of time and you have spun gold. A golden, creamy custard that makes you moan, just a bit, when you take your first bite. I'm not saying there was no stress that night with the Pot de Creme, but the stress came mostly from the razor thin Tuile (tweel) wafers we had to make to go along with the custard, and the little matter of the lemon tart that had to come in before the Pots. But when Chef V said mine had "excellent texture and flavor"and were "exactly as they should be" I knew I'd turned the corner in Level 3.

Make these and feel the way I did that night, and this afternoon when I made them again and took these photos. Just like a real chef.

Pot de Creme (adapted from the French Culinary Institute Level 3 textbook) 
14 oz. milk
4 egg yolks
2.5 oz of sugar (little over 1/4 cup)
1 t. vanilla extract 

Preparing the Custard:
1. Place the milk in a saucepan. Add the vanilla extract. Bring to a boil over medium heat. Watch it so it doesn't boil over.
2. Separate the eggs. Save egg whites for another use. Combine egg yolks with the sugar in a medium sized bowl. Beat the yolks and sugar until they take on a pale yellow color. (The French term for this is blanchir.)

3. Once milk is boiled, slowly add it to the egg mixture, stirring as you add it. You don't want to add it too fast and "cook" the egg. Use a paper towel to blot up any foam that was created from the mixing or milk boiling. You want your custard to have a smooth, glassy look to it. If you leave the foam on there, the bubbles will burst in the oven and leave your custard all swiss-cheesy looking.

Baking the Pots de Creme:
1. Preheat the oven to 325. Bring a pot of water to a boil.
2. Fill 4 porcelain ramekins/pots (you could use small pyrex bowls too) with equal amounts of the custard mixture, only filling them about 1/2 or 3/4 of the way full. Cover each with a piece of aluminum foil with a few tiny holes poked in the foil. Make sure the foil does not slope down and touch the custard. The little holes will let any condensation escape and not drip down and ruin the surface of your custard.
4. Find a roasting or baking pan that will fit the pots of custard. Make sure it is level. Line the pan with parchment paper so the pots won't slide around.

Place the pan on the rack in the oven FIRST. Then carefully transfer the filled pots to the pan. Using a measuring cup or a gravy boat, pour the boiling water into the pan so that it comes up about halfway up the pots of custard. This is called a "bain marie"—a water bath—and it will insure even and gentle cooking of the custard.
5. Bake for 40 minutes. You know the pots de creme are done when the surface of the custard no longer shakes loosely when you jiggle them. (Don't jiggle the whole pan! You don't want water from the bain marie to slosh up into your custard. Just gently jiggle one pot to test it....but 40 minutes should do the trick.)
6. Remove the pots de creme from the bain-marie, and cool. Once they come down in temperature a bit they should be cooled in the refridgerator and served cold. But you'll want to taste them when they are warm. Resist. Serve with a biscotti, a fancy cookie or simply as is. Enjoy!

NY Culinary Experience

The New York Culinary Experience. Last year I read the ads for this wet-dream weekend for cooking enthusiasts in my weekly copies of the New York magazine and sighed at the $1395 ticket price. Alas, I would NOT be attending the starchef-studded event and learn along side well-healed New Yorkers with enough discretionary income to do so. I wouldn't be choosing from "24 Master Classes" with "28 world renowned chefs" over two days at the French Culinary Institute. The promotional video on nymag.com teased me, showing giddy apron-clad participants from a previous event in hands-on classes with Eric Ripert, Morimoto, Anita Lo, David Bouley, Andre Soltner, Wylie Dufrene and many other top chefs. (To see this video go to: http://nymag.com/nyce/test/video/nyce_video.html)

But this year I was an insider. The 2009 New York Culinary Experience was scheduled for October 3 & 4 and as a student of FCI I was eligible to participate as a volunteer. Not only was I going to volunteer, but I was requested to assist one of the chef-instructors, Alain Sailhac. Alain Sailhac is the Executive Vice President and Dean Emeritus at the French Culinary Institute in New York City, where he has been since 1990. An extremely accomplished chef, Sailhac earned the first ever four star rating from The New York Times while at Le Cygne in the 1970s. He went on to be a chef at Le Cirque, the 21 Club and the Plaza Hotel.

I met Chef Alain when I volunteered to a assisst at a demo he was doing at school, along with 3-4 other students. One student, an older woman had positioned herself out front to assist the chef during the actual demo. The rest of us would be "backstage" getting trays of samples ready for the student audience to eat towards the end of the class. But a few minutes into the demo, the woman comes back to the kitchen behind the demo theater and says, "I can't understand what he is asking me. He wants something but I can't understand the accent!"

Cue Mrs. Fabulous! I quickly offered, to the chef supervising us, "My parents are French. I grew up around that accent. You want me to go out there and help him?"

"Yeah, you better get out there," he said.

So I got to "sous" for Chef Alain. I hovered around him in the small demo kitchen and tried to anticipate his every need. I pulled bowls out of his way, cleaned his board after he cleaned the fish, ran to get tools he needed. At one point he said to me but it got broadcast over the mike he had attached to his head for the demo, "You must have worked in a professional kitchen before."

"Yes, chef." I said.

"Because you know how to move around a chef."

"Thank you Chef."

I was thrilled. He delegated some actual cooking tasks to me during the demo and it ended up being such an incredible experience. When the demo was over and it was time for me to run to class, I asked him if I could snap a quick picture and he graciously obliged.

The next day I sent him an email thanking him for the opportunity and asking him to think of me if he ever needed an assistant for any future events. He replied almost immediately —

"Hi Rachel, I think you have a great sense of moving around a chef with efficiency. You look good in that picture. Saturday October 3 at 9am to 1pm I have class with participation it will be good if you can help. Ask your chef to be register. I think the class we’ll be in level 2 where you are right now. Thank you again, Alain Sailhac"

So that's how I got to assist him at the New York Culinary Experience.

The morning of Oct 3 I had to arrive at FCI at 7 am and help prep for the class which would begin at 10. There was a buzz that day at FCI that was incredible. When I walked in the back door a crew of maintenance men were still painting walls...everything had to be up-to-the minute-perfect for the paying customers and luminary chefs when they arrived. There was a chaotic precision to how this enoromous event was being pulled together throughout the school. Photographers roamed the halls. Espresso and latte stations with trays of continental breakfast were set up outside classrooms for the participants....dozens of white-coated students, FCI chef instructors and black-clad workers from New York Magazine got the job done. Chef Alain arrived about 9 and by 9:30 participants were filtering in and taking their positions at the cooking stations. I was assigned to assist an "island" of four participants and make sure they kept up with their "hands-on" completion of the recipe as Chef Alain went along. It was exhilarating.

Here is a shot I snapped with Chef Alain and two of the participants I helped that morning.


The team of volunteers for the class.

I realized that day how much I love being a part of this. I remembered how much I thrived on the buzz and excitement of the industry when I was younger...as a 17 year-old lying about my age I got my first restaurant job and became addicted to that adrenaline rush of the kitchen/restaurant/bar. Later I resented that work because I wanted to do what I was "supposed" to be doing—theater. But while rushing around that morning getting ready with all my fellow students and the chefs, I understood that food service was theater on a grand scale and much of what I loved about theater I saw in the food service industry too...the effort that could only be achieved by ensemble, the "family" that is created by the cast of characters needed to pull it off, the chaos, the adrenaline, the deadline, the audience that we ultimately must please, the drama, the attention to detail, setting the stage, the romance and the joy. And then...after all that...the room goes dark....and it starts all over again the next day.

Sucking Wind

To those who have been emailing or Facebooking me with "when's the next post?" I apologize for sucking as a diarist. I knew keeping up with keeping track of my journey was going to be challenging—as a writer I tend to procrastinate—but I had no real clue what being in school was going to be like. I've whined about it before, but while this culinary school thing is exhilarating, adrenalizing, stimulating and really fun in a lot of ways, it's also a lot more raw hard work than I ever imagined in the soft-focus fantasy I had about the whole thing before I started.

So, if I'm not posting, just picture me studying for the written tests we have every couple of weeks, which are getting harder, by the way or practicing recipes at home for the practicals. During my last test, the level 2 final exam, one question demanded we write out the entire recipe—ingredients, amounts and procedure–for a basic French sponge cake called a Genoise. It's an "egg foam" cake. Very light and full of the air. What happened to me during that test is exactly what happens to the Genoise if you open the oven door while it's baking and before the requisite golden crust has formed: it loses all the air you pumped into it with your whisk and aching frozen-shoulder arm and becomes an empty, pitiful shell of it's former self.

OK, maybe I'm taking this cake analogy too far, but the fact is that I knew all along that the Genoise was made with WHOLE EGGS that you beat furiously over a warm water bath, but on the test I wrote "separate the eggs" and "whisk the yolks and sugar to a pale yellow" and "whip the whites to a soft peak and fold them in" thereby creating an un-Genoise concoction drawn from bits and pieces of the several recipes I'd tried to jam into my hormone-drained brain in the hours before the test.

My consolation was that during the practical part of the test when we had to produce eight perfect cocottes of potato from one Idaho, and a creamy vanilla Aglaise sauce without a trace of scrambled yolk in it, I did. Thank you God!

My further consolation came today, a week after the final when I had the nerve to look at my grades online and saw that I got a 100 on the written test! ONE HUNDRED. Did I just dream I totally screwed up the Genoise recipe? Or did Chef X finally cut me some slack and forgive my little mix up with the eggs? I'm going to miss that guy. Really.

But I won't miss my "baker's lung."

"It's reported in people who work around flour for hours at a time...baker's, pastry chefs...it's a type of asthma...an allergy to the gluten," the young and earnest pulmonologist told me after I scored rather low on the breathing out part of my pulmonary function test.

He gave me 3 sample inhalers and showed me how to use one the next time I found myself sucking my breath through a clutched fist feeling in my upper chest after a 5 hour class in pastry making. Baker's lung!

With most of the past month's classes centered around pastry lessons, flour flying in abundance around the class kitchen, I've been breathless many a night. And while I was glad to put my paranoid psychosomatic delusions about lung cancer, tuberculosis, consumption and spore-like aliens lodged in my bronchials to rest, I was none to thrilled to add asthma to the growing list of physical limitations connected to the growing number of years I've been alive. As of September 30 that number is now 53. Whoopee!

I knew I had a wheat or gluten "intolerance." I could eat it if I didn't mind being bloated, gassy, having the runs and breaking out in a rash on most of the mucous membranes of my body. Now I can't hardly be in the same room with it. Life is cruel. Just try eating rice bread. Or soy pancakes. Or kamut pasta.

But what's a little bit of asphyxiation when you can finally turn out a perfect pie crust? Or understand what makes the puff in puff pastry (it's all about a huge block of butter and trapped air) or pipe out a doughy little blob on a cookie sheet that miraculously turns into an airy container for pastry creme once you bake it. Here are some of my Level 2 creations.


Apple Tart


Genoise Cake with Mocha Buttercream/ Toasted Almonds and Quiche Lorraine

Chef Envy

Can my complaining about Chef X in my last entry have unleashed a viral hex on him and sent him sprawling, as if from the impact of a well-targeted arrow, into his bed with pneumonia for the past two weeks?

(Chef X and Jonathan, my partner from week 2)


I don't think so. I have only to think of all the hundreds of lotto tickets I've bought, plans, wishes, affirmations for fame, fortune and publication that I've scribed into journals or onto notes I've hidden under my mattress according to instructions from my Feng Shui consultant, and that time I walked the perimeter of my property dusting the four corners with some toxic red powder using rooster feathers while chanting my best intentions for the future, to realize that as much as I'd like it to be so, my thoughts, negative or positive, don't have the "secret" impact on the world that all the new age gurus would have me believe.

So, I'm off the hook as far as Chef X is concerned. I am not psychically responsible for his ill health. I wish him a speedy and full recovery. I've had pneumonia and it is not fun.

In the meantime, we are four sessions into Level 2 without our French taskmaster and we've had an opportunity to experience some other chefs at FCI. Chef Candy was our first substitute teacher and she took us through the lesson on Lamb and Mutton, which included a delicious and hearty recipe for Navarin Printanier D'Agneau (Lamb Stew with Spring Vegatables) and oddly, a Poulet Braise au Vin Rouge (Chicken Braised with Red Wine). Chef Candy is a wiry, compact woman in her 50's (I'm guessing) whose no-nonsense approach and passion for her craft my team partner, Emily and I agreed was refreshing. She answered questions without sarcasm, asked questions without trying to trick us, and gave criticisms and praise in an honest, straightforward manner. We made Spatzle as a side dish, which was a revelation. I simple and delicious alternative to pasta. (See recipe below).
(Me and Emily)

By the way, it's been a pleasure working with Emily these past weeks...we seem to have gotten into a great groove of partnership, instinctively dividing up tasks and ending up with some great results. One happy benefit of Chef X's absence has been that we haven't been rotated to new partners as we would have at the beginning of Level 2, so Emily and I continue our run.

The second session, there was no Chef X again, and in his place was Chef Roger (Roj-ay), a youngish, darkly handsome French chef who started out shy and nervous and ended up funny and playful. We cracked up everytime he pulled a tool from his kit...everything he had was inordinately over sized. He mentioned having worked with Chef X at Picholine, many years ago and the ironic smile he gave while sharing that bit of history, told us all we needed to know about that experience. With Chef Roger we learned about Farci. Farci or forcemeat consists of coursely or finely chopped ingredients that can be raw or cooked. These "stuffings" can be used in vegetables (eggplant, large mushroom caps, zucchini, tomatoes) or inside meat, chicken or fish. They can also be formed into terrines, pates, galantines, ballotines or spreads. Who knew, chopped liver is a farci! With Chef Roger's gentle guidance we pounded top round and rolled and stuffed it with mushroom studded sausage, to make a Paupiette de Boeuf. We sauteed more mushrooms with shallots, bacon and the scooped insides of squash to make a stuffing for various vegetables for Legumes a Farcis. Chef Roger demonstrated a Mouselline, which was basically a chicken mouse you could use in a variety of preparations and threw in a really cool demo of how to make clear and delicate "pearls" of watermelon consomme using a vegetable gelatin Agar Agar. We got a real dinner break! No one threatened not to feed us or send us home or keep us until midnight. And we got the job done nicely, thank you without all that hanging over our heads.

In Session 3, Chef Sixto, another French chef who has succeeded in debunking my theory about French chefs, with his delightful way of laughing at his own jokes and charming "let me tell you a story" way of teaching, took us through the hell that is Organ Meats. That awful realm of offal. We made Sauteed Kidneys with Mustard Cream Sauce, Braised Sweetbreads with Country-Style Peas, Sauteed Calf's Liver with Caramelized Onions and Lamb Tongue with Sauce Piquant.

The lump that is a pre-condition of vomiting stayed in my throat pretty much the entire class, but I refused to get wimpy about the whole thing. I boiled and peeled a pair of lamb's tongues, sparing my vegetarian partner the task, all the while instructing my brain to NOT think about what it was I was peeling or to picture the lolling tongues of my dogs as they raced breathlessly around the yard or sat next to me on the couch and licked my face. NO. I WILL NOT THINK ABOUT THAT. I will just peel, slice and nap the grayish/pink protein with this beautiful, dark, piquant sauce I've made with shallots, black peppercorns, red wine vinegar, veal stock, tomatoes, butter and chopped herbs. My consolation comes with the assistant Chef's praise that the sauce was the best she'd tasted in the class. My dark secret about this session is that I did not taste any of the offal meats, even though the chefs instructed us to, even though Chef Sixto insisted we would be pleasantly surprised how tasty it would all be once we disguised them sufficiently.

And I was relieved that they sent up a dinner for us from "family" kitchen that consisted of fish cakes, cous cous, sauteed vegetables and salad. The compost barrel brimmed over with untouched organ meats glistening with their glazes. Chef Sixto dumped his own demo of the dishes into the barrel and admitted, "No one wants to eat it. Liver? It filters out everything. Disgusting!"

Spatzle (Shredded Egg Noodles)

Ingredients (for 4 servings)
1 Egg
1 3/4 oz milk
Salt and Pepper, ground nutmeg
1 T chopped herbs (parsley or tarragon...your preference)
3 oz. all-purpose flour
Butter for finishing

1. In a bowl, combine the egg milk, spices and herbs. Work in the flour and let it rest for about 15 minutes.
2. Set a large stockpot on the stove with water. Salt the water and bring to a boil. Prepare a large bowl with ice and water and set aside.
3. Set a colander or cooling rack over the stockpot, above, but not touching the boiling water. Pour the batter through the holes using a plastic pastry scraper or rubber spatula to press the batter through the holes.
4. Let the spatzle simmer for 3-5 minutes depending on the size. Remove the spatzle with a skimmer and place immediately in ice water bath. Drain well and refrigerate until needed.
5. To serve, saute the spatzle lightly in browned butter and season to taste one more time.

Skimming

We lined up in the stuffy hallway, an unwieldy snake of starched white interrupted only by our already red and sweating faces, just outside the production kitchen on the first floor of the French Culinary Institute. Some of use reviewed homemade flashcards, others talked and speculated what the practical and written tests marking the end of the 19 sessions of Level 1 would entail.

I had spent most of the day at my desk trying to anchor information into my post-menopausal brain, which is something like trying to affix an over-handled post-it note to your refrigerator...it just wants to drop off and flutter to the floor. I pressed on, nonetheless. I needed these to stick until around 9 pm: French culinary vocabulary, cooking times and temperatures, procedures for simple sauces like mayonnaise or veloute, basic techniques for making stock, braising a lamb shank, poaching fish in one of four different types of court bouillons... I took a break and peeled 4 potatoes and practiced the art of "tournage"....making perfect little potato footballs called cocottes....4-6 from each potato...a skill we'd have to demonstrate for the practical. I sliced carrots into little batons called jardiniere and turned jardinieres into little bricks called macedoine. Turnips ceased to be bulbous and homely and became delicate juliennes, thin and translucent. Chopped into pebbles, the julienne are now called brunoise and would help transform a plain broth into a Consomme Printenier.

We were finally allowed to file into the kitchen. At each station there was a cutting board and a bowl in which a turnip, carrot, potato and onion sat waiting to be peeled and shaped. I ended up at a station that faced the wall and straddled a sink and the compost barrel. In 30 minutes we'd have to make all our shapes, drop our knives, clean our stations, leave our student ID on the cutting board and leave the kitchen.

I knew I spent too much time on the turnips and ended up with too little macedoine of carrots and would lose points for that. I found out by chatting with my fellow students as we waited in the hallway that I'd screwed up by not keeping my potato trimmings submerged in water so they wouldn't turn pink. But, why? We were going to toss them in compost anyway! Well, in the professional kitchen universe we need to train ourselves to use every scrap, honor the food, fight waste and save money at every turn...those trimmings would make a fine mashed potato for that night's "special" or for a "family" meal for the staff. This is a lesson, if applied to our home kitchens, our industries and most of the western world in general, would go a long way toward saving the planet. So, even if we weren't going to save them TONIGHT, we should always treat the trimmings as though they could be saved. It was all about building habits.

I ended up with a 92 on the test. 10 out of 10 for organization, 10 out of 10 for cleanliness. 9 out of 10 for knife skills. 8 out of 10 for final product in cutting, 9 out of 10 for final product in cooking (not enough macedoine....a bit uneven perhaps? Not enough salt in the blanching water when I cooked them a l'anglaise?) I wasn't the best, but I was by far not the worst. Chef X gave us a little speech as he handed out the grades. "Some chefs give out 100's but I don't very believe in dat. How can you give a 100? There is no such thing as perfect in a kitchen. One minute your jacket is clean, then the next minute it's dirty, so how can that be 100? Your station is clean one time, but the next time I look there is a towel on your cutting board, so dat is not perfect. It happens, but what can I say? It's not 100! These chefs that give 100 they maybe want to make themselves look good!"

Or maybe they want to make their student feel good, feel accomplished, I think. What's wrong with that?! What is it about the French? Would it ever kill them to give you glowing praise? All of Chef X's compliments seem begrudging..."left-handed" kind of kudos that leave you feeling confused about whether you've been praised or dinged after all. This inevitably leads me to think about my father...not just to think about him, but to react viscerally, to feel my ancient history being triggered like a string of dormant land minds, by Chef X's rhythm of speech, his accent, his vaguely familiar humor and sarcasm, into feeling anger, humiliation and tears rising at the most inopportune moments.

A Frenchman, reared by a tyrannical chief-of-police French father, my father didn't believe in praise...it might make you into an "egoist", so was best avoided. I cannot remember a single time he told me he was proud of me or that I'd exceeded his expectations or that I was good at something. When I got good grades at school he took the credit saying it was only due to the fact that he pressured me or threatened me into performing at my best that I pulled A's or dean's list or won an award. Things I had passion or talent for (writing, singing, performing) he disparaged or dismissed as folly, or worse, a sign of my self-indulgent and selfish nature.

I'd knew I'd be stirring up a lot in culinary school, but I was thinking more in terms of French sauces....not the stew of my French-accented childhood.

Normally, we would move on to Level 2 and a new chef, but for some reason we've been assigned Chef X again for level 2. I hate the "every thing happens for a reason" cliche that gets thrown around when bad things happen and people want to be able to find a logical explanation to hold on to for it all...but I'm wondering if another 6 weeks of Chef X pushing my buttons isn't just what I need to "ecumer" the cauldron of bloody and bloated old feelings that have been bubbling over in my kitchen. If it helps me to take the cloudy stock of my old life and once and for all turn it into a clear, golden comforting consomme, then bring it on. When it's all over I'll be grateful for all the expert advice, techniques, habits and culinary lessons imparted by the chef, but I'll be most grateful for the unexpected gift he's giving me....a chance to heal some old wounds.

Ecumer: to skim off impurities such as blood and fat that rise to the surface of a simmering stock or sauce.

Jacques Pepin Jokes Around

"Get me a knife." Jacques Pepin said to the assistant event chef who I happened to be standing behind in the impossibly small wedge of a kitchen behind the demo auditorium at The French Culinary Institute.

"Yes, Chef. What kind of knife, Chef?"

"A sharp one." The Frenchman said as he caught my eye, winked and included me in his joking dismissal of the young chef. The assistant walked out of the kitchen muttering. I went to my knife bag which I had stowed under a prep table in the hallway and took out my paring knife and sharpening stick. I passed the blade back and forth to hone it, then quickly stashed the bag back under the table. I went back through the kitchen into the auditorium where Chef Pepin was checking his ingredients for his upcoming demo.

"Here you go, chef." I laid my paring knife down with a click next to his cutting board. "Be careful. It's very sharp." And I winked back at him. "Is there anything else I can help you with?" And there was. I ground some fresh pepper for him in a mise en place cup. Filled another with salt. I made sure his station was wiped down with white vinegar to degrease it from all the prep cooking I had been doing before he came (frying about 200 2" baguette slices in clarified butter that would become little "rolls" for an exquisite lobster salad.

"You are cleaning, that's good."

"Yes, I heard someone important is doing a demo today." I smiled and he smiled back.

Pepin, one of the FCI directors was hosting a cocktail party for a group of journalists and PR people who had come to hear all about a cruise line that he had designed the menus for and to watch the old master do a cooking demo. And I had volunteered that day to do 8 hours of on-your-feet-with-no-breaks prep work and hors d'oeuvres assembly for the party, all in hopes of meeting the icon.

And so I did. I was wondering if I was going to have the guts to ask him to pose for a quick picture, but my camera's dead battery solved that problem for me. Too bad. I would have loved to be able to post a pic of me and the old chef. He was a lot shorter, a lot older than I expected. I have him frozen in my mind as he was in those wonderful PBS shows I'd borrowed from the library. He was older in them...but sort of "Uncle-old". When I saw him in person I was surprised to see him be more "Grandpa-old", and taking careful steps around the kitchen. Heck, I'm surprised when I see myself in the mirror lately and I look like I'm knocking on the door of Grandma-old myself, so who am I to judge.

I was glad to have done the event just the same, photo op or not. I learned a few things...particularly some cool finger food ideas...the amazing lobster salad in their butter-drenched rolls, an incredible wild mushroom and cream "bruschetta" on crispy toasts, fried rigatoni pasta stuffed with a ricotta/herb filling, a raw kobe beef roll with kobe tartare and mozzerella in the middle....and I learned I probably will NOT work in a restaurant or full-time catering operation when I'm done with school. I was so bone-achingly tired after my 11-7 shift that I could have cried. Eight hour shifts in restaurants are the norm....ditto in catering.

I guess somewhere along my fantasy loop about what I would do with my life once I graduated school, there was a notion that I might want to intern or work in a top restaurant in NY for 6 mos or a year to experience what that would be like and to have something like that on my resume. Like my son doing his stint at Le Bernardin, I too could find my way into some 4-star establishment and forever have that notch on my apron string. But after the volunteer day, I don't know if this body can take it. I know...never say never...but Max is looking at 50-60 hour work weeks at Le B....and at 20, they'll be a bitch, but he probably won't feel like crying at the end of his day. He'll be saying..."let's get a beer!" At the end of my day of volunteering I was satisfied I'd done a good job, I got a chance to meet one of my heroes, and I was ready for a long nap and some Advil.

Bad, Bad Blogger

Ok, I'm a bad, bad blogger.

I'm reading Julie/Julia, the book about the Julie/Julia Child project and blog that the Meryl Streep/Amy Adams movie coming out in August is based on and I feel appropriately ashamed. Julie took on completing all the recipes in the Childs' Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year and pledged to blog about it all. According to the book she did the recipes at night...sometimes not sitting down to eat with her husband until close to midnight...then got up every morning and wrote her blog entries before work. So she did all this cooking, shopping for ingredients, working full time and blogging every day....and I'm going on nearly two weeks since my last blog entry.

My original plan was to make entries three days a week, after each class, detailing everything we cooked and learned along with my very witty and insightful observations. But one month into this Mrs. Fabulous Goes To Cooking School adventure I'm up to my nose in the reality of what I've taken on here. Just to illustrate my mental state let me briefly describe to you two consecutive dreams I had last night:

In the first dream I've agreed to be part of a group attempting to swim across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to England. The atmosphere of the dream is sort of film-noirish...black and white...shadows and dark clouds hanging over the black water of the endless ocean stretch. As I am being pulled out to sea by a line attached to an ocean liner (very possibly the Titanic) I am experiencing an all-encompassing panic and sense of dread about what I have gotten myself into. I know I will drown or be consumed by a shark.

As dream sequences are wont to do, one second I was taking on saltwater through the nose, the next minute I was on the floor of a super busy country-side restaurant and asking a large party seated at a big rustic table if I could take their order. I must not have been the regular waitstaff because I wasn't prepared and had to rip a page from one of the diner's address books and borrow a pen to do so. I wrote down what the party wanted to drink, then went back to the kitchen to fill the order. Once there, I found I couldn't interpret what I'd written, or couldn't find what I needed in the crowded fridge. I was sweating and confused and no matter how hard I tried I couldn't figure it out and pull the order together. I called out to a young waitress to please help me get the order out. She looked at me in a mocking, angry sort of way and said "Why should I? I'm not helping you!" Whereupon I shouted the only appropriate answer: "Well, Fuck You, Bitch!" When I finally got back to the table with my tray of drinks, they were all wrong and everyone was rolling their eyes at my complete and uncool failure as a person.

I don't think we need to call in Dr. Freud to interpret these somnolent panic attacks. It's safe to say that 4 weeks into this I'm feeling just a tiny bit overwhelmed.

I know it's only 15 hours a week of classes...but what you don't plan for is everything else that goes along with it. For instance, there is homework. I've got to read the lesson chapter before each class and copy each of the lesson's recipes out on 3x5 cards and bring them with me. It doesn't matter that Chef X promptly changes all the recipes...the ingredients, the procedures, declaring "I'm not very agreeing with how dey do do dat, so we going to do it my way..." and we have to copy his recipe down once we get to class and then follow his demo for the new altered procedure. Why then, you ask, would you have to waste time copying the recipes at home, when there is a good chance they will be changed or that you may not even cook all the recipes and in fact, end up cooking totally different ones? You waste this time because Chef X will randomly go around the room and check to see who does or doesn't have their recipe cards prepared and if you don't have them you get point off on your evaluations.

Then there are the tests, every 5-6 lessons that you have to study for...drill the vocabulary both French and English...the cooking terms, the product distinctions (round fish like bass and salmon have two filets and up to 27 pin bones that have to be removed when fileting, while flat fish like flounder have 4 fillets and no pin bones...what IS the difference between a bi-valve and a cephalopod?) I usually study by re-reading each chapter, underling and reviewing class notes and then reducing it all down to a one or two page study guide. There goes THAT day.

Then there is the practicing. Since my hollandaise debacle I've decided I need to be trying some of these skills at home to avoid future embarrassment and to hone my skills for the looming black shadow of the practical test (this could be what that Titanic image was all about) that's coming up. For this test we will have 70 minutes to complete some mystery plate of food (we find out only the day of the test) and present it to a panel of judges. We'll be graded on technique, execution, plating, cleanliness, organization, and taste. So...I've bought bags of carrots and turnips and onions and stood, shoulders hunched in my kitchen, trying to master the ciseller (a small dice) or a julienne (a thin strip) or an emincer (a really thin slice) without slicing off my fingernails; making a sabayon (an egg custard base for sauces and deserts) that fluffs up the way it should over a cold bath (or is it hot bath?); and sliding my fish knife in at just the right angel to separate the delicate trout flesh from the bone without making ribbons of it.

How about the uniforms? I always have to have a cleaned and pressed uniform ready to go. Chef's jacket, checkered pants, neckerchief, apron, side towel and hat. I iron daily now, it seems.

And the commuting? I have to leave a window of 2 hours to get to class because though the drive time is really only about 70 minutes, the traffic into the city is always unpredictable. And if I get in to SoHo by 4:40 I can get street parking just 6 blocks from the school as opposed to using a garage and paying to park. Since this saves me about $250 a month, I try to always get a street spot. So, this means I MUST leave my house by 3:00 for a 5:45 class start time, or earlier on Saturday when the bridge and tunnel crowd decide a summer afternoon in the city is just what they need. And my nap...I have to have a 40 minute nap the day of class...(yeah, right!) or else I might fall asleep on the drive home...THERE GOES THAT DAY...

Now, as for the drive home...class is supposed to be over at 10:45 pm. Due to the extended charming and sometimes repetitious anecdotes that make Chef X's demos run long, combined with our overall beginner's skill level, we have never finished class on time. We usually finish between 11 and 11:15. Which means after changing out of my uniform, packing my nerdy wheely bag with my dirty clothes and knives, filling up my water bottle for the drive, taking one last pee before I go and dragging a wet paper towel over my face to swath through the layer of sweat and grease that has accumulated on it over the last 5 hours, along with the 6 block walk back to my car, I never get on the road home before 11:45. With the late-night construction going on on the I-78 I get home about 1 am and finally wind down ( I should say "wine down" since I inevitably need a bit of the grape to settle down) around 2.

On my sleep-deprived days off I'm rushing around trying to get done everything related to school plus all that I was doing before I started this, like taking care of my house, my kids, the dogs, our banking, bills, gardening (forget it...the weeds win), finding my son an apartment in the city for his 4-month externship and dealing with slimy, craigslist scammers, laundry, feeding everyone, and driving my daughter and her friends every where on demand. Because of his schedule, I now actually only see my husband Friday nights for a few hours, Sundays, and Monday nights. Depending on your view on long marriages, this could be a good thing, a schedule that enforces separation and therefore deeper appreciation for one's life partner, or it could make you feel like "who are YOU?" when some guy comes up behind you in your bathroom and scares the shit out of you don't because it's been so long that you don't recognize him.

All this and FUCKING BLOGGING TOO.

OK. DEEP BREATH. IN. OUT. IN. OUT.

I'm done whining. I promise. And I'm done with this entry. I've got some Sunday left to try and figure out who that guy snoring on my couch is.