Wednesday 29 May 2013

Epic Meal Time: Cordon Bleu Style

While we're all stressing out over the recipes for our Black Box exam, we still have class to attend.

Today was a seminar on "Cuisine D'Assemblage"  (Kitchen Assembly), essentially an overview of the categories of preserved, frozen, pre-made and processed items available to the modern kitchen.  While we've used fairly few processed items here at school (with the occasional exception of things like tomato paste and frozen pastry), most kitchens use at least some pre-made items.  And, to be honest, the time savings and quality difference sometimes justifies using preserved or pre-made.  I, for one, will happily take excellent San Marzano canned tomatoes over the sad, underripe fresh tomatoes we get here in Ottawa most of the year.

That said, Chef 1 decided to have a little fun with us.  He handed the class a box of horrible processed junk food - Oreo cookies, Kraft Dinner (Kraft Macaroni and Cheese to you Americans!), canned cocktail sausages, corned beef, powdered poutine gravy.... I mean, look at this shit.....


Then he set us loose on the kitchen to come up with a few dishes using this garbage.  I'm sure the exercise was more for fun than anything because we ended up with nearly 20 students crowded into the one person demo kitchen.  Chaos ensued, but in a good way.


My idea?  Croquettes of Kraft Dinner (tightened with béchamel), with canned cocktail sausage and a tortilla chip breading.  Found some black truffle oil in the cupboard and threw a bit of that in for giggles. Haute cuisine, oui?


Verdict?  Tasted um... processed.  Gee really?  I thought something tasted a little off with the cheese powder anyway, and Chef 1 assured me that the box might have been sitting around for a year or two.  Yuck....

That said, I think it was better than the corned beef and spinach dip pasta that another group thoughtfully browned under the salamander, as if that would make it better.  It looked a little (and I imagine tasted a little) like cheap dog food.

So a little fun to break the tension as we get our recipes together for our final exam.  I think I know what I'm going to do now - just a matter of getting it on paper and handing it in tomorrow.  Then two weeks to practice, pray and panic.

Tuesday 28 May 2013

Opening the Black Box (Literally and Figuratively)

Well, the calm sure didn't last long!

Late yesterday afternoon the ingredient list for our Black Box Exam landed with a crash in my inbox.  I nearly fell out of my chair - I wasn't expecting this!  According the original term schedule (the one that's still posted in the student lounge, by the way!) we were supposed to receive the list on May 31. But now we have to create our menu, recipes and bon d'economat by this Thursday at 3:30 PM. 

Holy. Shit.

The list itself (shown below) is actually pretty good. Mandatory ingredients are 100g of chicken liver, 200g of shiitake mushrooms, 2 chicken legs, 150g of shrimp, and 50ml of calvados.  Three techniques (of which I must pick at least two) are farce a gratin, farce fine, and hollandaise.  Theme?  Business menu for two.



The best part?  No rack of anything to debone, no artichokes (YAY!) and lots of colorful produce available - spinach, red peppers, apples, beet root, carrots, etc.

My mind immediately jumped into overdrive and started spraying shitty ideas all over the place like out-of-control food poisoning. I had to give myself a time-out to get my focus back.

Once my reason returned I reminded myself of the lessons from the White Box that I just yesterday afternoon wrote about on this blog - maximize the easy points, focus on technique not ingredients, focus on my strengths, and keep in mind that mise-en-place is what's going to make or break me.

Do I have it figured out yet?  No way.  I'm going to try to use all three techniques if I can, and make sure I've got more color on my plates this time.  I'd like to avoid stuffing the chicken legs with a liver farce a gratin if I can avoid it (because that's so obvious that it's what EVERYONE is going to do) and I know I'm going to need to choose either the salmon or the clams to supplement the small amount of shrimp, and if I want to have a farce fine, it's going to have to be with the seafood.  And then I need to make sure I'm using some of the other techniques that Chef 2 has been showing us this term as my side dishes - things with vegetables, starches, etc.  And given that there will be next to no bones and trimmings and there is no veal or chicken stock on the list, my sauces are going to have to come from somewhere else - the hollandaise is a gimme with the seafood, but for the chicken?  Hmmmmm...

While this all still sounds like drivel, it's at least focussed drivel and proof that that other important "Black Box" (my mind) is working properly.  I'm hoping I can get through my class this evening, come up with a draft menu before bed, sleep on it, and then pull it all together tomorrow afternoon after class.

Wish me luck because it all comes down to this!



Monday 27 May 2013

Sarah Had A Little Lamb (and A LOT of Artichokes!)


A few of my readers have asked me why I’ve taken so long to write about last week’s “White Box” workshop, the dry-run for our upcoming exam.  Truth is, I’ve been struggling with a little writer’s block again and I needed a few days to figure out exactly what I wanted to say about it.

The White Box followed the same format and process as the upcoming exam.  We were given a theme (in this case “Spring Dinner for Two”), a list of three techniques from which we must choose at least two (sauce hollandaise or a derivative, farce fine, and turned vegetables), a list of mandatory ingredients (150g of salmon, 1 orange, 100g of goat cheese, and 5 artichokes), and a list of optional ingredients.  About 72 hours to come up with a menu, bon d’economat, and recipes, and then a week to panic.  Pretty straight forward, eh?

Once I got the list of ingredients and the theme, a few things jumped out at me right away.  First, 150g isn’t much salmon.   It’s enough for an appetizer for two, maybe. That meant that I was going to need to grab at least one of the two other proteins (scallops and rack of lamb) listed in the optional ingredients.  Then the little matter of five (!) artichokes.  Artichokes are a pain in the ass and five is a weird number when making two plates.  Arrrgggggh…….

 A short chat with my friend and mentor The Stig and I was in a much better mood.  He helped me come up with a plan that would use all three techniques, make use of that odd numbered artichoke, and be a little more creative than the obvious things like stuffed lamb chops. I can’t even begin to explain how grateful I was to have a plan so quickly and to then have the time to spend on the bon d’economat and recipes – more than a few people in my class stayed up all night to get theirs done and I (for a change) slept soundly.

So my menu:  Appetizer of salmon mousse napoleon, seared scallop, wilted spinach and orange and herb hollandaise.  Main of lamb chops with goat cheese crust and duxelle of oyster mushrooms, spaetzle, glazed turnips and braised artichokes.  And that fifth artichoke?  Blended into the spaetzle to make it “disappear”.  Easy, right?

The morning of the workshop (a week later), I was up at the crack of dawn.  I had to be in a little early anyway since it was again my turn to be the class sous-chef.  Two Turkish coffees and a breakfast of leftover pheasant had me in a sparkling mood.  Set up for the class was a little more chaotic than usual since every student was getting a slightly different basket based on their submitted recipes.

And as I mentioned in my previous post we had Chef 3 for this workshop.  Chef 3 hadn’t seen any of us cook since the end of Intermediate in mid-March, so the workshop wasn’t just a dry-run for the exam, it was an opportunity to find out if we’d actually learned anything this term.  No pressure!

I was pretty calm the first part of the workshop.  Got my salmon mousse (farce fine) put together quickly, baked the phyllo pastry for the napoleon (without burning it!) and got started on the mise en place for my main, including turning all those damned artichokes.  The only thing that went wrong?  My hollandaise broke about a minute before I needed it on the plate.  Fuck.  I grabbed a bowl, some cold water and whisked for dear life.  It came back to life just in the nick of time.

 

Chef 3 seemed fairly pleased with my plates.  A little suggestion or two on plating but nothing serious.  I was in a pretty good mood and decided get a smile out of him.

“Chef, do I get extra points for my hollandaise if it broke but I saved it?”

Chef 3 stared at me blankly for about two seconds and then started to laugh.

“Unfortunately no, Sarah!”

Once everyone had plated their appetizers, Chef 3 had us tidy up and sent us on a half hour long break.  I had managed to get some of my mise en place done for my main, but not all of it.  About 20 minutes into the break I started freaking out a little, realizing that I had A LOT of work to do.

The second part of the workshop was, for me, an exercise in controlling panic.  I made a hash of butchering the lamb – something that isn’t my strong suit anyway, but doing it under a time crunch was awful.  I hacked away at it and got it done, but it was less than pretty.  My turned turnips were also a little less than pretty, but at least I didn’t burn them.  I don’t even want to discuss my sauce, except to say that I can do a whole lot better than what ended up on the plate.

 

The verdict?  Artichokes were lukewarm, at best.  Not the prettiest or most colourful plate (no kidding, eh?), but the lamb was properly cooked and things seemed to taste okay.  Honestly, I was just happy that I managed to get all the elements of my dish on the plate.  I wasn’t thrilled, but it was on time and edible.

The lessons from this for my upcoming exam?

1.       Maximize the “easy” points.  The submitted menu, bon d’economat, and recipes are worth a significant piece of the mark, so it’s worth spending the time to get these right and presentable.  I think I did pretty well on this part.

2.       Focus on technique rather than the ingredients. The ingredients may not be sexy, but that doesn’t mean the plate can’t be interesting with good use of technique.

3.        Focus on the things I know how to do well, and practice the things I don’t. What I did to that lamb was less than dignified and messed up my timing.  No excuse for that.

4.       MISE EN PLACE!!!!!!!!

So another week of class ahead.  We won’t have the list of ingredients or the theme of our final exam for a few days yet so there isn’t much planning I can do, but that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about it constantly.

I can’t believe how time has flown.

Thursday 23 May 2013

Tweety Bird 3: The Final Flight (and Another Fucking Pheasant)


I don’t know what is it about quails, but they seem to be a curse on Cordon Bleu students.

Tuesday was one of two lessons this week.  An unremarkable dish of quails stuffed with their own meat and lamb sweetbreads.  Oh joy…

Every time I deal with quails I still get the giggles thinking about the quails from Intermediate and how they drove us mad trying to “bone” them from the back (LOL!).  This time we carved them up, stuffed them, and served the pieces separately.  I had just sharpened my boning knife and zero fucks were given.  Take that Tweety Bird.
 

Unfortunately, this was a boring dish.  I really don’t love sweetbreads when they are braised into squishy greyness, and combined with quail it was tedious and time-consuming for what ended up on the plate.  Chef 2 said my dish was fine – I’ll take his word for it.  Even with his plating in the demo, it tasted like a dish we would have made in Basic Cuisine, and looked like one we would have made in Intermediate.  Other than as a review of quail and sweetbreads, why?
 

Yesterday was a little more interesting: the return of the bird that I call the Fucking Pheasant.  Fortunately, we were making a sauce bigarade (like with the Bloody Ducky in Intermediate), a gastrique with caramel, orange, cognac and Carmen Miranda hatful of fruit (pineapple, orange, lemon, blueberries, strawberries, etc).  Once the buzzard was carved up, it was braised and deboned after cooking.  A whole lot easier to pull all those icky tendons out of the legs after cooking, let me tell you. My post-Chef tasting plate.
 

And Chef 2 was in fine form in the demo.  Unlike on Tuesday where he seemed slightly bored, yesterday he was in full flight.  He showed us how to make churros (a slight variation on pâte à choux) and also the Austrian/German dumpling called knödel.  And for some reason he was on a roll making fun of one of the pastry chefs, even going so far as to shape one of the knödel like the Chef’s face, with emphasis on the nose.  It would have made no sense to anyone who isn’t at the school, but trust me, it was hilarious.

The practical hummed along fairly quickly.  My sharp boning knife got the Fucking Pheasant dispatched with reasonable speed, and the rest of it was just plain auto-pilot of organization, tasting, and even more tasting.  As usual, I’m not the fastest person in the room even when I’m working flat out, but the Chef said my dish was good, the taste was good, the seasoning was good and he was particularly happy with my knödel.  “You have very good knödel.”  Is it just me or does that sound dirty?

So we’re done with the little game birds for this term, and for that matter, for good (at least while at school).  I’m a whole lot less freaked out by the wee buzzards than I was only a few months ago, and even the Fucking Pheasant and its ten billion bones and tendons isn’t scary anymore.  While I’m generally feeling slightly out of sorts that school will be over in only a few weeks, a dish like the Fucking Pheasant made me realize how far I’ve come in just a short time.  But then again, the more you know, the more you realize you haven’t got a clue.

And guess what?  This morning was our “white box” workshop, the one I discussed last week.  And guess what else? The Chef for the workshop was Chef 3, who hasn’t seen us cook since mid-March.  Good thing I was wearing my lucky socks!

Wednesday 15 May 2013

Vegetables: What Food Eats


Don’t get me wrong, I like vegetables, and I even like many vegetarians.

Cooking for vegetarians isn’t usually a problem. There are millions of cool things you can do with pasta, rice, eggs, etc.  But what does drive me a little bit mental are some of the crazy/trendy food restrictions that people have invented as a manifestation of their deep emotional problems/control issues/overly severe potty training. When someone tells me about their vegan (except for bacon), gluten-free, soy-free, no-carb, and no-garlic diet, I want to punch them in the crotch. And believe me, folks like that want to talk about it, usually ad nauseum while I’m trying to enjoy my duck confit.

The Cordon Bleu curriculum is not suited to vegetarians and vegans.  Nearly every dish is swimming in butter, eggs, cream and veal stock. But even without solid statistics on the number of Canadians who have gone veggie (I was surprised to note that Statistics Canada does not track this), it certainly is a top trend and a market that must be entertained.
So today’s workshop was about vegetarian cuisine.  I was mildly irritated to note that our baskets had all the usual Cordon Bleu suspects (potatoes, artichokes, butternut squash, onions, carrots, celery, a sliver of cauliflower, pale out-of-season tomatoes, and about the saddest shrivelled beet I'd ever seen), and absolutely no fresh herbs or cheese.  In place of herbs we had some slightly bruised watercress.  I stared at the box thinking "What the fuck am I going to do with this crap?"

A reappearance today by Chef 4, who we hadn't had teach or supervise our group since the Lesson 2 practical in Intermediate. Chef 4 has a bit of a different style than the other Chefs.  He wanders around with his tablet computer in hand, peering over shoulders and taking notes.  It's a bit un-nerving.  "All that's missing is the shark music from JAWS." the student next to me noted.

He asked for a vegan amuse-bouche and lacto-ovo vegetarian-friendly appetizers and mains.  And, by the way, the appetizer had to have something crispy, and the main something starchy.
I glared at my basket for a few minutes, willing some cheese to appear.  Nothing happened.
So I decided to try to modify a few recipes I know to suit the ingredients we had.  I started with a carrot and ginger soup.  I tasted it and it could have desperately used some chicken stock, butter, and maybe some nuts for garnish.  Threw in some cayenne (a little more for garnish) and some tapioca pearls. 
 
Next round I could at least use some eggs, so I made cripsy curry fried cauliflower with a salad of watercress, orange-balsamic vinaigrette, and orange confit.
 

And for the main, beet ravioli with butternut squash puree and turned zucchini.  If the beet ravioli sounds familiar, it's because it is - I made it in a workshop a while back.  But this time I had to put potatoes in the filling instead of cheese, and I (again!) had some trouble getting the dough rolled thin enough.  If it worked the way it does at home, the beet filling would be bleeding a gorgeous pink colour through the pasta.  Bugger....
\


 

The verdict:  Not too bad actually.  The cayenne on the soup was a little palate-murdering, the salad on the appetizer was a bit wilted (gee - really?) and the pasta could have been rolled a little thinner (ya think?).   But the comments about mine were quite a bit better than some of the things I overheard.

I suppose it's good that we had the workshop, but I was really rather bored with the whole thing.  At the end of the workshop Chef 4 explained that he deliberately left off fresh herbs - they are too easy to use and a rather forgiving of too much/too little.  The spices we had, on the other hand (curry, nutmeg, cayenne, etc) are all pretty deadly when overdone.  Ok... point taken.  And some of the other things in the basket (quinoa, tapioca, watercress, etc) were put there to challenge us to try something we hadn't used before.  Whatever - I've used them before, so nothing really scared me today.

Speaking of scary though, a couple of days ago we got our ingredient list for our "white box" workshop next week.  The white box is a dry run of sorts for our final exam.  A list of mandatory ingredients and a list of optional ingredients.  Three days to come up with recipes, a bon d'economat, and a sexy little menu.  Then a week to stew/freak out about what we've committed to making.  Recipes are due tomorrow afternoon at 3:30 PM.  I've got my menu worked out (with some excellent advice to ensure that I use all of the mandatory techniques and make it at least a little creative) and my paperwork is mostly done.  Time to let it percolate one more night, then I'll hand it in before class tomorrow.  Heaven help me.

Think I'm going home to eat some dead animals - that will make me feel better.


 


 

 

Monday 13 May 2013

Polishing a Turd

Most of the dishes in Superior Cuisine are pretty good.  The dish we made in class today was not one of them.

Flipping through my book last week, I noted that our next dish was stuffed sole with pike mousse and champagne sauce.  Bloody hell.... pike again.  It's one of the most disgusting fish, and, in typical Cordon Bleu fashion, it's pureed with egg whites and cream, stuffed inside another white fleshed fish, and covered in a white-ish sauce - just the sort of seafood thing I hate.

This dish reminds me of the old PR man's saying:  "You can't polish a turd, but you can roll it in glitter."  No amount of black truffle or champagne is going to make this dish anything it other than yucky and boring.  This Chef 2's plate from the demo.



I could tell that Chef 2 was less than thrilled about the dish during the demo.  He's normally pretty cheerful and enthusiastic, but today he seemed more interested in demonstrating fun things to do with asparagus and carrots.  He also warned us that this dish is not easy - lots of different things to do and keep track of. Yay...

I stumbled into the practical less than enthused.  But I stayed focussed and got through it.  My dish was okay, such that it was anything. Fortunately, we were able to supplement the pike in the stuffing with langoustine, but that didn't make it much better.  Properly cooked, and a nicely presented plate, other than that I burned my carrots.  But not bad for a half-assed effort.

A glittering turd indeed.

Thursday 9 May 2013

Show Me Something New


 
If you are like me, it’s easy to fall into a food rut and make and eat the same things over and over again.  Sometimes it’s because you happen to have a lot of something on hand, other times it’s a comfort thing, and sometimes it’s because you just can’t be bothered to come up with new ideas.

The theme of this week’s “black box” workshop (on paper, at least), was “Le Principal Inédit”, a term that was not familiar to me.  Our book provided no explanation beyond that. I looked it up, and “inédit” seems to mean “novelty”.  That idea, and the rumours of eggs and duck breast as our proteins, got me thinking ….what can I come up with that might be “new”?

In many ways, in my mind anyway, cuisine and literature are very similar.  Both are constructs of human civilization and imagination (yes, I’ve been reading Northrop Frye’s “The Educated Imagination” again!), and both essentially “tell the same stories” over and over again.  The characters/ingredients and the settings/styles may be different, but the “stories” are the same.  No one truly invents something new – they simply put a different spin or flavour on it.  Even with something like molecular gastronomy and its foams, gels, powders and pop rocks, there really isn’t anything new going on - just a different set of tools at work.

You can see that I was well and truly over-thinking this.
So I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t about to invent anything that Chef 2 hadn’t seen before.  But what I could do is come up with something “new to me”.  One thing that I discussed with the Chefs at my meeting last week is my tendency to revisit the same plating techniques – a scattering of vegetable brunoise, a splattering of sauce – essentially a deliberately Jackson Pollock-esque style.  So perhaps this workshop was a place to switch it up a bit.

The other group of Superior students started their workshop in the morning and were a good source of intelligence about what Chef 2 wanted to see.  He wanted an egg appetizer that also used artichoke and asparagus, and duck breast for the main with three garnitures.
My egg appetizer was oeufs brouillés in an eggshell, in an artichoke “nest”.  Kind of cute, a little whimsical, and seasonally appropriate for our much-delayed spring.  I was a little disappointed in my plating of the red pepper sauce.  I fell back on my old style out of pure necessity – just minutes before plating I seared the tips of my right thumb and index finger on a hot metal bowl and simply didn’t have the steadiness in my hands to do something neater.


After a short break (and some burn gel), I buckled down to work on the duck.  I was determined to redeem myself on this one after earning a withering look from Chef 3 when I served him raw duck in Intermediate.  Other than getting the duck right, I was going for some colour and drama on the plate. I think I pulled that off.  Beet and apple puree, rice croquettes with parsley and mace, some little carrot curly things, a pâte à choux “breadstick”, microgreen salad with confit lemon zest.   Chef 2 seemed pleased.  And the duck?  Properly cooked this time – redemption at last!


So a little time off to think about next week.  Two more lessons (including one I’m not looking forward to because it involves a pike mousse) and a workshop on vegetarian cuisine – now that will be something new!

Tuesday 7 May 2013

Oh Deer

Believe it or not, we've already finished Lesson 11 of 19.

Yesterday was Lesson 10, two fairly easy dishes: oeufs meurettes and consommé under puff pastry.

Chef 2 was in a cheerful mood, even though it was an early morning demo.

"Normally, the eggs should be poached in red wine, but I drank the wine, so there is no red wine."

The truth is, the wine we use in classes is horrible salted stuff - completely undrinkable and would have been ghastly for poaching eggs.  So we used water, but make a red wine sauce and garnitures of bacon, mushroom and brown glazed pearl onions.  What could possibly go wrong?  

To paraphrase Heston Blumenthal (who was paraphrasing W.C. Fields), never work with children, small animals, or eggs.  I have mixed luck with poached eggs generally, and yesterday I made three, of which only one didn't have the yolk break on me.  Let's call it an appetizer portion, shall we?


The consommé was fine, but in the now-brutal Ottawa heat it wasn't a lot of fun making a steamy soup and fighting with puff pastry.  Why couldn't it have been gazpacho day?


Today's lesson was also a nice cold-weather dish: venison loin in salt crust.  Like with eggs, I have mixed luck with salt crusts.  It's so easy to overcook something, and I find the crust needs a lot of patching up because it's so fragile.  And, true to form, I came perilously close to overcooking it.  Oh deer....

And just as I was slapping my food on the plate, my phone battery died, so I have no picture of my dish today.  It's too bad - I had a cute little stack of triangle-shaped potato and turnip and an adorable little microgreen salad (even prettier because I picked half the pansies and other flowers out of the package for my plate).  So this is the Chef's plate from the demo.  Pretty nifty, eh?


Tomorrow is yet another "black box" workshop.  This time we don't have even a partial list of ingredients in our book, but the items in the box are about the worst-kept secret, such that even the Chef has pretty much admitted that we'll be doing an egg appetizer and a duck breast main.  And there will likely be rice and the usual assortment of miscellaneous vegetables.  Lots of possibilities there.

So homeward bound to hit the books a little...I need some new ideas.

Friday 3 May 2013

Dinner, and When Your Tongs Catch on Fire

Last evening was our class  dinner in the Signatures Bistro.  It was a beautiful spring evening in Ottawa (and finally the weather is starting to be  nice!) and we sat on the terrace, enjoying a three course menu and some better than average wine.  I won't describe the menu - I'll just let the food porn speak for itself.

 
 
This morning I was back at it again in the school's production kitchen, doing odd little things like making a shit ton of gnocchi, breaking down ducks, organizing and labelling hotel pans of food for staff meals, etc.  When I met with Chefs 2 and 4 yesterday to discuss my progress this term, it was noted that I have a good attitude about school and am running up the kitchen miles by volunteering for extra work as often as I can.  The way I figure it, it's all experience, and at my "advanced age" I can use all the experience I can get. 
 
And sometimes it's worth coming in for the laughs alone.  We had some fun joking about 50 Things They Never Told You About Being A Chef (it's all true, by the way!) and making a few messes and near accidents.  One of the guys in the kitchen set his tongs on fire - I'm not sure how that can even be done, but I looked up to see him dousing his tongs in the sink.  I also gave the tip of my left thumb a good slice while cutting an onion, necessitating disinfectant, a band-aid, and a glove for the rest of the afternoon.  I've heard guys describe condoms as a bit like taking a shower in a raincoat - I get the same feeling trying to cook in gloves (note the soon-to-be flaming tongs in the background).
 
 
 
So a few days off, then back at it first thing Monday morning.  Hard to believe there's only about six more weeks to go.
 
 

Wednesday 1 May 2013

The Best Laid Plans

So yesterday and today were workshop days.  Tuesday was fish (salmon and tuna) and today was salmon for the appetizer, and chicken for the main course.

I spent part of the weekend carefully crafting recipes and coming up with flavour combinations.. even getting a little good advice on the side. But most of the planning was for naught since Chef 2 had other ideas.

Tuesday, the Chef asked us to do a marinated salmon appetizer and be sure to use grapefruit, which wasn't on the original ingredient list.  Ok then... salmon with pink grapefruit, star anise, and vanilla it was.


For the main, tuna.  I was able to salvage my original idea of tuna tartare with frites (and yeah, they actually worked this time!) but had to come up with two other garnitures, which were not part of my plan.  So I stared at the box of ingredients like an idiot for a few minutes and came up with shaved zucchini and carrot salad with thyme, and a mixture of green beans, salsify and butternut squash.  Not that creative, but they tasted pretty good.


I didn't even bother hauling out my books last night because I figured the Chef would have particular ideas about what he wanted today.  And indeed he did.  A cooked salmon appetizer and stuffed chicken breast with polenta.  So nothing exciting here either - I pulled together salmon with a green apple and ginger béchamel topping, and chicken stuffed with oyster mushrooms and a polenta tower with brunoise of carrot, yellow beets and zucchini.  I had a goofy idea to do some molecular shit and make pearls of balsamic vinegar.  Those started falling apart at the last minute, so I plated without them, throwing some peas at the plate to make it look interesting.  Sigh.....


Both days my appetizer was my best dish.  For various reasons I haven't been sleeping that well this week (most days I wake up with half the sheets torn off the bed, if I even sleep through the night at all), so I'm obviously more creative and organized just after the morning espresso touches my soul.  By the time we get to the second plate, the glow is wearing off and my mind gets fuzzy.

But like I said recently about the bitterness of my endive tatin, it's very obvious when I've got my game on and when I don't.  And these workshops require you to not only have some game but be creative too, because even with the best laid plans everything can change.

Such is the life of a Chef, I guess.

Tomorrow will be an interesting day.  Some hours in the production kitchen in the morning, a meeting with the Chef to discuss my progress this term, and then our class dinner in the bistro in the evening.  Am hoping they have that amazing chocolate cake on the menu, because I think I'll need it.