The Culinary Tales Week 4: Knife Cuts & Drama in the Kitchen

Week Four started off with a bang when, unexpectedly, we were ordered to set up our stations for a pop quiz on knife cuts. We were supposed to have lecture, and as such, left my tools in the car. I had two minutes to run out and get my knives, and as I rushed to my station sweating and panting, my heart sank to realize that the peeler that I needed was still in the car.

 

By the time I returned, my classmates had already peeled three potatoes each. I was given a short amount of time to catch up but I didn’t peel mine all the way through, embarrassed to hold up the entire class.

 

We were given a sheet with blank boxes which we had to fill with the designated cuts. We had roughly three minutes each to do Julienne (1/8″ x 1/8″ x 2″), Battonet (1/4″ x 1/4″ x 2″), Brunoise (1/8″ x 1/8″ x 1/8″) and Macedoine (1/4″ x 1/4″ x 1/4″) AND deliver two tournés.

 

My cuts turned out alright, albeit a little uneven. But I had a good yield; our teachers asked to see our discarded pile so they can check how much we’re wasting.

 

My tournés, however, were as pathetic as ever, despite all the practice I had been putting in on the weekends. I even had a couple of perfect ones that I saved and brought to school just to show Chef my progress. I kept them for a while, sealed in a plastic bag in the pocket of my backpack, even as they started to go bad and grow mold. They were that good. Unfortunately, I couldn’t replicate that kind of excellence under pressure.

 

We learned all about glazing, braising and roasting vegetables; more potato lessons (this time, we learned recipes for Latkes, Pommes Duchesse and Pommes Dauphinoise); and more sauce education (we made Hollandaise and its daughter sauces Maltaise, Girondine, Chantilly and Mousseline). Oh yes, and more soup: Gazpacho. (I was postiively hating soups at this point.)

 

We also practiced more egg cookery (took me a few times to nail down poaching) and made a few other things that we had done before (got to practice making consomme again, this time to bearable results.)

 

I also got to work with a vegetable I’ve never cooked before: Chayote. I always veered away from chayote for the simple reason that it looks raunchily like a female body part. It doesn’t taste bad – think of it as a cross between jicama and squash (technically, it is a squash.) I got a solid 100 on this, but I still wasn’t going to like it. Mostly because it looks raunchily like a female body part.

 

But I still struggled with time management (ironic since I made a living as a project manager) and on one night when we had to produce eight dishes, I missed a few assignments.

 

Early during the first couple of weeks, we were given the opportunity to (voluntarily) switch to Chef Bad Cop’s side of the kitchen (the early casualties came from his side and therefore we had to load-balance.) I wasn’t up for the challenge, and stayed on Chef Good Cop’s roster, which, as the days wore on, I started to suspect was the wrong move.

 

My suspicions proved correct as Chef Good Cop slowly revealed herself to be the much tougher grader, and frankly, quite the bitch. I didn’t see it at first, but two of my classmates, whom I’ll call Sweet Momma (because she was sweet and was a mother) and Lightning Fury (because she chops with furious speed), nice ladies both, repeatedly called her the B word. I guess I was so busy worrying about my own little world that I didn’t see the telling signs.

 

So it was a welcome break when twice we had a substitute chef. It took the pressure off because it was an unspoken understanding that we weren’t graded whenever a substitute was around (he tasted our dishes and gave us feedback, but never took down any notes.) Until ANNOYING GIRL had to, well, be annoying and put an end to that.

 

See, AG got on everyone’s nerves from the start but I had the tolerance to not let it bother me. She would skip back to our work area after presenting her dish, cooing and gloating how “Chef thought this was PERFECT!” and “Ooooh, this was a 100!” And then during our mid-term check, she jumped up and down and repeatedly exclaimed “I got an A!” with the exuberance of a Disney princess before being attacked by the evil-whatever.

 

She would disappear during cleanup time and feigned illness whenever she didn’t get praised for her work. Once, I saw Sweet Momma slowly reach for her knife and grip it tightly when AG was being her usual grating self. I prepared myself to be the hero should a confrontation occur. (Thankfully, it didn’t.)

 

Despite the irritating personality, AG was nice enough to share product if you happen to run out, and when a classmate reappeared after a few days’ absence, she patiently worked with him to catch him up.

 

That meant something in my book. Plus she liked dogs. (I tend to give dog people more credit than they deserve.) So whatever it was that she did that inspired murderous feelings in all of us, I shrugged off because I knew there was a kind person underneath.

 

But, when I mentioned that Chef Sub wasn’t grading us on our work, she loudly asked Chef Bad Cop across the kitchen, “Is it true we’re NOT being graded?” Which prompted the chefs to pull out paper and respond that, of course, we were being graded.

 

It was my turn to want to strangle her.

 

Kitchen drama aside, I was actually having fun, whenever I wasn’t too busy stressing out about delivering my dishes on time and perfectly cooked. But finals week was approaching and failing them was far scarier to me than the thought of a Republican winning the presidency.

 

 

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