The Culinary Tales Week 6: An Eggs-ellent Finale
Finals week was just plain exhausting, starting with our written final and knife cuts practical on Monday. A little frightening, looking back now, how much knife work I did considering that I was running on empty. Said a lot about the progression of my knife skills.
We also had to turn in a “notebook” for class, a four-inch-binder full of general information, recipes, and TYPED lecture notes. I spent my Friday night off from the week before and every free minute of the weekend through 3 a.m. on Monday putting it together. Every page had to be in sheet protectors that had to be paginated (even the section tabs had to be in plastic sheets) with neatly typed tables of contents (one general one at the beginning of the monstrosity plus sectional TOCs.)
I received a 100 on it. And for all that work, it accounted for less than 6% of our total grade.
We received our menus on Monday after our knife cut practicals, and my insides leapt with joy when I saw it. Many of the dishes were ones I did well on, including Pasta Bolognese, French Onion Soup and Pommes Anna. I wasn’t thrilled with the appearance of the spicy black bean soup, consomme and Hollandaise, but I thought it was all pretty manageable. We were allotted some time the night before to do some prep work but we weren’t going to be allowed to enter the lab until 6 PM sharp every night of finals. No more extra time; I had to bring my “A” game.
What we didn’t know was how much time we were going to be given to execute, but I promised myself that I’d make everything if it killed me. And for the most part, finals went well. I had calculated that as long as I didn’t do HORRIBLY, there was no mathematical possibility of failing.
I managed to make everything, but in doing so, sacrificed quality for quantity. My dishes were good when I could take my time. When rushed, not so much. Speed, however, is a skill Chef Good Cop assured me will come in time.
Turns out I didn’t so well on my “A” dishes. My previously sucky dishes, however, came out great. Go figure. Who would have thought that I’d get an A on the spicy black bean soup? And I had to do some last-minute rescue work on it with time running out.
Consomme officially became the dish I hated the most. It was a disaster as I’ve ever fucked up anything (pardon my French). Starting with pouring in the stock before I added the egg whites (which wasn’t pure egg white as one of my yolks broke and made it into the mix.) And THEN I left the stove too long and allowed the damn pot to boil over. (BIG MISTAKE.) I told myself to do it over if there was time. But as this was on the toughest menu on the toughest night, I didn’t have a chance for a do-over. I decided to turn in what I had to get some credit for it, not confident enough in the rest of my dishes to chance the zero.
Trading war stories with Class Buddy later, his eyes widened with horror as I regaled him with tales of misstep after misstep. Halfway through my nightmare-list of things to NOT do when making consomme, he said something to the effect that he couldn’t think of anything else that I could’ve done wrong.
“Oh. I’m not done.” (Picture a pair of eyes bulging out of their sockets.)
In the end, I got a few 100s and a few 70s, with everything else falling in between, and I ended up with an 84 average (a B-minus.) Overall, I walked away with a B+ for the class. (I’ve long suspected that I was born under a lucky star.)
I found out – quite dishearteningly – that I would have been better off had I been on Chef Bad Cop’s roster, based on the grades of some folks with questionable skills on his side of the kitchen. Oh well. This was what I got for insisting that something worth having wasn’t supposed to be easy.
Our Sanitation class culminated in the presentation of group projects (ours did a puppet show highlighting various foodborne illnesses that you can find/can originate on a farm.) I was a pig and talked about trichinosis, a parasitic disease in your intestines that you can get by eating raw pork.
You know, I tried for many years to snort. Intentionally. And I could never do it. It was only after I got on Flonase, when my nasal cavity cleared up, that I was able to snort on command. There’s nothing like a well-timed snort to sell a pig story.
We also took the ServSafe exam, a certification test all food handlers are required to take. I stopped sweating about this when I found out that failing the test did not mean failing the class. A failure on it simply meant having to re-take it, forking over an additional $40 for a new Scantron sheet. (The cost of a drink and a half in London.)
I celebrated by buying a shiny new food mill. I could have gotten it for much cheaper at Surfas, but I sprung for the designer one with my 20% student discount at the school’s “cookstore.” What I really wanted was the KitchenAid Artisan mixer, but it was way too expensive of a purchase considering Mercury was retrograde.
And just like that – my, did it fly! – the first term came and went. And I actually survived it.
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