The Culinary Tales Week 12: Water and Oil Don’t Mix (Sometimes)
Just when I thought I was doing a great job of balancing school and work, life threw me a curveball. All of a sudden, my workload went from a “7” to a “20” on a scale of 1 to 10.
Having to juggle finals frenzy at night was hard enough without the craziness of work to distract me, but I couldn’t exactly blow off one for the other. Both were important parts of my life, and I had to make them both work. The problem is, when you try to make two things great, knowing full well that you have to choose one to give your all to, something suffers.
And that week, I had to give up a good grade on my final exam.
Now in the real world, in the restaurant ‘biz’, no one cares what your grade is. They just want you to be able to cook. But I said the same thing to myself when I was in college the first time around, then realized what a mistake that was when I tried to apply to grad school and couldn’t get in to the good ones because my grades weren’t good enough.
But before hitting the real world, I had to get past this school world first, and we were told that we had to have an “A” grade to be able to work the bistro rotation. (I would later learn that was a lie, one of many we were fed at school.)
I wanted to work the Bistro because it was the only place where I could get a real restaurant experience but still be in an educational environment. Sure, there were REAL, paying customers, who are spending (not cheap) REAL money and who could also be victims of very REAL food-borne illnesses. But in a real-world restaurant, you get fired when you mess up. At school, we chalked it up as a learning experience.
So of course, the heat turned up at work just when I needed a no-stress week the most. I blew it on the written test, and I was so tired that I flubbed the most on the product ID. This was the easiest part of the test – no studying involved: Look at a piece of food and write down what it is. But I was so out of it, I couldn’t remember what a chipotle was called. And goddamnit, when I got home, there was a Chili’s commercial with a nice, sexy hero shot of a chipotle and the voiceover taunting “fire-roasted CHEE-POTE-LAAAY.”
I even missed garlic powder – I’ve been cooking with this for years. I picked up a sample and felt it. I even tasted it. Several times. Why didn’t I smell it? I smelled about eight other items on the same table. If I had the presence of mind to smell it, I would have gotten it right.
And I even missed the extra credit question. It was right there, smack in the middle of the table. I didn’t even see it.
Fortunately, I had excellent fish and chicken fabrications (although I used up the entire time allotment.) Class Buddy had practiced on four chickens at home the day before was completely done in six minutes.
I walked away with 85s – 95s on my knife cuts; I don’t know how because I thought it was a pretty sorry lot. (Overall, I still walked away with an A for the class, but I’m not sure why. Always strive for perfection because if you don’t, if you aim low and you still fall short, then you end up with something shitty.)
Unlike Intro 1 where we had about 16 dishes to prepare over three days, this time we only had to prepare three courses to turn in on each of two days: a soup, an appetizer (which included a protein, a sauce and a vegetable); and an entree (which consisted of a protein, sauce, starch and vegetable.)
There were four menus and I was really itching to do Menu 1 because the soup was French Onion. As luck would have it, I pulled Menu 2 – which turned out to be a blessing in disguise, for although it wasn’t one of my top two choices, it was also the easiest.
We had one day to prep and make sure to get our product, because there would be no chance to do so during exam days. (Turned out to be another lie!)
I took extra special care in cutting up paysanne (that’s a half inch tile cut) vegetables for one of my soups, and even cooked them ahead of time, only to find out after class that the veg had to be cut macedoine. I ran out to Ralph’s the next day to get the vegetables I needed. Only to leave them in the fridge at work.
But I forgot to grab mahi-mahi for my appetizer. And I forgot to get the ground chicken for my consomme. Fortunately, the nicest man alive, let’s call him NMA (I’m not even sure what he does), happened to be in the main school walk-in, and he put some chicken aside for me. I had to get mahi mahi at Santa Monica Seafood Company, but fortunately, it was one of the few proteins that Chef managed to have some leftovers of. He told me to save the one I bought for myself and use the school-provided one.
How the final worked was that we had one hour to prep, and then the windows would open. The first 15 minutes we had to turn in the soup, then another 15 minute window for the appetizer, and the final 15 minutes to turn in the entree. Major points off for missing windows, and I vowed not to miss those.
On Day One, I had to prepare consomme with brunoise veg, grilled mahi mahi with a ginger-lime beurre blanc and julienne vegetables, and grilled salmon with pomme puree (mashed potatoes), battonet glazed carrots and lemon beurre blanc. Since I sucked at grilling, I sought advice from the grilling/BBQ experts at work. It paid off, because I got a 98 on the mahi mahi and a 100 on the salmon. The consomme was somewhere in the 80s – I needed to salt it more and the cuts were uneven (ironic, as my brunoise knife cut practical was my highest grade.)
Day Two was just miserable. I had to prepare a vegetable barley soup (with macedoine veg, not paysanne), chicken roulade with mushroom duxelle (that’s basically a mushroom hash) and port wine sauce, and grilled pork chop with pommes lyonnaise, braised red cabbage, and sauce robert.
Because I had to re-cut my soup veg, I lost a little bit of time. I got the chicken roulade to a perfect color early, but decided to pop it in the oven to keep warm. And then I forgot all about it until my window opened, therefore it was overcooked. The sauce even broke. I thought I was doomed with the entree, because I had overfried the potatoes and overcaremelized the onions, but I guess they were at that just-right point. My cabbage ended up being underdone (I forgot that I had used the burner that didn’t work well) and the sauce broke again.
My grades ranged from 70-85 on Day Two, which cancelled out my stellar Day One.
The good news was our class was broken into two shifts, (so that one shift had to report early one day, and then late the other.) Well, Day two was my early day, so for the two hours that we had to wait for the other shift to complete their final (we had to come back into class at the end of the night), we held court at a Mexican restaurant down the street, drinking shots and margaritas to pass the time.
It’s true what they say – tequila makes everything better.
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