The Culinary Tales Week 34: Hitting the Wall

September 29, 2014

 

 

At the halfway point of the term, I found myself with a B+. Really not surprising, I expected my production grade to be a lot lower. Though Chef Evil did pay me a nice compliment after a knife cut practical, saying that my cuts looked perfect.

 

“You should teach knife cuts.”

 

I raised two eyebrows and quietly went on my merry way. I wasn’t a consistently good cook, but I was consistently a chop monkey.

 

Week Four called for a tour of the Pacific: Japanese, Chinese, Thai & Southeast Asian cuisine, plus a Hawaiian luau for family and friends.

 

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t love Japanese cuisine but I gained an even better appreciation for it. Everything Japan does, it does with artistry – films, anime, design, food. You really have to admire the cuisine; it’s simple and complex, delicate and intense all at the same time.

 

We were schooled in the art of kaiseki, a multi-course haute cuisine meal.

 

I was running late on Japanese night and arrived to find that all of the tasks had been claimed.

 

“Don’t worry, I have something better for you,” promised Granola Girl, our sous chef for the night. (I call her Granola Girl because I can’t quite remember if she was vegan or vegetarian, but I remember how into the granola recipe she was and proceeded to make loads of it at home.)

 

I went about prep with everyone else (working with Annoying Girl to work on soba sauce), but when it came time for the restaurant fire exercise, I was told to pull up a chair because I would be playing “Food Critic.”

 

Bless your heart, Granola Girl.

 

I was not subjected to the stress of restaurant fire or washing dishes, I got to sit on my fat ass and eat. We had never had official tasters before during our previous restaurant fires… normally, the food just sat on a table until we were done and all hell broke loose.

 

I happily dug into beautifully plated dishes of miso soup, assorted tempura, salmon with soba noodles and tsuyu sauce, gyunku no yamasaki (rolled beef with vegetables) and marinated sea bass in sake lees.

 

China day was far more stressful because the items we had to prepare were done individually. Plus, people really pissed me off. It was the worst time to deal with my classmates’ bad habit of borrowing a piece of equipment and not being done with it by the time I needed it, therefore jeopardizing my deadlines. I even worked alongside Annoying Girl but she wasn’t even a problem that night.

 

In the end, I managed to make char siu bao, hot and sour soup and chinese steamed fish with black beans and scallions without killing anybody.

 

Thai day was also a fabulous time, when I learned to make thom kha gai soup (chef really loved mine), chicken satay with peanut sauce and pad thai. We had a little round-table tasting of each other’s soups and pad thai (an exercise you really have to be wary of because some people’s idea of “mildly spicy” is another person’s idea of “flaming inferno of hell.”)

 

Asian food can be complicated to assemble, primarily because of the myriad of exotic ingredients. Trader Joe’s makes it seem easy to make at home with their one-jar mixes… but knowing what goes into making authentic Asian dishes actually made me appreciate the culinary melting pot that is Los Angeles.

 

The easy access to authentic Japanese, Chinese, Thai and Indian restaurants is underrated and easy to take for granted. Until you find yourself outside the state, craving a good vindaloo and having people go, “Vinda who?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the end of the week, we got to put on a Hawaiian luau, a school tradition in which we got to invite friends and family to sample our work. It ended up being kind of a nightmare for me.

 

The entire term, I kept getting shut out of the opportunity to work on dessert, mostly because the same three people kept signing up for them. Except this time, I fought to get on Team Dessert because Annoying Girl had already signed up for the one savory dish I had any inkling to make: spam musubi.

 

So there I was, my first opportunity to do dessert and I was denied the chance to work on what I really wanted: Dancing Queen was all over the pineapple upside down cake, Granola Girl and Little Girl claimed the guava cake and I was stuck with haupia.

 

WTF is haupia, you ask?

 

Haupia is a kind of a custard. Think of it as coconut-flavored jello. It’s actually tasty, if a little too sweet for my taste, but a real bitch to make. It requires cornstarch, which is a thickener, and must be poured into molds fast or it will set solid, even as you pour.

 

It didn’t help that while I got help from one of my classmates to pour into the cups, he did it pretty damn slowly. Chef gave it her official stamp of disapproval and told me to do it over and in different colors. She had a pretty short memory too because on my second try, she got up in my grill asking why so colorful.

 

“Because you told me to.” (She walked away.)

 

It was that kind of night. I was even done early, and subsequently helped the other dessert makers with finishing their dishes. I should have enjoyed having friends over and sharing all this good food with them, but I found myself in a foul mood.

 

I had gotten to a point when I was just tired of everything: of chef, of my classmates ditching cleaning time, of the grind. It’s like that point in a marathon, what runners like to call “the wall,” when you reach Mile 20 and all of a sudden you feel like you can’t go on anymore.

 

Your body aches. Your feet are blistering. There’s a patch of dried up pee from the time you missed while squatting in a smelly port-a-potty on the side of the road. You’re bleeding somewhere from chaffing, quite painfully. You find yourself utterly pissed that you missed the beer tent, and fight an internal battle to go back and look for it. And yet you soldier on. Because you didn’t torture yourself to go this far only to quit then.

 

So I soldiered on.

 

 

 

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