Practice, practice, practice...

After reading my entire knife book in about an hour and half on Sunday, I stayed up until midnight chopping onion and sweet potato. Anyone need some diced onions? I've got a liter sized ziploc full, and more to come. :-) Tonight I stopped by the grocery store to get a 10 lb bag of potatoes and 5 lb bag of carrots. Also about 6 bell peppers. I'm gonna make one heckuva veggie stew...or something. ;-)

Today was a little crazy. I got there early, but not super early due to some traffic on the West Seattle bridge. Today I learned that getting there 15 minutes early is not early enough. :-P Here I thought I was doing so well with being there early in the first place, but unfortunately, the Chef Instructor decided that it was my turn to be Sous Chef without any notice, probably because of being at the top of the class attendance list. That reminded me of being in grade school and hating to always having to go first because my last name started with A. In any case, being Sous Chef means setting up the Instructor's demo station, helping with their demos as needed, and being in charge of the whole kitchen for that class, which includes directing the food steward and the sanitation steward during cleanup. Also, the Sous Chef directs the entire class during cleanup to make sure it gets done quickly, so you have a mass of people running at you asking what needs to be done, how to do it, and where things go. Bottom line, this is Day 5 and I pretty much only have an inkling of what to tell anyone. Yes, I was graded on it. I'm hoping I did ok.

A few people have asked me about the grading, and why it counts. Everything we do (uniforms, attendance, professionalism, cleanup, teamwork and of course cooking) is all graded on a 10 point scale. While it's not an academic program (mostly), it's still a school that expects top quality in all skills aquired and we need to show it in production. After all, Julia Childs went here, and it was famous to the rest of the world for a long time before that. They have a reputation to uphold, and know that there will be high expectations for graduates of their program. Beside this school, the culinary profession has a high amount of pride in what they do, especially in the high end cuisine, which is what I'm learning, and it's seen as an art form as well as "just a trade." It's a profession that's steeped in history and tradition, and kind of like the Catholic church, there's a ton of pomp and circumstance put into cooking and how a kitchen is run, and it's expected that you will not only know every little detail, but perform everything with speed, agility, efficiency, quality...all while making it look super easy and keeping your whites spotless. It's more of a challenge than the average home cook is willing or able to take on, that's for sure. Like I said in the title, it takes practice, practice, practice. :-)

Anyway, I'm off to class, to learn some math...ick. Lots about measurements and how to scale out recipies today. We'll see how this goes...