Culinary School, Week 1

...Day 4.

The plan was to write one of these everyday. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), starting culinary school at Sacramento's Le Cordon Bleu coincides with moving into a new home. Our phone and Internet gets turned off tomorrow, so this blog comes to you during the hours between Day 4 and 5 of my first week.

First up is Food Safety and Sanitation and Culinary Foundations I, both taught to us by Chef Bruno Caccia. We've been given 7 books (!) that will serve as our texts during our entire time at the school. The culinary/knife kit comes next week (supposedly Monday).

It's a little weird; Chef reads the SafeServ book to us. Yes, he also provides his own anecdotes and elaborations, but having been out of high school for 15 years, it's weird to be in a class where the teacher reads the text aloud. As we learn more about foodborne illnesses and prevention measures, I fear the class will do the opposite of what I'd hoped it would do; I'm obsessive-compulsive - a "germaphobe" - and I was hoping that learning about food safety and sanitation in the professional kitchen would help me to realize how far is too far when trying to be clean in the kitchen. So far, my paranoia feels heightened, like Spider-Sense except not as cool.

Day 2 put us in uniform, complete with checks (pants), chef's jacket, white neckerchief , hat, black socks, and slip-resistant shoes. No earrings, though, which meant taking mine out (and losing one). We have uniform inspection everyday, during which we line up in alphabetical order as the chef inspects our fingernails, our shaven (or unshaven) faces, and our uniforms.

Day 2 also saw us jumping right into learning classic knife cuts. In doing so, I became subjected to the confusing world of French culinary terminology. A diced potato, for instance, is called "macedoine", no matter the size. However, a "macedoine" for vegetables, however, is a larger dice, while a smaller dice is a "brunoise" and an even smaller dice is a "brunoisette".

Oh, but wait. There's more. Cutting a vegetable - say, a carrot - into a 1/2" x 1/2" x 2" stick is called a "batonnet". But if you do the same cut with a potato, it's called a "pont neuf". Sigh.

Today, Day 4, I cried in class. It was the onions. Imagine 32 students cutting shallots, garlic, and onions in fairly close proximity to each other. There was a lot of crying and sniffling. I'm surprised I didn't see any ex-newbies watching us through the hall window. It's funny to look out and see students who were probably newbies six weeks ago watching the new newbies as if we were zoo exhibits. I would've expected that today, with all the tears and snot pouring from our faces as the fumes from the onions took their toll, the ex-newbies would have looked in on us, the expressions on their faces saying, "I remember that. Ha. I bet we never looked that funny."

My class is a hodge-podge of people. Some are older, some younger. Some look like they're the pirates described in Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential. Some look like they came from a ghetto. Others from nicer areas. Some have professional kitchen experience. Some, like me, just love food and want to learn. As I look at the faces of my classmates, I wonder how many will quit before it's over and how many will graduate. You just can't tell because the food industry is full of so many different kinds of people and you really can't stereotype what a foodie is supposed to look like or how they're supposed to behave.

Day 5 is up next, then the weekend. Hopefully the major part of the move to our new home goes well and I'll actually have some time to get some homework done.

Orientation at Le Cordon Bleu, Sacramento

On Saturday, 9-18-2010, I had my first official day at culinary school at Sacramento's Le Cordon Bleu. It turned out to be part self-help class, part orientation. I felt like I was five years old until the chefs got up to speak.

I assumed orientation would let incoming students know how to prepare for their first week of school, where to go, what to bring, what to wear, when we'd get our uniforms and equipment. And it was. But a lot of this basic information was preceded by talk of how to deal with your personal issues while attending school; of where to go for support; of encouraging everyone to help each other and to ask for help.

Don't get me wrong. This is all useful information for people that have never worked together in a kitchen before, for people who are changing careers, for people who haven't been to school in years. But delivery is a powerful thing. They way you say it has a lot to do with how one takes it.

And I hate it when people talk to me like I'm five.

I'm mature enough to handle my responsibilities as an adult and to handle myself in public in a manner that, hopefully, isn't embarrassing to me and to those around me. I think I can get that much right. But I'm also immature enough to like potty humor, to watch cartoons meant for kids, and to act like a five-year-old when I'm trying to cute and/or funny. But when administrative members of a school get up in front of a room filled mostly with adults, please don't talk to me as if you're trying to communicate to a five-year-old.

You can use humor. You can as rhetorical questions. It's all fine. I do the same thing when I teach drumlines. I talk about asking for help and helping their peers. I ask for group answers to my questions. I use humor to help get my messages across. But I talk to my drumline members, who are mostly high school students, like young adults. It's less patronizing, which leaves the listener more open to what I have to say.

Thankfully, when the chefs got up to speak, the communication got better. I feel pretty good about entering a classroom and having the chefs talk to my class. School starts in a week and I'm nervous and excited.

I'm looking forward to it.

Fake Claypot Rice?

I watched an older episode of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations last night. In 2007 he went (back) to Hong Kong. At the time of watching, I'd had two slices of leftover pizza to eat that day... about noon. That was it. No other form of sustenance except for a bit of water entered my body. The time of viewing? Oh, about 10:00 PM. I was pretty hungry but had little to cook in the house and little money to justify getting take out that late.

So perhaps my state of hunger had something to do with how big of an impression this particular episode had on me.

(In contrast, the night before I'd watched the Shanghai episode and, though everything looked spectacularly delicious, I was so not hungry that the episode was hard to watch)

One dish in particular reminded me of a few things I did have in the house to eat and would have cooked if it wasn't so late. Claypot Rice. Basically, a steamed rice dish in a small claypot that was accompanied by various "toppings", such as Chinese sausage ("lop chang", or however you want to spell it), duck, salted fish, chicken... basically a one-bowl rice dish. It's something they apparently eat in the winter.

I knew I'd be making some version of that today for lunch.

I had leftover rainbow chard (about 12 days old, but still a lot of healthy-looking leaves), eggs, leftover rice, and lop chang. A bit of canola oil, soy sauce, water, and crushed red peppers and I was ready to go.

Oh, but wait. I don't have a claypot. What to do?!

1. Canola oil went into a medium-medium high heated nonstick pan. After it was hot, I threw in the lop chang, which I'd cut into medium-sized pieces (for its size).
2. Once the sausage had browned, I threw in the chard until it wilted. Then, in went the rice. I tossed it with some crushed red pepper. Then, about a 1/4 cup of water to help steam the leftover rice.
3. After most of the water had been absorbed/turned to steam, I cracked an egg over the top. I drizzled soy sauce over everything and put a lid on it. After a few minutes, once the egg had cooked through, it was ready to go. The results?

Excuse my funky mug, but the webcam was the only thing available. Pretty obvious that I'm happy though, yeah?

It was pretty damn good, cheap to make, and didn't take long at all. Usually I make fried rice with my leftovers, but this was a bit different. Fluffier, really, and the dish overall seemed to be a bit more incorporated whereas fried rice is usually a mish-mash of ingredients that still seemed separated in the dish. This could've been more incorporated had I used more liquid, but it was good the way it was. The bottom of the rice dish was crispy because it had fried while the rest did not. This led to some pretty intense flavors.

A small variation on a one-bowl rice dish, to be sure, but one worth exploring with your leftovers.