After a three week vacation back home for summer, I returned to the Culinary to start the next class. Skills Development 3....what can I say? I can honestly say this class at one point gave me a unpleasant dream involving pasta but more on that later. This was our first production kitchen. We were responsible to opening the kitchen and serving 40 members of our fellow classmates. Our chef was a woman by the name of Elizabeth Br. This was a name that on numerous occasions was followed by a chuckle that could only mean "Hahaha...you're f---ed." Turns out the reason for this reaction was because Chef Br. was also known to be the type of chef that would change the menu up on you 3 or 4 times in one conversation. Our ability to adapt was about to be tested.
Chef Br., or Lady Br. as many called her, was
bat shit insane completely mad a character indeed. Before leaving for break, I heard so many stories about this woman that I really had no idea what to expect. Genius? Why...yes! This woman had the ability to draw you in to every technique, every pot of soup, every slice of garnish and at the drop of a nail, blow up in your face, reducing you to nothing more then a deer-in-headlight, possibly drooling, shell of a human being. With that said the food she taught us to cook was absolutely amazing. Chef Br. showed us so many new tricks like how to make her special "Chef Br's World Famous" canoe tournèe or how to quickly brown onions for her "Chef Br's World Famous" French onion soup. She showed us her way of cooking the classic blanquette de veau, which was a white veal stew. We served this dish with some fragrant rice pilaf and people...this dish is still by far, one of my favorite dishes to make and eat at the CIA. It was a bowl of stew and rice that could make you smile and sigh in satisfaction even after the toughest day at work. We seared off the veal cubes to G.B.D. (golden brown and delicious...yea...its a term.) We sweated off mushrooms and reserved the beautiful liquor that the mushrooms released. That liquid was then reduced to a glaze and then we coated the carrots and pearl onions in that before they were added to the finished stew. So damn good.
Now when Chef Br. wasn't getting her hands dirty and teaching us these awesome technique, she was probably checking with the students to see if they liked what we cooked, or what was more likely, reducing someone in class to a wide-eyed, blubbering labradoodle. On one of the days, the dish was Saute Chicken Fines herb w/ fresh pasta and veg. My responsibility for the day was to make, cook, and plate about 4 lbs of fresh fettuccine. Meh...only 4 lbs, not too bad right? Murphy's law. Before cooking, the pasta looked and felt pretty good but either due to under cooking or over cooking, the end product was a craptastic broken sorry excuse for pasta. The single component of my teams plate that was horrible was my pasta as Chef Br. kindly announced at the end of class not to mention several times during service. That pasta ate at me (ha!) all day and eventually came back to haunt me in my dreams. I think somehow I burnt 10 pounds of pasta while cooking it in boiling water. How does that even happen?!
With all that said, I learned so many cool new things in this class and Chef Br. kept me on my toes with the way she ran her kitchen. Best part though? We were never late for service AND I swear my fellow classmates can back me up on this one, I think we actually started developing a little fan base that started following our class around from kitchen to kitchen! It was legen...wait for it!
P.S. Sorry...no pictures this entry...I think there was a unanimous fear that any cell phone or camera would have been chopped in half if we took it out.
