Week Two - Monday

Week two of school oddly paralleled my first culinary class. On Monday we focused on moist cooking methods, boil, steam, poach, etc. One half of the class was given potatoes and the other half vegetables. There was a bit of irony in that my class with the kids handled this better. When I took Professionalism with the kids we paired off in groups of two (I like the redundancy of that wording). In Monday's class we split into two groups of like twelve. The old adage too many cooks in the kitchen came to life. Nobody could make a decision, the people who were experienced tried to dominate the task and it just became a true cluster fuck, to say it nicely.

I was on the vegetable side. We were given frozen green beans and frozen broccoli. It was decided that we needed to blanch the beans. Blanching green beans made no sense to me, as they are already blanched prior to freezing. Essentially we just thawed them. Oh well. The blanching also did not involve boiling water which I felt to be strange, but I went along with it.

Somehow it was decided to put mushrooms, onions, yellow and red peppers in with the green beans. I'm not sure how and it was humorous that this was beyond what Chef envisioned. One of the guys who works at a fancy resort in the area told us to remove the stems from the mushroom caps prior to slicing. Then Chef came over and said put the stems back in. Too funny.

Since it was taking four to six people to "blanch" the frozen green beans in a single pot I decided to go down and help the other end of the table. In my first class Chef stressed that if we finished with what we were doing we were to help others who needed it. This is second nature to me and I'm good at it but was a new concept with the kids. It's a big part of our grade so it is not a concept to be taken lightly. The other end of the table was making Bolognese sauce (meat sauce for pasta) as a special task from Chef. First step was mirepoix and they were busy looking up the recipe for it. I told them it was 2:1:1 onions, carrots celery. MILF corrected me that it was 50% onions, 25% carrots and 25% celery. That's what I said. I grabbed some carrots and started dicing. They were in cone shapes from roll cuts so it took a little extra time.

After that it was still discombobulated in the kitchen so I did what I do best, ran the dish washer.

The Bolognese sauce was for pasta that Chef made for us for lunch. It was pretty good. Chef said the extra effort was my fault since I complained about no meat in the vegetable soup last week, so he was making sure I got meat this week. I laughed and said I didn't think I was so much to blame as much as I was inspiration.