What Can You Comprehend in 80 Hours?

When I went to upload some pictures for this entry, I realized the insane amount of things I've learned this week- It's unfair how much I've learned and not gotten to write about! Between work and school from Wednesday to Wednesday, I logged 82 hours in kitchen clogs 90% of which was spent learning something awesome and new, the other 10% of that time was spent pretending to be conscious while the lecture of how to properly 6 fold puff pastry passed me by. If there's one thing I know every single classmate has learned how to do, it's make coffee.

Just for reference, school is awesome. I'm so pumped about the amount of varying product I've put my hands on in one week. Everything from veal tongue to making my first creme anglaise...Culinary school: I love you. Let's take a looksie at the second week of Level 2:

My favorite part about school is if you screw it up, although everyone looks at your like your an idiot, you get to do it again and again until you get it right! You didn't just waste the restaurant's money by overcooking a flat of quail eggs...twice...no one's mad and there's someone there ready to teach you the right way to do it. And if there's a few left over eggs, you can ask to make a creme anglaise for giggles.

Wanna play around with sugar and see if you can make a sugar cage out of strange shaped objects you find in the room?

You've got ten spare minutes to see if it comes out right or just melts all over your cutting board.

Wanna make a monkey out of meringue? While it was strongly discouraged- YES I MOST CERTAINLY DO WANT TO MAKE A MERINGUE MONKEY!

Besides dabbling in pastry, we also had a day of ORGAN MEATS!

Veal Tongue!

Tasty, tasty sweetbreads!

Foie Gras: It will never ever happen again that a Chef hands me a piece of Foie and says "Go cook it" and even after I stutter trying to tell him I always melt and ruin it- he says "JUST GO COOK IT!" School > than Kitchen, just once.

A little bunny butchery:

The Weekly Techisode: Clarified banana bourbon.

First I was pureeing this case of bananas with a little pectin-x and bourbon.

Next, it went into a centrifuge for 15 minutes spinning it around 1800 rpms bringing all the impurities to the bottom that later came out in a jelly like coin. It was filtered it a bunch of times through a chinois and then a coffee filter to make...Banana bourbon! We spent a considerable amount of time playing around with liquid nitrogen and making different ice cubes for the drink- plain coconut milk ice cubes, chocolate branches which tasted deliscious but made the drink look like

a sewage trap and finally, banana ice cubes made by freezing a whole banana with LN and throwing it against something hard (very techinical) thus making banana ice cubes.

Final note: When I described culinary school as "uninspiring" before, I said I'd eat my words, so I'm eating my words. It's inspiring for sure. Challenging, too. Show a little extra interest, a little flicker of passion gets you a long way with these Chefs- they teach because they love it too. Of course they want to chat about how to keep ice crystals incredibly small for the finest mouthfeel of ice cream possible and they absolutely want to see you learn and grow and they'll push you if they see you want it. You just have to find the right Chefs.

In the first few days of Level 2, Chef Jeff asked the class to share one food item their family makes that is representative of their heritage. I was hoping he didn't call on me because I couldn't figure out how to align my mom's wonderful lemon chicken LeanCuisine with our Irish and German heritage or my dad's "yucky cornish hens" (so nicely named by his delightful children) to our ancestors either. Luckily, he concluded the lecture. He said that living in New York and being exposed to such an insanely complex food scene we should try to remember the things your family cooked, the things you loved that defined the food you grew up with.

My dad cooked, still cooks, like Julia Child. That's bad ass- and I didn't really think about that until now. He makes a better Pomme Darphine than any I saw that day, and I grew up calling those hash browns. The role food has played in everyone's family history is deeper than you think. My mom makes a mean pecan cake-mean in the sense it's evil. It hospitalized more than a handful of our loved ones post Thanksgiving feat- but it's still incites gut-wrenching laughter at every gathering. Food has shaped our families more than we consciously recognize. It's nice to remember the things we enjoyed most about it growing up- It's not the sight of a vanilla sphere thickened with agar agar that I cherish most.

I still remember the first thing I ever cooked with dad, and just the smell of toasting fennel seeds puts me back home lopping up pasta sauce with my brother. Uninspiring my ass. Excuse my French.