Day four: And if you thought the heat was on yesterday, today I cooked
Posted on | February 17, 2009
The day started, as usual, with a two-hour lecture. I have learned that the trick is to let whatever the motorcycle-chef says to just wash over me and seep in. Sometimes she talks about her menopause. Sometimes she talks about administrative details. And sometimes, just sometimes, she lets incredibly smart tips fall, like pocket-change from a wealthy man. Tips like this.
Make a floor roux
Spilled oil (and we’re talking a restaurant-sized spill, not a little drizzle)? Sprinkle it with flour and a bit of salt. Then simply sweep it up. Brilliant, eh?
To the kitchen with ye
But the interesting part of the day, predictably, came during cooking. And the interesting part was not making pasta dough which I had done before and which was pretty mindless. No, the interesting part was twofold. First: We had our first (sort of) injury. And, second, there was very interesting interaction among the students in my group. Very interesting, indeed.
Burn, baby, burn
The first injury in our class was a helluva burn another student got when she grabbed the handle of a heated saute pan. It was a wicked-looking thing: Fairly large and already blistering.
Of course, this post-dates my first injury (and only one, so far, knock wood) which is a nasty-looking bruise about the size and, right now in its many splendoured journey though our color wheel, the color of a coffee stain.
It is located on my forearm.
Now, I know what you are thinking. Did I get this bruise, say, chopping onions? No. Did I even get it, perhaps, whipping up, say, a Châteaubriand? Sadly, no. Did I even get it preparing a sumptuous meal for eight? No, no, a thousand times no.
I got it shlepping the 12 pound text book and 8 pounds of study guides and supplementary books home on the first day.
And that’s all I want to say about that. But I do want to talk about this very interesting student interaction, today.
Step up to the plate
The student I suspect everyone would vote as the person most likely to annoy is a skinny, married, gay, vegan who insists on talking about his boyfriend ad nauseum and who was cursed at by the motorcycle-chef on his first day.
Well …
Today, my group of five students (normally four, but one student was chucked out of the other first term group by the chef and, laden with bitterness, joined our class for the day) had three dishes to make:
- individual batches of fresh pasta
- a cooked group pot of dry pasta
- a cooked group pot of Alfredo sauce for Fettuccine Alfredo
Yes. Welcome to starch week.
I made an ordinary pasta dough. Another person made one with sun-dried tomatoes, another with parsley. Complaining chick set out to make a plain pasta dough and never finished rolling it out. Annoying vegan guy set out to make one with cayenne and apple cider vinegar, but never finished, that, either.
Complaining chick didn’t finish her dough because, doh!, she was busy being complaining chick. But, and here’s the wonderful part, annoying vegan didn’t finish his dough because he was so busy making the recipes the rest of us were just too busy to make. Namely, making the alfredo sauce. And cooking the dry pasta. Twice.
See, he had to cook the dry pasta twice because he left the first pot of cooked dry pasta in the cleaning sink. So the chef made him to dump his food and start again. Which he did. And I didn’t even know about this until long after it had happened.
He never asked for help.
Now, sure, I helped grate the cheese for the alfredo sauce and got the cream and butter and salt. But it was annoying vegan who actually made it.
He may be annoying, but he is exactly the kind of guy you want on your team.
So now I need to come up with a new nickname for annoying vegan guy. I’m open to suggestions.
Oh, and in case you want to know, my pasta was quite nice: Plain, but tender and cooked perfectly (I knew enough to take it out of that boiling water in just over a minute – the fresh stuff cooks so quickly). The flavored pastas were somewhat over cooked and fairly tasteless, although the one with the parsley was reminiscent of spring. The dry pasta was dull and insanely salty (poor, overworked, vegan guy so over salted the water Charlie the tuna would have felt right at home if the heat had not been turned to high). And the Alfredo sauce was gummy but, then, I never was a fan of Alfredo sauce.
Tomorrow, I make potatoes.
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June 17th, 2010 @ 7:48 am
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