Day four: It’s been a dreary first week of my last term
Posted on | October 5, 2009
Yes, this was not a week of delights. But before I tell you about my day, it is about time I introduced you to my fellow travelers on this, the second to last leg of my schooling.
Some of them are new. Some, you are very familiar with. And some you have not seen for a long, long time.
How do you make a walnut laugh?
~ You crack it up!
First up, we have Make-Up Girl. We have not seen her since my first term at school. To refresh your memory, she is a chubby, blue-eyed, dimpled, spitfire. If you want to refamiliarize yourself with her, read my first twenty posts.
Her BFF is Cucumber Chick, so named because of an incredibly rude story she once told involving her and a, well, you guessed it. (Culinary school is most definitely not for the delicate of heart). Both of them are tough-talking, tough-acting, heavily made-up women who wear their four-way’s (aprons) slung low on their hips, below their paunch.
Of course, you are familiar with Mr. Big who likes to tell everyone what to do, and Other Guy, who expends most of his energy doing as little as possible. And, of course, Gawky Guy and Mama.
Back again is Sweet Line Cook who sits behind me in class and expends far too much energy trying to make me laugh. You first met him in my first term.
Then there are the students I have never studied with before. First, there is Mr. Rastafarian. He is Abraham Lincoln tall and thin and wears his dreads in an enormous purple knit hat. His goal in life is to cook for his stoner friends. Second there is another guy who, erm I have no nickname for because I’ve barely exchanged more than two words with him. In fact, all I know about his is he has an enormous tattoo of a knife on his forearm, a commonplace occurrence for cooks, and always seems to be in the kitchen, alone, catching up on missed exams.
Finally, for the kitchen, but not for the lecture, we also have the soft-spoken southern guy we met back in my first term. He is not with us for the lecture because he is doing that as an independent study to help facilitate his early graduation. Apparently, he wants to go to help a friend with a business. A technology business. Once he finishes culinary school.
Yeah, scratching my head on that one, too.
“What is white, has a horn, and gives milk?”
~ A dairy truck!
Now you want to hear about my day at culinary school? Okay. Let’s start with kitchen production.
School, as you know, is split into two segments: Production and classroom. Up to now, we have always had three hours a day in the kitchen. However, for this semester, this has been slashed to two hours. Now, on the first day of production for this semester, a semester that is only 20 days long, we scoured the kitchen. On the second day we prepped for the school restaurant. On the third day, yesterday, we were told that there was no point starting a new protein mid-way through the week so the chef ripped open a frozen bag of shrimp and told us to make appetizers out of it (if you want the recipe for yesterday’s appetizer, please see my last post).
Today, was a repeat of yesterday, frozen shrimp and all.
So, like a good little student, I used what I was taught and sauteed my shrimp with asparagus tips, julienned fennel, red pepper flakes, and lemon zest. Big yawn. But, when the Chef judged the plates, what really irked me was that the students who got the kudos were the ones who used garnishing tricks they had learned in the restaurants where they worked.
I, alas, have never worked in a restaurant. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to learn those tricks, too. It would have been nice if Chef Peacock had taught them to those of us who don’t have professional kitchen experience. Now that would have been a good learning experience.
So four out of our 16 days in the kitchen are gone. And we still have not received a syllabus. Which, of course, means I can’t anticipate, I can’t prepare, I can’t even work up some good inspiration.
Sigh.
However, we did get some recipes to use in the next four days.
As for beyond that, it is anyone’s guess.
“What do you call candy that was stolen?”
~ Hot chocolate!
My husband is away on a business trip, so I started the day in a rotten mood. Working, yet again, with frozen shrimp certainly did nothing to improve that mood. So it is understandable that I was truly annoyed by my fellow students.
As always I had Mr. Big, back, bossing me around.
“Take these dishes to the sink!”
“Stop telling me what to do.”
“You’re just standing there, not doing anything.” (I was looking for a food label for the shrimp the Chef asked me to refrigerate.)
“Mind your business.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Well, don’t.”
“Yeah, well.”
“Yeah!”
I’m getting tired of the boorishness of the students, too.
Chef Pigtail: “See? It’s easy!”
Mr. Rastafarian: “That’s what they call my little sister.”
And, you know, the professional writer in me struggles every minute not to correct grammar.
Sweet Line Cook: “That don’t make no sense.”
Me: _________________
I’ve had everything from bigoted remarks about my religion to derogatory remarks about my place of birth to snide remarks about my cooking techniques. It certainly is no worse than they treat each other. But it is considerably worse than I treat anybody.
And I have yet to see anyone at the school address any of this. But, then, why would they? After all, behavior is learned.
Okay. Thank you for letting me get all that out of my system. To repay you, I won’t share the restaurant costing lecture we had. But if you have a funny kid’s food joke, now would be the time to share!
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5 Responses to “Day four: It’s been a dreary first week of my last term”
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October 5th, 2009 @ 9:42 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Cooking Student and Roy Sarkar. Roy Sarkar said: Excellent read! RT @cookingstudent: Who goes to culinary school? What are they like? Here's the scoop from a student: http://bit.ly/n0ZF5 [...]
October 5th, 2009 @ 3:30 pm
Okay, best joke: Why don’t cannibals eat clowns?
Because they taste funny! hahahahahaaa!
It’s bugging me to death that this culinary education gets away with charging so much and doing so little. arghhh!
October 8th, 2009 @ 6:29 pm
I really enjoy your blog. It contains information on cooking while adding humor at the same time. Nice job. It is now on my fav bar.
October 28th, 2009 @ 12:13 pm
Oh dear. Sad that everyone is so dreadful. I’m currently reading Spiced by Dalia Jurgensen, which is a very inspiring read. I’m also not doing classes this semester, just one online business class, but I can empathise with your misery, I found the other students to be just so closed minded, and maybe its because of the part of the county the college we were in, but I was really sad about how racist and homophobic they were too.
January 14th, 2010 @ 2:43 pm
Here’s a kid’s food joke for you:
Why don’t cannibals eat clowns?
They taste funny!
Seriously though: For the last couple of weeks I’ve been reading your posts in chronological order. Like a great book, I am trying not to peek at the ending before reading everything else. Its so enthralling!
I discovered it through my friend’s blog site (he posted some replies on here too) right after discovering my passion for cooking.
Like many others, I am living vicariously through your posts and am very envious since I would love nothing more than to be in cooking school as well. Having you in my class, not no mention my team, would be awesome.
Thanks for the inspiration! And the entertainment! I love the way you write!