Day seventeen: Pork, my arch enemy, returns

Posted on | January 28, 2010

This, my last week of the first semester of my final term, is dedicated to pork. Sure, there is supposed to be a lobster finale. But the bulk of the remainder of this semester is all pork.

And not just any pork. Oh no! Pork in a million and one different ways, from pork butt to pork cheeks to my personal nightmare, pork sausages.

Actually, they were fascinating to make. But then I had to eat some.

What did the teddy bear say when he was offered dessert?
~ No thanks, I’m stuffed!

The first thing we made (we actually made this yesterday, on day sixteen, but I posted about the test, so I did not tell you about this) was pork sausages.

We used a recipe the Chef photocopied from a cookbook (at first, most of our recipes came from our textbook, but now, they are photocopied from cookbooks with the bulk of them from the Culinary Institute of America). It was a simple spice recipe with meat and just tons of fat.

And when I say tons, I mean tons. There was so much creamy white fat that, when it was ground, the overall color of the meat turned from a decent red (well, pork is never as deeply colored as beef) to an insipid pink. There was that much fat.

Now, normally you would go ahead and make your sausages once your meat is ground. But this is culinary school. Where we take it up a level. So we cooked off a small patty of the ground meat first to test for texture and flavor.

The Chef said my texture was perfect. Then he asked me about the flavor.

Yep, here’s me, eating pork again. Popped a big old piece right into my mouth.

Mmmm, doesn’t that taste fine, I ask you?

(How do you season something you don’t like? I tried to ignore that it was pork and pay attention to the mix of the spices. I thought it was a balanced mixture but, yeah, I was also working hard not to taste the pork while trying to taste the spices and how they worked with the pork. It was complicated.)

What did one tomato say to the other?
~ You go on ahead and I’ll ketchup!

Now that the meat was deemed okay, we moved onto part two: Making the sausages.

Picture a canister, say the size of one of those sugar canisters from the 1950′s, with a 6 inch tube sticking out of the bottom, parallel to your table. There is a lid to the canister and a crank you use to raise the lid so you can add the meat to the interior of the canister, or lower the lid to force the meat down the canister, through the tube, and into the hog casing.

To get that casing onto the tube with some ease, we lubricated the tube with a bit of the pork fat. Then we just slipped the casing onto the tube as easily as slipping a condom onto a …

Culinary school; you can imagine the snickers.

Once the meat was in the casing, it was tied off at both ends and everyone rolled their sausages.

I rolled small ones, say, maybe four inches long. I thought these would work nicely for serving. I made sure they were not too tight before I rolled them, but once they were rolled, they felt insanely tight to me.

We poach them tomorrow. I won’t be surprised if they burst.

What happens when you tell an egg a joke?
~ It cracks up!

I haven’t talked too much about my fellow students because I’ve been keeping interaction with them to as little as I can manage. And, as we tend to work individually this term, instead of in the teams we used to work in, this is pretty easy to do.

Why am I keep interaction to a minimum? I’m a bit tired of the crudeness, the rudeness, the high school-level pettiness of it all.

Let me give you an example.

Yesterday, Sweet Line Cook and Other Guy were standing next to a prep table piled high with ingredients. As I was passing, Sweet Line Cook pointed to a pile of pepitas and asked me if I knew what they were. I did.

But Other Guy insisted they were chickpeas.

Pepitas and chickpeas look nothing alike. Something was up.

I asked Sweet Line Cook why he wanted to know. He said he was testing me.

What?!

I declined to be tested by a fellow student and left.

Then I thought about what had just happened. And I remembered that She Chef had complained that Sweet Line Cook tried to test her all the time and she hated it. This is the first time this happened to me. And, boy, did I hate it, too.

I’m not sure why he does that. To prove his superiority, perhaps?

But then there is the issue with Other Guy. Did he really think those slender seeds were fat chickpeas? Or was he purposefully feeding me incorrect information.

And the more I though about it, the more I remembered times when he purposefully feed me wrong information. Such as during our black box practical exam in the second term when, as I lined up my mirepoix to saute in the order they were to be added to the pan (you have to add what takes the longest to cook, the carrots, first, followed by the celery and the onions so everything will be ready at the same time), he scoffed and pushed me to add them in a different order.

He was purposely feeding me incorrect information. Not in a fun, teasing you way, but in a sincere, pushy way whose goal was to convince you to do or believe the wrong thing. And I wonder why he would do that (and lest you think I am singled out, I am not; he does it to everyone). Was this high school drop out not very intelligent? Or was he just mean?

Still, I don’t want you to think I am distancing myself from everyone. Mama, for example, works next to me and we help each other out all the time. And don’t think it is always miserable at school. This morning, for example, we had a silly moment. See, I dragged in at 7:00 am after one of those nights where I just didn’t get enough sleep. When Mr. Big greeted me, I told him it was just too early to speak. So he said, “Oh, I have just what you need!” and pulled a sign language brochure out of his knapsack and handed it to me. See, he had bought it off someone at a bar the night before. The timing was just so perfect that everyone in the student lounge, including me, just roared.

As for what’s going on with the students:

• Mama, who is going through a divorce (her husband of 15 years ran away with a woman from their church leaving her with three young children and one large, empty house) told me she thought the man of the family was the head of the household, the one who should make all the decisions, because “The man needs respect while the woman needs love.” I was shocked to my core. Does anyone really believe that anymore? Well, I guess someone does. It’s such a shame because Mama is such a lovely person, you know she is ripe if a rotten man (and I know there are plenty of great man out there) wants to come along and take advantage of her sweet nature. I debated saying something, but eventually did not in an attempt to mind my own business. Of course, now I worry if I did the right thing.
• I just found out that three students: Mr. Big, who normally drives me nuts, and two of the students I only started working with this semester, will transfer to the night class for the second semester of this term. Which means, Monday is my last day with them. Mr. Big is not bothering me this semester, but last semester he drove me so nuts that I will be delighted to see the back of him. (Actually, I thought he was moving to nights for all of this term so you can imagine my shock to find him here when I started the third term. This time, I hope he really goes.)

And speaking of my fellow students, I’m a little sad that I have not found any friends at school. Sure, there are people I am friendly with. Stern Girl and sometimes Giggles, both of whom are now in the other class, and I used to chat before class every day. Mama and I tend to chat during break. And I comfortably gab with anyone in the student lounge or the kitchen or the restaurant. But there is no one I have any real similarities with, outside of food, no one I wish to socialize with outside of school hours, and no one I will miss once school ends.

I knew that I would be older than most of the students, more educated, more worldly. So I knew the odds were against it. But we are new in town, having arrived just two weeks before school started, so it would have been a pleasant surprise.

C’est la vie.

What does corn say when it feels embarrassed?
~ Aw, shucks!

So now that I told you about yesterday and brought you up-to-date on the school gossip, I should tell you about today. I’ll keep it short – no need to overwhelm you!

In the kitchen, beyond the usual assortment of mise en place, we did two things: We poached our sausages and tied a roast.

My sausages did not (so far, anyway) explode. I am grateful! But a few of the little monsters unraveled, leaving me with one or two sausages that are twice as long as the other sausages, but that have a strange indentation in the middle.

Tomorrow, I will saute my sausages. These odd ones, I will slice into medallions, discarding the ends and the middle piece, for service. No one will be the wiser!

As for the roast tie, we learned this in the second term, had it on our proficiency test, and had it again on our final practical exam. So why we need more experience doing a roast tie, I do not know. But the Chef said he thought we did, so we did.

A few of the students didn’t remember how to do it, so I showed them, then tied one myself. Chef told me to take it apart and do it again. When I asked him what was wrong with my roast tie (every time I did a roast tie in the second term I got a perfect score) he said nothing, he just wanted everyone to do it again.

So I took it apart. And did it again. Perfectly. Again.

As we were doing this, Mama said she wished we were trussing chickens, instead. You know, I can’t, for the life of me, fully remember how to do it!

We both agreed that would have been a valuable skill to revisit.

Then, in the classroom we reviewed a lot of what we had studied to-date and did a wine tasting. It was interesting, but between the noise of the class (this is a pretty rowdy class which, in turn, makes the poor Chef pretty exasperated), my hunger (we rarely get anything to eat this term and it is missed after the gluttony of the first and second terms), and my exhaustion, I ended up with a helluva headache.

Still, I found it really interesting to smell the cut peach, for example, then smell the wine and try to find the similarities. Or the green apple. It really opened up the wine notes.

But, my pounding head calls, so would you excuse me, please, while I go take some aspirin.

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