I know I know, it has been an insane amount of time since my last post. I get so caught up in things here its hard to keep up! Since my last post, we had the Worlds of Flavor conference. It was INSANE! I worked 60 hours mon - fri, and those are on your feet running around like a madman in a hot hot full and busy kitchen. It definitely took its toll, but was ENTIRELY worth it! I got to meet some great chefs, including the great Rick Bayless, Cat Cora, Masaharu Morimoto, Michael Chiarello, Seamus Mullen (Next Iron Chef finalist), etc. Not only did i meet them, but i cooked for them, and i ate their food! I was assigned team Spain, and had the greatest pleasure of working with Chef Paco Roncero from Madrid - one of the leading molecular gastronomists. Which means I learned so much and got to use so many cool techniques, techniques that most chefs today dont use - so when I was prepping something, amazing chefs would walk by and ask me to explain to them what I was doing! cant quite wrap my head around that. The actual conference was 3 days long, and during those 3 days we would hold demos and such, and every day there was a marketplace where every chef (about a hundred from around the world) put out tapas size portions for everyone to walk around and try - believe me, i was like a kid in candy land! My pictures from the week can be seen here.
After Worlds of Flavor, we had one week of Skills 1 left including our knife skills practical! The tray i mentioned in the last post? Well, we had 40 minutes to complete it - 2 onions small dice, 2 onions emanceed, 3 garlic cloves minced, 1/4 bunch of parsley finely chopped, 3 shallots brunoise, 2 potatoes medium dice, and 1 potato julienne. Can you believe I actually finished with time to spare, and got a high score?!
Now that we are back from thanksgiving break, we are in Skills 2. Can you say INTENSE?! The first day was a train wreck - just off vacation I guess most of us didnt have our game faces on, and we werent used to having to turn so much out. We did braised red cabbage, chateau potatoes, duchesse potatoes, glazed beets, and our knife trays. After day 1 we came up with an organized game plan so day 2 was much smoother. We made a parmesan risotto that we finished with olive oil and lemon zest - it was DELISH - i completely recommend using olive oil as a seasoning yall. Anyway, we still have knife trays, but these include some more complicated cuts, such as tournee potatoes and fluted mushrooms. I had to stay after class last night for some extra help on the fluting because that is hard. One should look like this:
NOT easy! But you have to admit its sexy...Today in class we are learning how to make homemade pasta, and im really excited!
I promise ill post again soon, but until then...
eat well! <3>
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