To begin Monday's class we took a quiz. During the previous week's review, Chef Jim told us it would be about 10 questions. Well, it turned out being about 20 questions over 3 pages. I wasn't thrown off by it though because I knew that I knew my stuff. Luckily, Chef Jim came into school on Tuesday and had our graded quizzed in hand. I got a 97!!!! I wonder if I scored the highest?
Once the quiz was over, we began a 3 hour lecture about soups and stocks. I'm not surprised that the lecture took that long since a good stock is the foundation to any good meal. We also learned about the difference between stock and broth. Stock is not seasoned with salt. So, we are really buying broth at the grocery store, not stock. At the end of the lecture, we got right into making the stocks since they take so long to cook. Usually, I couldn't care less about being short, but it was a challenge today when I had to skim the crap off of the top of the stock. I could barely see into the pot. The stove comes up to my waist and then we used a 3-foot tall stock pot to cook the batches of stocks in. I was pretty much hanging off of the edge of the pot with my fingers and nose!
We each got our own soup recipe. There wasn't a clear soup like minest so that sucked, but I'll eat any kind of soup you put in front of me. My soup was Thai Chicken and Coconut Soup. It used ingredients that I don't ever cook with at home, but that I love the flavor of. I used lemongrass, ginger, jalapeno peppers...I love eating this type of food. I had to strain the above ingredients from the recipe so you couldn't even taste any spice in there. So, Chef Jim and I went to get Sriracha sauce. Holy moly it that stuff spicy...but so good! I would recommend this over Tabasco any day.
So, I had a really good day. The only thing that would have made it better would be to have had a sandwich with the soups...that is my heaven!
Today's' Recipes: Creamy Mussel Soup, Shrimp Bisque with Pernod and Dill Cream Drizzle, Puree of Vegetable Soup, Pot Au Feu, Thai Chicken and Coconut Soup, Cold Cream of Asparagus Soup, Tomato and Bread Soup
97 is great! You made it sound like you would get high 80s or low 90s.
ReplyDeleteA lot of those soups sound fancy - except for maybe the Tomato and Bread Soup.
They are teaching us to make things sound fancy so when we open our own restaurant we know that if we call it something fancy we can charge more than we can charge for a plain ol' soup!
ReplyDeleteIt's all about the benjamins, baby!