Shellfish/Genoise

Sorry for the delay. I also don't have pictures for this week as I forgot my camera. For Food Basics, we focus on shellfish, specifically mollusks. There wasn't much to the lecture, but talking about raw oysters got me hungry! Once we were in the kitchen, we started our mise en place and waiting for the oysters and clams to arrive. I have never shucked an oyster before and was awaiting my time to do this! Once they arrived chef demonstrated how to shuck the oyster. The oyster has a 'soft spot' at the narrower end. You take a tool that looks like a thick, dull knife without the pointed end and wedge it into that soft spot. You need to have the oyster wrapped with a towel and have the towel wrap around your hand as well. If not, say 'hello' to a huge gash in your hand. That kind of scared me because Chef kept telling me I have to wedge the knife in more. I was afraid that if would slip and go right into my hand if I pushed any harder. Once I got over that fear and popped open my first oyster, the rest were pretty simple.

We then moved onto cracking open raw clams. A lot of us failed miserably at this, thankfully, it wasn't my dish and I could walk away. I think it is almost impossible to open them. You have to line up the tool where the to shells meet, however, you are trying to fit a tool that is twice as thick as the little opening into the clam. The result ends in you shaving the side of the clam. I can honestly say that I quit that attempt in opening even one. It's not worth the time. Just smash them with a hammer or cook them so they steam open, it will save you a lot of time!

The recipe I focused on was Oysters Rockefeller. This is a classic recipe for oysters. It had a lot of steps, but is and easy recipe. By then end of class, we only had 4 students as the rest of the class went home because they weren't feeling well (this was before we ate, so it wasn't the oysters). Because of that, we were able to eat a couple of raw oysters. I have to say that I would prefer a raw oyster over a cooked oyster any day.

Today's Recipes:Oysters Rockefeller, Oysters Casino, Garlic Clam Pizza with Thyme (gag me!), Clams with Dill Cream and Roasted Red Pepper Butter, Chunky Shrimp Gazpacho with Basil Croutons, Steamed Mussels with Orange, Fennel and Garlic, Sauteed Scallops with Leek Fondue, Mixed Greens with Creamy Lime Fig Dressing and Armenian String Cheese, Pear Mousse

In Baking, we are in our 2nd of 5 weeks of cakes. This week is Genoise, which is a sponge cake. The lecture was about cakes in general and very boring. The recipe I received was not for a genoise, but for something completely off of the radar. It was Apple-Walnut Upside Down Cake with Calvados Caramel Sauce. Chef said this was a quick recipe and that when I am done, I should still make a Genoise as Genoise are notorious for showing up on our practicums. The apple recipe was good, but my favorite part was the caramel sauce. I have always wanted to make caramel sauce and now that I know how easy it is, I may be making a lot of things covered in caramel. I did make the Genoise and found it to be an easy recipe to master. I had pictured using the Genoise to make a cake that tasted the the samoas girl scout cookies, but I didn't have time. Maybe someday I will make that when there is a big party going on. Instead, I took the baked genoise and dumped the rest of my caramel sauce on it and brought it home to Derek. He was quite excited to get a whole cake when he knows not to expect anything from the baking courses.

Today's Recipes:Apricot Almond Genoise, Chocolate Genoise with Chocolate Ganache Filling (the best one since it had chocolate covered espresso beans on the outside), Chocolate Citrus Bang, Cream Cheese Pound Cake with Poppy Seeds, Praline Nut Roll, Spice Cake with Mocha Butter cream and Caramelized Pecans

For seminar, we focused on food cost. I really am enjoying this Food Management Seminar more than I thought. I like to know all of the details of things and this seems to be what it's about. We broke down how much a recipe costs per serving and how to figure those numbers out. We talked about building relationships with suppliers and how to deal with them if things don't go as they should or you get a bad product. This may be where I am headed with my career. It's still early though, so don't hold me to that.

Before seminar, my team met and we decided on the name of the restaurant we are opening. We are calling it The Spring Chicken and only serving 'baby' products, whether they are baby because of their age or size. We've done a really good job so far of creating our menu. I think we will do really well because we are having fun with it, but we are taking it seriously and are making wise decisions. For those of you that don't know what a 'spring chicken' is, it's a chicken that is killed at 6-8 weeks after birth. So there you have why we are serving baby animals!!

Cake Decorating

Ok, I guess I have time to write this now if I have time to comment on people's Facebook status. Today's lecture was about sugar. It's one of our longer lectures in baking. I'm not going to say it was boring, but I am pretty impressed I managed to not nod off. It could have been the sugar taste test we were doing while Chef was talking. Once lecture was done, Chef demoed the soft ball stage of sugar, then took it to the caramel stage and made hazelnut praline and showed us how to make caramel cages and the hair-thin strands used to decorate cakes. It was a pretty cool demo. After that, she showed us how to do a crumb layer of frosting. This is a really thin layer of your frosting that is there to keep the crumbs from going into your presentation layer of frosting. Once this thin layer is on you need to stick it in the fridge to harden. While that was chilling, she showed us how to fill the center of a cake...pretty basic. She then took the cake with the thin layer our and showed us how to properly frost a cake. After that, we were on our own to practice frosting and piping. I practiced the basket weave more than anything because I like that a lot and have never done it. We were free to do what we wanted (as you could tall in the previous post!).

Needless to say, all we had to eat at that point was SUGAR!!! The assistant made us pizza and some of us ordered Greek food for lunch so we could have real food. I also got my baking quiz back. I received a 92. I was really expecting a B+ so I am happy to take the 92 and run.

Tonight was the first night of the Food Management Seminar. It's tough by Chef Jim, my Food Basics teacher. We started our by taking a quiz right off...this is the way Chef Jim is, so people from his class were fine with it. However, we have this seminar with the Pastry people and they almost shit a brick. Hello....the first question is 'What is your name?'...which Chef Jim kept saying as long as you answered question 1 right, you got a 100. They still didn't get it, so he had to boil it down to saying, if you are here, you got a 100 on this first quiz. I don't know if all classes are like ours, but we don't really like the pastry people. Don't know why, we just find them annoying. Anyways, we are having a quiz at the beginning of each class. Today we talked mostly about the food service industry and at the end we talked about our group project. It's pretty cool. We have to come up with a food industry concept (most likely a restaurant). Come up with a press release, menu, recipes and present everything on the last class. He let us pick our own groups and my class just stuck together. It will make it easy to meet up since we can have up to 3 hours if our Baking Class gets out early until the time the seminar starts. I think we will do a really kick-ass job. One of the girls on my team said she wanted to do a brothel restaurant with one of the item menus being called a 'Double Bagger'....she's the one that made the dog poop cake! We may have to tighten the reigns on her a little bit!!

Today's Recipes:Sugar in the form of Buttercream!

Just a tease....

Until I have time to fill you in on the whole day...here's a little teaser of our cake decoration class...I did not create this, but I will take credit for encouraging it to be completed. It reminded me of when Christopher and I made penis cookies for Christmas one year!

Fish

I'm not a huge fish fan, so I wasn't looking forward to eating the food today. This is the first of 3 weeks of fish/shellfish. There wasn't much to lecture except the families of fish. Nothing too disturbing...we talked a lot about Japan and how their standards for fish are so much higher than America's since fish is in such high demand there.

Chef decided that today he was going to try to do something different. He said in the past it either works out great or doesn't. He told us that we would be eating the appetizers first, then get up and cook the entrees and eat them later. He said this doesn't have a high success rate since people will sit, eat the apps, then just sit there in a food-induced coma and not get anything done past that point. At least he was giving us the chance. He broke us up into 3 people on apps, 3 people on entrees and 1 person on dessert. I chose to do the entree section because I though it was more of a challenge there. I focused on getting the prep done for the 3 side dishes we were assigned while one of my other team members did the salmon and the other did the snapper. We pretty much had a lot of down time because we couldn't start anything until after we ate. It was nice because it allowed us to keep up on the dishes so there weren't that many at the end of the day. Once we finished eating apps, we were right into the kitchen to start our meal. Everything came together perfectly and my team was 15 minutes ahead of schedule. The picture above shows our meal minus the whole snapper. For not liking fish, I sure had a pretty good amount to eat!

The chef that teaches my Food Basics Class is also the chef that teaches the 4-week butchering seminar that ended last week. He gave us our grades for the 4 weeks and I received a 100. I can't imagine how anyone could get lower than an A in that class, so it's not liked a accomplished the impossible.

Tomorrow, in baking, is cake decorating. As most of you know, I like to decorate the cakes, just not bake them...that's what Dawn is for, she bakes, I decorate! I also get my second quiz back. I'm anxious to see what I got for a grade because it was a little bit harder than the first one...I'll keep you posted!

Today's Recipes:Orange-Flavored Gratineed Smelts, Hot and Sour Fish Soup (yummy!), Salmon in Parchment with Herb Vinaigrette, Pescado al Forno, Saltimbocca Di Alberto Ciarla, Summer Squash Saute, Rice Pilaf, Green Beans with Lemon, Warm Spinach, Egg and Bacon Salad, Blood Orange Crostata

Strudel, phyllo and a huge chunk of beef!

We started baking class by taking our second quiz. It certainly as easy as the first one, but I think I managed to pull at least a B. Our lecture today was on strudel and phyllo. Chef told us that we would make the strudel, but, for the first and only time, we would use phyllo out of the box, we would never actually make phyllo. Fine with me!

We all received our recipes. Half of us had to make strudel for the recipes and the other half got to use the phyllo out of the box. My recipe was called Floyers. It's farina (kind of like cream of wheat) pastry cream filled in phyllo dough then dunked into a tasty syrup after they are baked. We all had to participate in stretching the strudel though. You need at least 3 people to help stretch. You first roll it out into a 12-inch round, then you lift it up and stretch, with your fists, from the middle out. We needed to get it stretched over a square table. You can see the tablecloth through it. It needs to sit there and dry. As it's drying, some parts will dry quicker than others. When a section is dried, you need to brush it with clarified butter so it doesn't crack. Once it's all coated, you add your filling and bake it off.

For my recipe, we had to thaw the phyllo in the fridge. However, it was not going as quick as we needed it to, so we had to take it out to thaw on the counter. You have to be careful with thawing this way because if it goes to far, you just end up with all of the pieces stuck together in one mess. I tried unrolling the phyllo and realized that the very center was still frozen, so the last part ripped away from what I had already unrolled. Getting each individual piece off was a pain in the ass too. It kept ripping. I would have to get one sheet onto my board, spread butter over it and put another piece on top. Then, I would fill it with the pastry cream and roll it into cigars. Once done, I baked them for about 25 minutes until they were golden. They got dunked into the syrup which consisted of sugar, water, lemon juice, clove, cinnamon, and vanilla. It was a very tasty syrup. I was one of the first done, so everyone was snacking on my leftovers. My dish was called the 'crack' of the class since everyone couldn't stay away from them...I will take this as a compliment!

We had our quarterly baking reviews as well. In baking I am at an 89-plus (whatever the 'plus' means!). She said I did great in my bread classes, but need to practice on the fine pastries. I couldn't have agreed with her more. That's what I hated the most! She also told me that I have an excellent palate and that I can freely change up recipes as I'd like. This was a really nice compliment to hear and to let me know that they trust me.

Tonight was the final night of butchering. We focused on lamb, veal, beef and pig. The best part of the night was the primal cut of beef we got to take apart! We first started by Frenching a rack of lamb. It's pretty easy once you get the hang of it, but nothing I would ever do at my house. Derek would be pretty upset if I took off something he could eat! We then had to debone a fresh ham, breast of veal and the side of beef. Once this was done, we had steak with a nice pan sauce and rack of lamb. We didn't get out until almost 10pm, but why would you leave when steak is being served? I also got to take home a rack of lamb, so the next night, Derek and I had lamb with a leek and rosemary risotto....very good! Next week in seminar, we start Food Management. I am anxious to start this because it will help me decide if this is the direction that I might want to go in.

Today's Recipes:Pear Streusel Strudel, Cherry Cheese Strudel, Poppy Seed Strudel, Lihamurekepitras (Finish Meat Loaf in Strudel Dough), Chocolate Mousse Napoleon, Moroccan Bisteeya Triangles, Beggars Purses with Shrimp and Pesto, Mushroom-Broccoli Tartlets, Baklava

Lamb

Sadly, my Spring Break has come to an end. It was nice having those 2 days off. Today we got our second Food Basics quiz back. I got a 92. There were a couple of questions that really threw me off, but one of them had thrown the whole class off, so Chef Jim didn't grade that question. We talked about Lamb and ages. The worst part is learning that a Spring/Easter Lamb is only 6-8 weeks old before it's slaughtered. The only comment we could make was 'that sucks'.

Once in the kitchen I was in a team of 3 and our recipes included Fried Artichoke Hearts with a Lemon Sauce, Tomato and Red Pepper Soup, and Lamb Ravioli. One of our team member focused on the soup and myself and my other teammate split the other dishes between us. The filling for the ravioli was awesome. Plus, we got to use the pasta attachment for the KitchenAid Stand Mixer. I loved it...I almost want to buy one, but I don't like pasta enough. Our eating time was set at 3:30pm today. Our 3 recipes were all prepped and were just waiting for other team's lambs to be done so we could finish ours off. I think that gave us a little leeway as far as the time was concerned. We actually decided that some of the lamb was cooking quicker than we had expected, so we changed the time to 3:15pm and hit it right on the nose! It's always nice when we all reach this goal. We do work really well together. I have to say, this was probably the best meal we have eaten to date. I love lamb, and, of course, the side dishes were great with the lamb.

Today also happened to be our quarterly reviews. We all met one-on-one with Chef Jim to discuss our performance to date. He started off by telling me my average grade between the quizzes and my lab grade. He has me down as a 90. He said this is very good as he considers himself quite a tough teacher. This made me feel really good. He likes how I am efficient, organized and am an emerging leader in the class. He told everyone that he expects us to be the ones that communicate with each other and see where everyone is and when they will be ready to serve. He only wants to be there to observe by the last weeks of our classes with him. During our meeting, he also asked me if I was willing to become more of a leader in the kitchen and really help push the class along in reaching this goal. Of course I am happy to take that opportunity and run with it. He told me it's very good that I am able to get my stuff done successfully, but am also very aware of everyone around me and their situation and how it would affect my dish and the classes dishes as a whole. Not that I had doubt about this whole culinary thing, but today's meeting totally erased any feeling of uncertainty that I may have had.

It was a good day! But, tomorrow is Baking. I have a quiz, maybe quarterly reviews for that class and we are making phyllo dough and something else (yuck). Anyways, I have to have a good attitude tomorrow since that counts as part of my grade!

Today's Recipes:Leek and Goat Cheese Tart, Tomato and Red Pepper Soup, Ravioli D'Agnello, Braised Lamb Shanks A La Provencale, Roast Leg of Lamb with Mint Pesto, Zucchini with Tomato, Artichoke Heart Beignets with Avgolemono Sauce, Roasted Beets with Balsamic Vinegar Sauce, Arugula Salad with Feta, Mint and Olives, Konafa (look it up, it's so freakin' good!)

Brioche

Because of the snow we got on Sunday night, we did not have our Food Basics class, so there is no blog for that. We are making it up on Friday though.

We started the baking class with our usual lecture. The past few weeks we had been starting our dough first, then having lecture. With Brioche, you have to let it do a slow rise in the refrigerator overnight, so we used dough made from a previous class and we would repay the favor by making the dough for the next day's class. Lecture was extremely quick since we only had to learn what makes Brioche Brioche since we already know that 11 steps to bread making. The recipe I was given was Twice Baked Brioche. I didn't care for it because it had an outer coating of almond paste...almond paste is one of the worst flavors on the face of the earth. I think I only tried a tiny bite of mine just to taste the brioche. I'm getting ahead of myself. I need to tell you about 'crashing' the dough. You essentially pound the dough into the table by lifting it over your head and slamming in down. The tables in the kitchen are all stainless steal, so everyone had a headache by the time we were done. We had dough all over the kitchen because you have such a loose, sticky dough that it will fly off of itself when you are crashing it. I am extremely happy to have not have been the one that had to clean the floors!

We got out of this class quite early, which sucks because I am stuck there for the seminar anyways. In the downtime I went upstairs to the library to check my ServSafe score. I got a 93! I can now serve food to the public. How exciting!

This week's seminar is still butchering. Tonight, it was fish! We had striped bass and flounder. We had an extra special treat of the striped bass not being gutted, so we got to do that!!! It was really cool to get to play with the guts and fish heads! The flounder was also not gutted, so when chef pulled out the stomach of his flounder there was another fish, whole, in the belly!!! He must have just eaten! After we had finished with the fish, we cooked up some fish sticks and fish with a lemon-parsley sauce. It was pretty good! As soon as I got home I had to wash my clothes because they smelled so bad! Ollie liked it though!

Today's Recipe:Chicken with Wild Mushroom Sauce, Saucisson en Croute, Brie in Brioche, Cheese Twists, Nanterre, Pizza with Brioche Dough, Apple, Apricot and Dried Cranberry Strudel, Pecan Sticky Buns, Brioche Tart with Secret White Sauce (tee-hee), Twice Baked Brioche