*The Halfway Mark Already???

Holy freaking hell, I can’t believe it myself.

Wednesday was the halfway mark for my classroom education time at Oregon Culinary. At the other end of this journey comes an externship, wherein I get kissed on the head by Chef Maxine, thrown outta the nest by Chef B, and I have to fly on my own for 360 hours with a total stranger as my guide. That is, however, provided I survive the rest of my education in the classroom and the Demo Kitchen Of Doom.

This second term was touted to be the best experience I can get for the time and money. The Smart Guy In Charge of us band of misfits has a head that should be considered a finite resource and should have protection orders upon it, as well as around the clock security. This guy knows his shit and teaches beautifully. Only complaint I have is that I don’t think he’s gonna want me stalking him just to get more out of his dome. The restraining order was probably a good indicator. He’s not taking it personally, he gave me an A for the first half of the class, so he’s over that whole climbing in through the bathroom window thing I pulled last weekend. Just like his kitchen, the guy has an AMAZING medicine cabinet…

Since my last post, I have gone from breakfast making at gunpoint to making all kinds of protein sources into that gorgeous stuff we delicately and daintily call forcemeats. Got a good hand in making cured meats and fish (if you ever get a chance, please RUN and do not walk toward any horseradish and beet cured salmon. It rocks), sausage, pate’, sandwiches (gonna post a recipe here soon, I promise!! I made a kick-ass sandwich!), and the ever-dreaded Hollandaise. The only medically good thing to come of it is that I now have a serious aversion to the smell of melted butter, which is a total crime against humanity, and I sincerely hope it reverses by the time I attack my dungeness crab tonight.

I’ve also done salads, some infusions for mayonnaise and vinaigrette (will post a Mojito Salad Dressing here shortly, too) and then made my way through International and low-fat cuisine. During World Cuisine week, the chef discussed how other cultures outside the superpowers tend to have less meat in their diets. He tossed out a casual comment that I don’t think he expected any one of us to take seriously, “Try a vegetarian diet for a month, see whatcha think.” So I did. Eleven days ago, I hopped on the OvoLacto Vegetarian wagon and gave meat all up, save for the required, and I do mean required, tasting I need to do for class. Dumbshit that I am, It fell right before meat fabrication time, and I have been up to my ass in tenderloin, filet mignon, chateaubriand, flank steak, short ribs, veal shanks and bloody HELL, I had to make my favorite meat ever- braised lamb shanks. It killed me to watch everyone else walk away with plates of my goddamned dinner, with that gorgeous, slick and lovely reduction sauce glistening on their lips with every forkful. I damned near started to suck face with everyone I handed a plate to, but for that silly little restraining order thing…

The night we had mid-terms, Chef H made the class a prime rib to nosh on before kitchen testing time. Damn him. I had a roasted potato wedge with horseradish on it.  I gave him shit though, I said, “If you actually cared, you’d have made me a dish of pasta.” I got that sick little smile of his in return. We moved from beef to shellfish last night, and I bent the rules, gorging on scallops until I mooed happily. Molecularly similar to an egg, and believing that somewhere in this world, some poor bastard living in another less industrialized nation than mine had nothing BUT scallops to eat every day, I went for it. Eleven days on the wagon will do that to a person. Tonight its king, snow, and dungeness crab, shrimp and prawns. I picked the wrong fucking term to go vegetarian.

Anyway, the journal of my vegetarian adventure is located on the menu, just scroll down and look for “Goin’ Veg” and read by date. I pulled a sucker friend on board, and we update each other frequently. His wife is a Peruvian Goddess and has mad kitchen skills in the kitchen, so he is having good days for the most part. Read today’s entry later on tomorrow for how its been going. I took time off for mid-term studying, but I’ve dutifully been behaving…until last night.

School Wrap-Up

The term was freakishly busy and fact filled. I managed to kill one half a notebook single-handed in just a few weeks. I am continually impressed by what I don’t know, and I am glad to know it. A lot of this really is about me filling in my skills, polishing up the fundamentals. I am not going to graduate some ninja-Mac Guyver-Iron Chef girl, but I am going to be a lot better at food than I ever was.

A few of us volunteered last weekend to work a huge event at the convention center to feed 800 people. Yeah, you read right. Eight. Hundred. I have never seen this kind of production facility, and I hope I never do again, actually. Next time you make a pot of chili, think about making that in a 50 gallon square cooker with a hinge and a lever handle to pour it into a rolling vat over a floor drain (in case you miss the vat). I think watching a platypus have intercourse with a fire hydrant is far more intimate than this kind of cooking, and if I ever have to work in a kitchen like that again, I will head right to Sea World and climb into the playtpus tank myself.

So, I am working on externship placement right now. This is where a student goes to work for a chef and learns all they can absorb in 360 hours of practical kitchen time. Usually this involves a Stage (pronounced French- “stahj”), or an audition of sorts, in which you attempt to show the chef that you know which end of a can opener to use, that you can peel a case of grapes , not remove a body part as you cut up a small domesticated farm animal and then turn it into  a dish measuring two by two inches and costing fifty dollars and do it all in about 3 hours. And never use the bathroom, speak no other words than “Yes Chef” and do it all with a USMC drill sergeant sitting on your shoulders calling you a puke.

My first desire as a young, budding idealistic student was to find Dan Barber of Stone Barns out in NY and throw myself upon his mercy and beg for a crack at it. Reality and practicality set in and I took into account our desire to move out of the country someday and live in some tropical, quiet and vegetationally gifted little village that nobody we know has ever heard of or can get to easily. I thought about Hilton and their vast, brilliant empire and all its possibilities for launching us to better climes. Then I got a call about a region the locals call Little Tuscany down in southern Oregon. A chef who respects Dan Barber like I do is looking for a student to learn her business and help her out all season long. I have an interview with her next Saturday afternoon at her inn, which she runs with her master gardener husband. She has a cooking school with visiting guest chefs that pop in from all over the country and she teaches in between catering events and breakfasts 7 days a week. We’ll see what she has to show me. It sounds good over the phone so far…