Cooking School - Week 1, or How I learned to be a keener

When I was in university I always rolled my eyes at the keeners. What a bunch of lame try-hards, pssh.

Ten years later? I'm a total keener. Yes, I show up way too early. Yes, I sit in the front row. Yes, I answer the instructor's questions. And yes, I'm going overboard on the homework. Homework that doesn't get checked, isn't assigned or really required to pass. Does this happen to all of us as we get older? Are only a few of us really prepared for the value of school when we're 19? Whether it's that us "mature students" finally, a decade later, know what we want, or whether we are finally too old to be wasting our time in a class learning something we aren't enthusiastic about, I've heard similar stories from other people who've gone back to school in their 30s. We all turn into keeners.

The first week of culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu in Ottawa was everything I expected. (But I do suspect they're going easy on us because it's the first week...) And didn't I go straight home to buy onions, carrots and potatos to practice on on my way home? Then didn't I buy mushrooms so I could master the art of turning them into strange little fungi spirals? Three pounds of carrots, 5 pounds of potatos, 2 pounds of mushrooms and 8 giant onions later...I'm still nowhere near perfection, but I am knee-deep in vegetable stock. I am getting used to a 9-inch knife and feeling more confident for the practical classes. The coming week will be a better taste of the rhythm of things for the next three months, with lots of early mornings and long days using both the pastry and the cuisine sides of my brain.