Troutacular

Oh jellified trout. Let me preface this post by saying that our chef told us that normally this dish is made in 10 hours and we were asked to do it in 2.5. Why 10 hours? Because that's how long it takes to properly do the following: make a court bouillon, skin a trout, poach said trout, cool down same trout, clarify poaching bouillon, make veggie designs, cook veggies designs, make jelly out of clarified bouillon, dip each veggie design in gelatin of perfect consistency with a toothpick, let jellified veggie design set, jellify trout, place jellified veggie designs on jellified trout in a beautiful and planned out pattern that shows the fish "in motion, as it would be in nature" on a bed of white rice that acts as a "sculpture" to support your trout in his "natural" movement. A white river of rice cooked in milk if you will. Natural.

So we had no time to plan our design after seeing the demo. No one told us not to cover the whole trout with our veg designs...nor did they tell us what the traditional ways of doing this are.

We all just did a variation of what the chef did in demo. Which was a trout in its natural state: flat and dead, laying on the bottom of a cooler. A white styrofoam cooler of rice cooked in milk if you will.

We also didn't do any of that toothpick stuff. I basically had time to throw my veggies into my bowl of gelatin, fish them out (har har) and try to stick them on the fish (pre-jellied at that point). I was wishing for some of that ice in a can we use in pastry to set our chocolate faster for decoration. That would have been handy today.

My individual veggie cuts were creative and lovely, they just couldn't cover the broken disaster that was my fish. Remember the idiot from the last workshop? He bashed into me as I was bringing my fish to the flash fridge and given that fish is a fragile (especially when hot) it basically shattered into a million little pieces. I challenge you to cover that up with some carrot flowers and zucchini cut to look like leaves. Hilarious.

Chef also said that what we see in school and its frequency reflects what we will see out in the "industry" or "ahndoostree"as they call it. Then he said this is the only time we will see this in school...and probably in our lives. Unless we go and work on a cruise ship that likes to jellify things....Hey family, remember those jellified penguins made out of hard-boiled eggs and black olives on the cruise? I bet I could make them now....Keep in mind that these pictures were taken after the chef deconstructed it. But it wasn't much prettier before.

Zebra cake

This cake is truly a freak of nature. Follow me closely here folks: On the bottom is ladyfingers. On the side is a combo of chocolate cigarette paste and Jaconde biscuit cake in a wacky zebra-like pattern. Then inside the cake the layers go like this: Blood orange syrup imbibes the ladyfingers, white chocolate mousse on top of that, flourless chocolate cake layer, blood orange mousse, glazing, decoration. Who the hell thought this combination was a good idea? Two kinds of biscuit-y eggy cake, two weird, polar-opposite-flavored mousses, a flourless chocolate cake layer? BARF! I didn't even pretend to taste this cake. The blood orange mousse was tasty, but I have no interest in the combination of flavors they lined up for us.

Today was tough. That's a lot of things to make in 2.5 hours. Especially when you overwhip your cream and have to add more and then rescale, and you overcook your creme anglaise becuase your electric burner is too hot and you can't do anything to cool it down. Chef got pissed because my piping was so ugly. I didn't plan on it being that bad, but the chocolate was too cold and it wouldn't stick to the glazing on the cake...so it was a bit Halloween-y. Not my prettiest piping, as you can see...need to buy some chocolate chips and practice some more this weekend...right after I move.

Plus we were all super tired today because we had a plated dessert class this morning. I didn't take pics because it was crazy. There are 15 of us in that kitchen and there just is not room to do the things you need to do cleanly. So the plated desserts didn't turn out as nicely as we wanted them to. Plus Chef had made the caramel ice cream for us and some asshole left it on the counter for 30 minutes so when the rest of us got to it it was soup. Genius. There's one girl in our class who is a selfish hoarding bitch. She hoards fruit and supplies and doesn't speak up when people call out asking for it. So some of us go without say, strawberries, or have to use rotten ones, and she has a ton of it "just in case" in her fridge. The ice cream sat in front of her for those 30 minutes. I'm not saying that she put it there, but it would have been nice of her to put it in the freezer for others. I'm just sayin'...a little help here.

Anogther workshop fiasco

So in cuisine on Tuesday we had yet another workshop fiasco. This time I ended up with the other idiot, and Allison got a great team of competant people. There were 4 in my group, I wasn't sous-chef, but I did some good things. I built all the bases of the sauces, so I did the espagniole, the demi-glace, the brown chicken stock, the tomato sauce and then our sous chef built the sauces from there. I also did the pommes dauphines (the choux paste + mashed potato puffy deliciousness) and they were so good this time that when chef sent the other things back to redo, he kept the potatos and said we had to make them fresh because he wanted to eat them. That was a good sign. I also did the on-the-spot vegetarian entree...a little stuffed artichoke action...but it wasn't seasone well enough, so we had to do it again and I got sent off to help another team, so it got messed up without my supervision.

My favourite moment was when our sous chef was making bernaise sauce. Our first order came in and I grabbed it to read it becauce his hands were full, but chef said no, sous chef had to read it. So John catches his towel on fire trying to multi-task without breaking his sauce and then waves it around to try to put it out, further fanning the flame....chef said it was a sign. Maybe it was. It wasn't the shit show it was last time, but we have a really stubborn girl in our class that was in our group which made it tough because she doesn't really like to listen to other people too much. But whatever.

This idiot was underfoot the whole time and was almost worse than the other idiot.It's almost like he doesn't hear you say things. He looks right at you and then does something else. Unreal. The classic move was that we had to make a vichy carrots (glazed in water, butter, salt, sugar + parsley) and it was served with a steak, and he put the bordelaise sauce perfectly on the carrots. Glazed carrots with a dark brown sauce. Naked meat. Sigh.

I have no pics from that fiasco. Trust me, there's no way one can take photos during workshops like that. But we're doing a trout in jelly tomorrow so I'll be sure to take lots of photos of that tomorrow. I have a feeling it's going to remind me of that photo project Brian did when he lived on Yonge Street where he put those fish in jelly in a lasagne dish with some weeds and things....what was the point of that? Also, as a side note for insiders (mostly Brother Brian) I have a framed photo of you taking a picture of those fish that I did for my photo project at the time....how's THAT for a memory inside a memory inside a memory wrapped up in the future? Trout in Jelly...watch for it tomorrow folks.

Millefueille Mille-degrees

It was really hot in our kitchen on Monday. So where our problem in January was with things setting too fast if they had gelatin in them or were ganache for example, now our problem is with things not setting fast enough. It was so hot that as soon as we piped our cream (the fancy layer) it started to melt. Blah.

But all in all this was a great little cake. It tasted great too. Hazelnut and chocolate and a nutella-like substance called ganduja are mixed together between the first 2 layers of puff pastry, then a hazelnut praline cream is between the second layer. Candied hazelnuts on the bottom on the outside, and really pretty candied hazelnuts on top, which I took a closeup picture of. Mine were AWESOME. You just make an inverted sugar syrup and add cocoa paste and food colouring to it and then dip it using a toothpick and then let it drip until it dries all nice and pretty. Remove toothpick and voila!

Plus tempered chocolate decoration! Sadly, the excessive need for icing sugar on top messed with the white balance of my camera, so that one picture is a little our of focus. Flourescent lights + icing sugar= no focus. But you get the idea...

Oh yah...and these

Last Wednesday we made another round of Petit Fours...these ones on teeny tiny tart shells, filled with almond cream, baked, then shaped with Italian buttercream and covered in fondant. Fondant ruins everything it touches. It was REALLY hard to get it to stick to the buttercream and none of ours looked that good. What I don't understand is why they make us make such volumes of things. At first the demo chef said to make 60!!! So then when we got to class we conspired and told the practical chef that we were to make 24, 4 kinds, 6 of each...but still. I would rather make 12 and take the time to really make them nice and learn how to make them pretty and perfect than try to assembly-line them into the fondant and run around like crazy trying to get 24 of them out on time. Am I crazy?

I thought my mice turned out well. As you can see I didn't cover its perch in fondant (I was trying to preserve the mouse-y shape) and because I piped, scraped and repiped those mice about 4 times it's a little messy on the perch....but isn't he cute? He tasted disgusting (you know how I feel about buttercream, and while Italian buttercream is much tastier than French buttercream it's still not delicious) but I think he's cute. The George Michael-Wham!- circa 1985-pink one is raspberry, the oval is coffee, the little log with what looks like poop on it is ganache. The mouse was straight up white sugar flavoured.

Later that same day...

We made rack of lamb. Mine was a little dry on the sauce front. Can you tell? It's supposed to have a delicious oniony bechamel with mushrooms in it on top when you shock 'er under the salamander....but I think I didn't cook my roux enough or it was too hot when I added the hot milk because it just didn't get thick enough and it dried out under the intense heat (as did I, working directing in front of it. That thing will melt your face off at about 1000-degree Kelvin). This picture makes it look gross, but even though my sauce wasn't creamy and delicious the lamb really was.

See also the carrot vichy on the plate, the cauliflower gratin in the ramekins and the pommes boulangere (like scalloped potatoes but now cream, just chicken broth, potatos and onions, layered). It was a long week and we were all ready for it to be over.

I spent Saturday morning practicing tempering chocolate and I feel no better at it than I did a week ago. Chocolate work is not my gift. At least not yet....next week is going to be another week of insanity. I look forward to sleeping in tomorrow...

Baa

.....But before the lamb tale, the moment you've all been waiting for. A picture of me in my chef's uniform. Hilarious.

Ah the lamb. Friday morning we arrived to 8 lamb carcasses all naked and ready to be taken apart for our butchery seminar. Wicked. We heard they would have heads and eyeballs and were disappointed to discover that only the chef would have the luxury of shaving down the skull to scoop out the brains...but no biggie.

So we all stood around and watched while the chef broke down the carcass, we took notes and then split into groups. You can see our whole class (21 of us) in this picture. Three people per lamb and one to the chef.

I would say the highlight of the day (besides wearing metal aprons to keep us from slicing our sides/hips open. Chef said it is the most common butchery injury as well as being fatal because "how do you put a tourniquet on that? You'll be dead in 15 minutes" he says. Which seemed long enough for EMTs to arrive to me, but I'm no doctor and back to the highlight of the day) was when we were going to split the back legs apart and Allison and I stood each with one leg in hand, pointing straight up, when the chef walked by and burst out laughing at the sight. It was pornographic to say the least and damn hilarious, though it turned into a horror movie pretty fast when I whacked down and split those legs apart with a cleaver the size of my thigh. (See photo to the right for accurate portrayal of said cleaver.)

I switched to my smaller standard cleaver to split the rack apart in the next photo. I finally learned the trick to hitting the same spot every time you

give a whack with your cleaver. Keep your arm in one place and just whack/click with your wrist.

It keeps you on target, but it hurts your forearm a bit until you can build up your Popeye muscles.

It's much easier to embrace the animal and understand what you're eating when you have a chance to see it go from whole to pieces like this. It's fascinating to learn the step by step process of taking an animal apart into its various cuts. Using the saw on bones was a new, but we got the hang of it.

Here's one last shot of me, deboning the leg like a pro. If there's one thing I can do like a champ, it's deboning all manner of critter. Champ. (PS - they made us wear those stupid gloves on our non-knife hands in case we slipped with the cleaver...)

I would also like to say the eight lambs is a LOT of meat. The archaic old vacuum packer wasn't up for the job of sealing in the wooly goodness of all those lambs...you should have seen the stack of parts waiting to be packed and frozen. It could have fed a small nation. Instead, it will feed students and staff as practicals with lamb occur. Ah the circle of life...

Bad about pictures

I am sorry that I've been really bad about taking pictures lately. Intermediate is tough and at the end of the class I'm so scattered that I forget about photos and just try to clean and get out and move on. It's going well, but it is definitely harder than basic was. It's more fun though. You never know what to expect. Like the workshops, for example. Our workshop last week was a shit show. They put us into groups of three, one strong, one ok, and one idiot and we had to make 2 soups, omelets, soft boiled egg florentine, zucchini gratin, celeriac mousseline (like mashed potatos, but celery root) a spinach quiche and pommes dauphine (which are, by the way, the most delicious way to eat potatos, but more on that later). So the idiot in my group says to me at the beginning "I don't know how to make any of this." Great start bud.

The idea behind the workshops is that they give us the list of ingredients just like they do for our regular classes, except we don't have a demo for them. We have to be able to look at the ingredients and figure out what to do with them to make the dish. We also can research it online if it's a classical dish, or at least figure out what the base of each thing is online or by talking to chefs. So I did my research, I figured out what the hell to do with pommes dauphine (it's mashed potatos mixed with choux pastry and deep fried in balls. Mmmmm potato puffs), I used my genius to make the gratin, and tried to assign the other things to the other two. The bisque we made was legendary. My gratin and pommes were good...the rest....the other soup was ok, but the eggs were a big effing mess. This idiot just could not get it together. And every time we handed the chef a gross egg dish we had to redo it. Finally I had to hip check the idiot out of the way of the salamader and just do it myself to be able to finish.

How did this kid and the other idiot in our class make it past basic? Why were they passed? Why did I fret so much and these fools just slipped on through? They can't do the basic things required of us, and the rest of us have to carry them. It's a shitty life lesson that I have learned 1000 times over in both school and work. I'm tired of it. It's an old, stupid lesson. But fine. I get it bla bla blee, bla bla blah (as the chefs say) we'll have to carry people in the kitchen at least until they get fired...but big sigh.

So we have another workshop this Tuesday, this time there's serious protein involved (rabbit, beef steaks, chicken) so it should be even more interesting. Stay tuned. (Sorry no workshop photos...it was just too messy and chaotic to be busting out the camera).

Chocolate Box

I have a LOT to post right now, but I am WAY too tired to do it. I wanted to put up these pictures of my chocolate box and my bonbons....just to keep you all interested until I can muster the energy to write more.

I have a story about our first workshop to tell, and I have to recount the tale of the pheasant deboning....unforch the pheasant pooped me out too much. So those stories will have to wait until tomorrow.

So for now the chocolate box. I managed to temper the sides and the decorations, but the white chocolate on the lid wasn't tempered and so was blurry when it set and I spread dark chocolate on top. But the great thing is, the box held up well enough through the weekend and the wear and tear it presented (sitting in the proofer (off and used as storage) with everyone else's.....don't laugh, some of them broke!).

The bonbons were all right. Just a matter of making different ganaches and then dipping and dusting them.

My chocolate wasn't tempered (argh) so the rocher (first pic) weren't shiny, but they were DEELISH. The black truffle (cocoa on it) was meh. Not a big fan. The honey milk chocolate one was the next best after the rocher. The weird log one (muscadine, it's called) was gross. Apparently the two truffles were the right size (tiny) the others a bit too big. I think that's a matter of taste. I could eat a rocher the size of my head and it wouldn't be too big.

Will try to post more tomorrow...the stories are building up and my energy is struggling to keep my eyes open.

And here's a closeup of my beeyootifully tempered chocolate decoration. I'm going into the open lab they have on Saturday (at 8:15 a.m. ugh) to practice my tempering. It's a crap shoot for me (as you can see by the contrast of the blurry crappy lid) and I need to get it down pat.

The Chartreuse

I don't really know what to say about this dish. It's supposed to be the toughest one this session in terms of time, and there were a lot of tough elements within it - mainly the farce. Scraping raw chicken meat through a tamis (big round flat sieve) takes some serious muscle and patience. I was sweating WAY more than usual. You scrape and you scrape and you press and you scratch and then you turn it over and there's barely a thin layer on the other side. It's a little demoralizing. And when you have 25 minutes of demoralizing work with the tamis you kind of want to toss it in and go home early. But you don't. You keep scraping and keep sweating so that you make sure you have enough. Then you think long and hard about all that work you did when you throw out most of it after filling the molds. We need to get used to it. I think we do this farce fine 4 more times this session.

So inside a ramekin you chemiser with the carrots and zucchini (cooked) and then you line with the farce, put in cooked veal sweetbreads, top with the farce, cook in a bain marie, and ba-bing! done. I finished on time. Me and my friend were the only ones. At least we think we served on time....he was a little unclear. But we finished first (me) and second. I felt good today, though not exactly the cleanest I've ever worked...but it was crazy and I am proud of how I did.

Here is a picture of the inside. Look at that montage! Beeyootiful!

Horse Sammy

No, I didn't make this, but I wish I did. Some folks are asking to see the raw horse sandwich that I ate in Toronto this past weekend. It was legendary. Raw horse meat, onions, raw egg yolk and a clever hot sauce that burned bright and fast and left only flavour on the tongue. It was deelish.

And now I would like to apologize to the horse world because I've always said I thought they were overrated livestock. Untrue and unfair. It turns out I do like horses. With hot sauce.

Fraisier

Today was a long long day. We had a workshop at 8:15 am that we thought was going to be on tempering chocolate...unfortunately it was on piping chocolate. Again. We had a workshop on that in basic and I bought a 5kg. bag of chocolate chips that I've melted down over the past three months to practice at home too. So it was a long, boring two hours.

HOWEVER, I know I am not perfect so it was good to get more practice. As you can see, writing Fraisier (the name of this lovely pink number to the right) 100 times this morning paid off as my cake was BEEYOOTIFUL when we finally got to

the practical this afternoon. Only thing was that I put too much mousseline cream inside (pastry cream + butter) and so it wasn't flat...there was a slight dome. But my piping was mighty nice, if I do say so myself.

So it's another dry sponge cake (I ate a piece of the scraps and almost choked to death on the 'polly-wanna-cracker' crumbs) and it's imbibed with kirsch syrup (of course, and I way overdid it after my near death experience trying to swallow the scraps) and then strawberries and mousseline cream. On top is a big old disc of pink marzipan. Random? Perhaps, but we've all come to expect the weirdest combos from the French, haven't we?

I posted a couple of pics because it's just a nice looking cake. I even posted a closeup so you can see how exact and regular and beautiful my piping is.

Veal Escalope

This is the dish from last Thursday. Veal Escalope. It's a fun little presentation, and really fun to make. We had to cut our own meat off a giant hunk of veal leg (which my friend Allison and I had to trim down and clean) and then we breaded 'er and pan fried 'er along with some sauteed potatoes and a strange little racing stripe garnish of parsley, hard-boiled yolk and white and capers. Weird, yet colourful and beautiful. Good times.

Oh, and that nipple-like garnish on the meat? a lemon slice with an olive in an anchovie embrace.

Ambassadeur Exotique...blah

This cake was gross. Why are so many of the cakes we make so gross?? So it's that dry old genoise sponge cake imbibed (or in my case, under-imbibed) with kirsch syrup, pastry cream, orange slices, pineapple, then covered in Italian meringue. Blah.

I made my sponge cake and I guess I didn't fill the mold enough and it came out half height. It really is a mystery because my neighbor saw it and thought it looked as full as I did. Anywho, I had to remake my sponge, but I totally had time to do it and STILL I finish before 4 or 5 people. And then he thought my piping needed work and I need to learn to SOAK these dry cakes in syrup...Not my best day, but again, more good than bad. I've been off my game because of the sickness. I'm heading to Toronto this weekend to visit friends and when I return next week I'll bring my A-game and get back to kicking ass.

And the bad karma piles up...

Today I killed a lobster. This lobster was so alive that when I went to get it out of its bowl in my fridge to begin the massacre...he had crawled out and was running for his life. Poor guy. He never had a chance.

So the way it goes is, you face the lobster, eye to beady little eyes and you put your knife to the back of his head and you slice forward. Right between said eyes. Then you turn him away to writhe a bit while you cut him right down the middle to his tail. Pop that bad boy back in the fridge...not much chance he's crawling out of the bowl now.

The way I see it is, if he were at Petit Homard Cordon Bleu (homard = lobster, anglophiles) he would do the same to me if it were expected of him. That doesn't mean I don't understand that bad karma is piling up. If, someday a predator larger than me decides to carve me up I guess we'll know that the universe is at least fair, even if it isn't pretty.

So we made a bouquetiere (tourned artichoke, cauliflower, peas plus tourned carrots and turnips and green beans) and a sauce and that was it. I'm still on the mend, so my sense of taste is not great and the chef didn't love any of my seasoning on anything. Some too much, some not enough...and no chef has ever before complained about my green bean doneness...note to self: this chef needs them to be softer than I made them...but whatever. More good than bad again today, and that's what I aim for. Am I perfect? No. If I were I wouldn't be in school.

Tomorrow....Ambassadeur Exotique....ooooohhhh....exotic.

Poulet Basquaise

So today was interesting....I have been sick and over the last few days have felt like I'm on the mend. After yesterday's crazy/rusty/gross fish day (no pics...you didn't want to see it. Trust me) I was really tired so I went to bed at 10 pm. Which is EARLY for me. I woke up at 4 am in a pool of sweat and in my weird head state thought it was time to get up. Had a shower, dried my hair and then went back to sleep. My alarms went off at 6 am as usual. I ignored them. I woke up at 8 am. Class is at 8:15. It takes me 20 minutes on a good day to get there, but I thought I had to try. Made it 5 minutes late and chef let me in. So I was a bit frantic all morning during demo.

When we got to practical I was AWESOME. I was. I was worried the frantic morning would pull me under but I had it together, I did a great job with this chicken dish and the chef was happy. He did this thing where he told us one time to serve, about 3 of us were on track for that, then he said the "customer" had called and would be about 40 minutes late. So then we had 40 minutes to kill and keep everything warm. It worked out, but I guess that's the big difference between basic and intermediate besides difficulty level and it actually made it kind of fun today.

Phew. Good thing it's Friday. I need to finish getting well and pull it all together so I don't have another morning like today.

Two Tart Day!

Technically the second day back (we had a seminar about how to temper chocolate yesterday) and we had to make two tarts today in 2.5 hours.

It was rough because instead of 10 cooks in the kitchen, there are now 15 of us (though only 13 today). It was a gong show in there. I finished on time (phew!) with about 30 seconds to spare. I think considering how foggy my head is (I got wolloped with a big fat sore throat chest cold last week and am still living it out) I did a pretty good job.

The only thing wrong is that the passion fruit one (yellow) needed to be in the freezer longer before I glazed it (true) but otherwise everything was good and lovely. Sorry I didn't take a picture before the chef brushed the fruit deco aside to cut into them...but ah well, they have character now, all cut up, no?

We had to make one big and one little of each the passionfruit and raspberry tart (frozen jellied raspberry coulis sandwiched between 2 layers of passionfruit cream) and a strawberry black currant tart (almond cream with currants in it, baked...then pastry cream...strawberries on top...meh. Much less delicious than the passionfruit)...

I like how the small passion fruit one looked like a smiley face. Cute.