Pacific Opera

This cake is beautiful. Am I right? It's a hot cake. (Not temperature hot, hot looking.) I am awesome, or at least I was on Wednesday. We had a two cake day, the Pacific and the Opera. Let's begin with the Pacific.

This beauty is composed of Jaconde Biscuit (a not-as-dry cake) imprinted with multicolour cigarette paste (stupid) and layered inside with strawberry and lemon mousses, both of which were extremely delicious.

I do love fruity desserts! Then I did a magical job of piping some waves on it (it made sense being Pacific and all. Those colours on the side are supposed to be tropical by the way). I bought chocolate and practiced my piping on Monday night when I got back from the cottage. How's THAT for devotion to this cake? The chef has been telling me that my piping needs to improve, so I've been practicing. It's clearly paying off...or so I thought until the Opera cake later that afternoon.

Ah the Opera cake. I thought it was going to be disgusting and at one point during demo asked the chef if we would have to eat it with a spoon. It was SOAKED. And I'm not exagerating, SOAKED in coffee syrup. Chef says that when they make it in big slabs in pastry shops they just pour a bucket of coffee syrup over each layer of biscuit and let the excess run out the sides.

So the layers are (from bottom to top) soaked cake, coffee buttercream (french buttercream, which uses egg yolks, as opposed to Italian buttercream, which uses egg white and italian meringue) wet cake layer, chocolate ganache, we cake layer, coffee buttercream, chocolate glazing. I hate hate hate soggy cake. You can ask anyone who knows me well and they will tell you that my least favourite dessert is.....anyone? Yes, Tiramisu. Blech. Oddly enough, this cake is so over the top with the soaking and all the layers that once it spent a little time in the fridge and the chocolate outside got a bit hard and snappy I thought is was delicious. It was a tasty surprise. So I made sure to give both cakes away.

The piping on the Opera cake...certainly not my best work. But then the chef tells me that it's the best he's seen me do. The border, I will admit, for the first time doing that border, actually went all right because it's also really tiny piping, which is so hard to do. But I was offended because my writing on my Fraisier cake was CLEARLY the best I've done. But he wasn't there for that. So I had to send him a picture of it to show him what I can really do (I'm such a jackass). This Opera crap was just that. AND I put the accent the wrong way to boot! hahahahha. That actually made me laugh really hard when he pointed it out and then proceeded to give me a French lesson. Too funny. All that planning and work and I just casually put the wrong accent in there. Hyster. I'm not even that bad with French, I can understand some and I understand accents so it cracked me up that I was so blase with this one. (and yes, blase should have and accent on it, the same one the opera cake needed...I think).

Duck with Orange Sauce

Why does gastrique sauce have to be so damn impossible to do? Forget that (as Annabelle pointed out) gastrique sounds totally unappetizing, it's also damn near impossible to get right. Mine, apparently had the right taste, but I can't seem to get the consistency of it right. Bah. I give up on it. I made a really good gastrique last session, but asking us to deglaze with jellied Grand Marnier? That is just wrong.

Why is the Grand Marnier jelly? Because chefs are notorious for having drinking problems, so all of our hard liquor is jelly (it gloops out of the bottle) and all our wine is salted. This might just be me, but if I wanted to get drunk bad enough I would likely shoot some of that jellied booze back like I was at a Stag and Doe. It makes controlling your salt in your sauce hard because you can't separate sodium from wine flavour. So you want to add more wine to have that flavour, but then you end up oversalting the sauce. I say let them drink and let their fates befall them. And let me deglaze my caramel for my gastrique with liquid Grand Marnier.

But anyway, we just served that annoying sauce on the side of this duck breast. What the point of the exercise was I'm not sure. They also made us sear foie gras, which I found to be annoying because my pan wasn't hot enough and it didn't get enough colour. My pan was smoking, but apparently it has to be on the verge of bursting into flames before foie gras will sear and get colour and not just melt. The grape sauce we had to make for the foie gras turned out really well for me, but I was bitter about having to peel the grapes. I mean, do the French not have good strong teeth? The skin is part of the grape. Just chew it.

Another Esoteric Dish

I love my clear tupperware container to help me set up a good picture of my tiny stuffed birds. They look suspended in mid-air, just like the osso bucco did in this same container. Look at that one spread-eagling (spread-quailing?) in the top right corner, hahahaha. It looks like a cartoon. A sick, sick cartoon.

So these little quail get deboned with your fingers. Yes, too small to use any tools, you have to feel around inside their little chests to separate the muscle from the bone, slowly turning them inside out like you're balling a sock on laundry day. Getting the skin off the spine without ripping it is the hardest part. Once inside out you remove the femur (scraping the meat down and off the bone, again like you're pushing your own socks down your legs to your ankles) and then you turn them right side out and stuff them with a chicken liver farce and serve them on a little toast raft smeared with chicken liver pate.

They were actually quite delicious. I have eaten quail before, but a deboned quail experience will change your life. Seriously. I will never eat quail with bones in ever again. What is the point? There are so many tiny bones, how does one even begin to but to find meat? But deboned? They're like little sausages with leg and wings. Yum!

Stupid Dover Sole and Stupid Croutons

Yuck.



I stared at this post for 10 minutes and debated just leaving the work yuck to describe it, but then realized I had to explain the title a bit better.
So my loyal followers may remember a post way back in January about Dover Sole (but there was no pic, so don't waste your time going back to look, devotees). ANYWHO, we made a Dover Sole dish similar to this ugly piece of creamy crap way back at the beginning of basic. Dover Sole (which is only fun because it's a flat fish and you can literally just pull its skin right off with your hands in 2 big rips) is gross. This has shrimp, mussels, oysters and some veggies in it. Not to mention that big beautiful N-shaped "crouton". Stupid. This dish was mucked around a bit by the chef but it didn't look that good going in, I have to say. I kind just threw it on the plate and served it up, soup kitchen style.

5 more posts to catch up on

I still have 5 more to catch you up on, but need to catch ZZzzzzs tonight first. Will finish updating tomorrow and will be sure to add in tomorrow's Beef Wellington to round it out to 6! Yay reverse puff pastry!!!

A week of Sausages

So last week in cuisine we had two practicals that involved sausages. This first picture is the first round. Any sausage whose official name is "White Pudding" is no sausage of mine. We had to mix a lot of cream into pork and pork fat. Blech. Then we poached them (natch) and then finally sauteed them fast in butter to brown them a bit. It didn't help though. The flavour was ok, but the texture was disappointing. Pudding-like meat inside an intestine casing. Mmmmmm. We served it on apples and onion compote-ish things and had to make a port reduction of some kind to go with it. Mine was kind of a port caramel that I cooked my apples in. Good times.

But the next practical we made REAL sausages. And by real I mean garlic sausages. They were straight up meat and fat and garlic and they were delicious. We made them with a side of yummy green lentils. Very rustic. Very delicious and full of butter. Making sausages is easy enough, but cleaning out the parts for the KitchenAid SUCKS. I would recommend all you home sausage maker wannabes get a manual one that clamps to the country. Jamming meat through the KitchenAid thing is stupid and gives you a lot of air bubbles in addition to hanging your sausage way too high...

Tradish

Ah the croquenbouche, the traditional French wedding cake. For as fussy as they are, their wedding cakes aren't near as fussy as North American ones. This little tasty may look familiar, we seem to make pate a choux every 5 minutes and fill it with various creams, dip it in caramel, then assemble it in different ways. So this is another one, but bigger and fancier.

The chef said the rule was that we had to have 50 choux balls on our cake. But we could also fill the cone with choux balls if we had them and didn't want to stick them on the cake. The point is to have 3-4 balls per serving (small wedding). So I made the calculated decision to make a much smaller cone, fill it with choux, and then it would fit in my fridge and I wouldn't look like an idiot carrying it home. What does the chef say to me during my evaluation? "It's small." Yes. I know. I did that on purpose. But my choux were so small and perfect who could really complain? So these are filled with good ol standby pastry cream, then coated in caramel, then stuck together with same caramel onto a nougatine base (think sesame snaps but with almonds....definitely the most delicious part of the cake) and to each other. The sticky outy things are nougatine "dents de loup" which means wolf's teeth, a name the french apply to all things with any kind of a point.

The chef also took great joy in waiting for us to burn ourselves on the 180-degree Celsius sugar as we dipped. Did I? You bet. Did I give him the pleasure of even watching me flinch? Hells no. I can take a burn, grit my teeth and assemble choux balls like a man. I only got one tiny burn on my fingertip. I've definitely suffered worse in cuisine grabbing the handle of a pot that was in the oven.

So these closeups show my ingenius caramel decoration. I just drizzled leftover caramel on parch and let it cool. Fine. It's not my best work, but in a pinch, it worked. It wrapped around and looked cool. I had a big Dr. Seussian caramel thingamajig to stick in the top that was twice the height of the cake and it cracked us all up, but I didn't present it with that because the Chef didn't know who Dr. Seuss was, so the humour was lost on him. He kept asking me who Dr. Yes was.

Long Time No Blog

Sorry folks, I know it's been a long long time since I've posted. School has been crazy and I've been slacking in the remembering to take home my camera department. Luckily I haven't been slacking in the picture taking department (not too much at least). So let me go back to where I left off.

It's been a while, so why not start with something hardcore French, like aspic? We had a garde manger workshop, which is basically all cold preparations. Normally in a resto the person in charge of this does all the salads, cold apps, and terrines...which means jelly and lots of it. More than even that trout was jellified. I have a photo here of the whole buffet we did, but I don't really have closeups because the chef was standing over our dishes - all of which were so shiny that his reflection was peering back at me with every picture I tried to take.

We were a bit taken aback by this workshop because the way they do workshops is to give us the name of the dish, the list of ingredients, and then let us go at it for 5 hours, or in this case, 10 (spread out over two days) with absolutely no instruction or explanation. So we had all these terrines and fish mousses and salads and canapes and just had to do our best. No one ever went over the true French meaning of garde manger which means you have to gloss EVERYTHING to a high sheen with jelly. Slice your fish mousse? Brush those slices with jelly. Plating a terrine? Make a mirror of jelly on the bottom of the tray. I don't know about you but seeing the reflection of fmy ellow buffet eaters as I'm trying to serve myself a delicious slice of fish mousse is sure to help curb my appetite.

So our group was really well-prepared and we thought we were doing awesome until we realized last minute that everything had to be coated in jelly. We were then forced to quickly use gelatin leaves to finish the glossing because we ran out of meat gelatin. Gelatin helps, you see, to make sure than nothing dries out. The French think they're so logical. Is your cake dry? Soak it in boozey syrup. Will your pork pate dry out on the buffet? Preserve it in jelly. Why not just solve the problem at the source? Why not make a moist cake to start? Why preserve something in jelly after the fact? Why not just avoid putting foods with a tendency for dryness on a buffet table for hours on end? Anywho....the fish mouse, that lovely item with the spinach spiral in the middle, was truly the hit of the show. And it was done by Yours Truly. It's Tilapia (yuck) and scallop mousse on either side and salmon mousse rolled up in the spinach in the middle. Heidi's monkfish terrine (in the picture with her proudly displaying it) was a piece of art, truly. Monkfish, cherry tomats, parsley all suspended patiently in layer after layer of jelly. The chefs were super impressed. It's funny because the chef kept warning us to put plastic wrap in the molds to be sure that our masterpieces would unmold....and Heidi forgot. Then she panicked and the chef was being a pessimist. He didn't think it would come out. I reassured her - a decade's worth of jelly salads unmolded in the 1970's without any plastic wrap. Heat a towel, loosen the outer layer of jelly and SHLOOP! out it comes. Voila! Magic. Housewives 1, French Chefs 0.


We were also smart enough to buy some pansies

(edible) and put one on each plate of our buffet to tie them all together and make them beautiful. It was fantastic. Allison's gallotine (cold deboned poultry rolled in a log and stuffed) was also a work out art, though I don't have a closeup shot of that.

So due to the lack of my photos without chef-face reflected back, I only have these few to show for now, but my friend and groupmate Allison has pics of each dish individually and when she finally gets around to sending them to me, I will post them, each with a description of what they are. Yay jelly!

The Marquise

I'm going to start this post by saying that there were only 2 cakes that were presentable and sellable for this class, and mine was one of them. He thought the piping was a bit messy (it looked just like his) and my glazing was a bit off temperature, but my design was tempered and lovely, even if the sides were a bit blah because of the glazing. I have mastered tempering chocolate. Do I still need to use a thermometer? Yes I do. Do I care? No. I don't have the time in class for trial and error of tempered chocolate. I have time to get it done right first time, make a decoration and dress that damn cake.

So this one is thin chocolate cake (biscuit) on the bottom, them chocolate mousse, a thin layer of hazelnut and milk chocolate praline with feuillantine (think cornflakes), then more mousse, glazing, decoration. Not too shabby. I was just so excited that my decoration turned out. Yay!

Today in cuisine we did a garde manger workshop where they gave us 12 recipes and we had to prep and make a bunch of stuff (terrines, fish mousses, various other gross things) and then tomorrow we plate it all now that it's good and g and assemble our canapes, etc. I will take lots of pictures tomorrow to show you our wonderful work. Spoiler alert!: all I'm going to say is I made a salmon mousse spiral with spinach INSIDE of another fish mousse that I hope is going to knock their socks off...but that's all I'm going to say. Patience (as the pastry chef always tells me).

Also, we had our cuisine evaluations today. Rocked it. He had nothing bad to say really. Everything can always be better, but that I'm doing very fine. He went through our marks and told us which classes were our worst ones (but didn't tell us the marks) and one of mine was this most recent trout with the noodles. I was SHOCKED. Though now that I think of it, it was one of my lowest marks....maybe I'm doing THAT well in everything else. I thought I rocked that one and chef had nothing bad to say about it. But it was a different chef that we had for practical that day, so this chef couldn't tell me why it was lower than some of the others. Meh. I'm still awesome.

Edible Trout

Today we had two practicals. We did a turkey rollup this morning where we opened up a turkey breast into a flat sheet, stuffed it with more ground up turkey breast mixed with saffron and almonds, rolled it up, tied it, browned it, braised it and served with a really delicious couscous that had dried fruit and cilantro in it. I didn't take a photo of that. Sorry. But I did eat it for dinner tonight.

Then we made another trout this afternoon, but this one we could actually eat, meaning it wasn't jellified. This was deboned but left whole (not easy and involves much crouching and squinting) and stuffed with wild mushrooms and shallots and baked. We also made noodles to go with it. And it was with the noodles that my life changed...

...We had Chef Daniel, who usually teaches the superior level, but seeing as a bunch of chefs are visiting and travelling around to other schools, we had him for demo today. He was AMAZING. Watching him make pasta honestly changed my life. We've made pasta about 3 times so far and every single time it's rubbery and impossible to roll out. It's always super thick and chewy and almost oily and dry at the same time. Well today we watch him make it and he just like, how to describe it....fluffed the ingredients together and it was supple and soft and rolled out like a dream. So I did it just like him in practical and it was magical. The clouds parted and the culinary light shone down on me. Magical. I can actually see making ravioli or tortellini with it. Past pastas we've made? No way. But this, this was a life-altering. Aren't they a beaut? (Beuts?)

Here's a picture of the inside stuffing. Doesn't look so appetizing, but it was mushroomy and deelish.

Delice Caramel

This is the delice (French label for a fancy cake of no particular origin or type, just fancy). It consists of yet another weirdo combination of coffee-flavoured lady fingers (bottom, sides and layer in the middle) caramel mousse (burnt caramel if you ask me, but the chef says "no, is caramel", and pear mousse (which the chef says like "peer" or "pier"). Not awful. I just scraped the pear mousse off the top and ate it. It was the delice part if you ask me. Not too shabby. They made us glaze it (yuck) and smear it with caramel just like the blood clot cake. And we had to make chocolate cigarettes and chocolate fans to decorate.

I've asked the chef if we can do a whole seminar on chocolate decorations and tempering so that we can practice more because it's definitely the hardest part or all of this. I did manage to do the bi-colour cigarette, but barely. The single dark chocolate one is no problem, but the double...needs practice. As do the fans...

Check Out My Rack

So this is from last Friday I think...the pork rack...nothing too special. We just frenched the rack, made that little hat for the bones...made some ratatouille (not a big fan of eggplant, but it wasn't awful). That's about it. Sliced open a different finger, it seems to be one every day. One finger cot begats another. They make your hands so slippery that you make more mistakes. My hands were so hot that morning and I didn't have coffee (don't ask). I was foggy and I was melting the pork with my meaty hands.

Quick Note

B wanted me to tell you all that if you click on the photos here on the blog you can see them blown up big. He thinks it's a much better way to see the precise details you might miss with the regular shots. Thought I'd let you all know.

We made pork rack today and I left my camera in my locker, will try to get it tomorrow and post the pic. My rack came off the pig ugly, so there wasn't much hope for it. But it WAS delicious. The pretty ones were dry. The ugly fatty marbly ones? Deelish.

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...