One year down, one to go.

My twenty days of summer are nearly complete. It seems like just yesterday I was baking off the perfect baguette for my bakery final, getting docked 5% on my Food Prep II Final for talking, and completing my first year of culinary school. I hope to go back and write more on my last days of first year but right now my life is consumed with work. Lots of changes going on so I have a lot of my mind as well, which has been nice having the time off from school. But on Wednesday, August 26th that will all change. Soon I will be yet again juggling a practically full-time job with full-time culinary status. Not to mention trying to maintain a semi-normal social life and enough time to sleep :-)

Project(ed)

No matter how proud or good of a student you are, always listen to your teacher (or in my case, chef). I remember the beginning of summer classes and debating whether or not to stay in my menu planning class because of all the outside work. I ended up staying in it because I figured there was no way it would really require THAT much time. hahaha, oh boy was I wrong! I've been working off and on this project ever since he gave it to us, but only really dived in about 2 weeks ago finalizing my menu and figuring out the costs of each ingredient used. Then over the last three days I have been nonstop working on detailing the menu according to our book, marking up the costs to get my selling cost, and finishing my twelve page business plan.
Having just completed the last step of this project (a short speech in which we "sell" our restaurant)--I feel complete relief. Yes, my pricing is probably off, but considering the limited time- I'm quite happy with my menu and concept. For my financial stability paragraph I put that my family used to live in Italy and we sold our land and moved to America to open a restaurant based on my grandmother's dying wishes (haha). I thought about going up for my speech and being like "yeeeeeeeah, I'm secretly rich. I'm funding myself." I figured that wouldn't go over too well....

Anyways, the top pictures are of items I've made lately in my baking class. This coming Wednesday is the last day for that class :-(. Anyways- Chef Easter has been out because he had a stroke, but a former student (Julie) and Chef O'Brien aretaking over for him. We've had a lot of fun making the above items as well as some not pictured. The left picture is of whole wheat loaf bread, white loaf bread, and my BABY (aka sourdough that I developed for seven days). The right picture is almond poppseed muffins & golden raisin currant scones.

In Garde Manger we attempted to make sausages (which I will never eat again). We did everything up to the grinding for the sausage before one of the teams managed to break both of our working grinders. Oh, and this was only after every other group had gone. So therefore, not knowing exactly when the blade edges wore off- we had to throw away all the sausage.....except ours! haha, that's what we get for being patient I suppose. So then we were using the big buffalo grinder and that worked but Chef Boetel managed to short that out right before we could case the meat. Needless to say, we went home early this day :-)

Food Prep 2 has changed since I last blogged. Chef Carey no longer instructs us (which is something I never thought I'd be sad to say). Instead, Chef Miller took over and we are doing demonstrations. This means that he'll give us a recipe the week before, he'll demo it the day of, and then we copy what he did and produce the same thing. Last week we had a delicious Sauteed Chicken with Supreme Sauce and Glazed Carrots. I received at 85/100 because he said it wasn't seasoned quite enough and that my chicken was a tad overcooked (my thermometer stopped working). Then this week we made Beef Stew rimmed with Whipped Potatoes. I received a 90/100 this time only both items needed more seasoning. I've decided I'm going to start arguing with him (advice from a book I'm reading) about his "complaints" on my food. I seasoned the heck out of that stew. It says a pinch and I "pinched" about ten times (no joke). So now, anytime we make something I'm going to season it to my liking and then add double. I wonder if there's something wrong with his taste buds....eating 85 different student's stews can do that to ya, right?

Pacific Northwest

I don't even know where to begin on updating you on my life's happenings.
Honestly, I did not expect summer school to go this quickly. Sure eight weeks is a short amount of time to learn a semester's worth of information- but I have learned a TON and the semester is not even over yet. In Food Prep II we just completed making all five mother sauces. Each one proved to have its own difficulties.
Hollandaise- sure enough my very first time making it, it curdled. I tried my best to save it (as did Jimmy) but in the end I had to toss it an start over. Luckily it was a quick recovery and my next attempt proved to be successful. This sauce tasted good, but only in moderation. It's very very rich in butter.
Bechamel- my personal favorite. It took forever to stir, about 45 minutes, but in the end this was hands down the best tasting of all the sauces.
Veloute- my mortal enemy. Seriously, I was working on this sauce the whole time while my classmates breezed on to their third sauce of the day (this was my first). Finally, two slurries later and about an hour and a half later- Chef said it was complete.
Espagnole- Not what I imagined when I thought of brown sauce. Very red in complexion up until we sent it through the sieve in which it then looked brown (true to its name afterall!). At the beginning stages when you're browning the roux it look like stuffing at Thanksgiving time...haha, though I doubt it would taste remotely good.
Tomato- 2nd favorite of mine, it tasted delicious despite being a combination of about 12 students' sauces. It required a lot of time (2 hours in the oven) and constant stirri.ng to prevent ending up with a black tomato sauce, but it was good
In baking we had a "feed the baby" project in which over a period of seven days we take away and add to a levain (or sourdough starter). Today is actually day 7 for me so I'm taking mine a week late and cooking my baby off :-) since I was out of state. We also got to make croissants and danishes which have very rich doughs and lottsa butta!
Garde Manger we have made sandwiches, condiments, crackers, and pickles. Today I personally made a dried apricot relish and sweet coin pickles. Both of which are really good (I can tell already). The pickles take three days to...well, pickle and the relish takes a day. Throughout the week we get to check up on our product (aka sample). We also got in two fresh Ivory Salmon from Seattle that weighed 32Lbs together. They were ginormous! We all got to help scale the fish, fillet it, de-bone it, and scoop out the insides for salmon tar-tar. We grilled one after a short cold brine and it was freakin' awesome. Like 5x better than your normal salmon. The other three fillets we are going to smoke later on in the week.
Menu Planning is getting close to the due date. I finally have a feasible menu (kinda) with all items except five. It is indeed a lot of work and I have two short weeks to complete it all so here's to hoping I can complete it and complete it well.
My recent trip to Seattle gave me some very good insight as that is actually the location for the restaurant that I had in mind. In going there I realized Seattle is a very populated area and has a tooooooon of food options available to the many tourists and locals. Therefore, I decided to instead focus on surrounding cities that are on the rise. I also was able to visit a few restaurants and get ideas. Tutta Bella was probably the largest contributor. I realized that despite their good food and hyped up restaurant, I do not want to be like that. Much too small and not at all the atmosphere I envisioned for my place. Instead, I'm beginning to toy with incorpating something similar to another restaurant, Melting Pot into my Italian restaurant theme. It'll be interesting to see how it all fuses together.
Seattle was indeed awesome and I looved my time there hanging out with my APU friend Alison, hanging with my sister on three different days, and even meeting up with another APU friend, Kevin. I saw a bunch of what Seattle has to offer and I would love to live there someday! Definitely recommend going there any chance you get. Oh and it did not rain one single day I was there (and I was there for 10 days)!

Artsy Fartsy

You're looking at my latest Garde Manger creations! I have to admit...when I heard we were carving fruits and veggies for this class- I was super nervous especially as she stated that the artistically gifted would appreciate this most. I have never taken an art class and am an AWFUL artist... we're talking stick people here. So she shows this super intimidating movie where the chef is carving masterpieces within seconds and then she send us to work. Luckily she was super chill about it and just wanted us to be practicing and be as creative as possible. My products actually turned out really well and I was happy with my results. Looks like I'm more artistic with a knife and food than I am with a pen and paper.
So school has been getting better. I think the decreased "lecture" times and more "labs" helps a lot. It's hard sitting in a classroom all day trying to stay awake- actually using our hand and creating stuff in the kitchen can keep anyone awake. This week we have Boys State over in Camp Dodge at the military base. There are three seperate kitchens and we are assigned two days in which we prepare 3 meals a day for hundreds of teenage boys. Each individual kitchen only serves about 100-200 so really it's not as bad as I originally thought. Today we had to go on site and finish cleaning the kitchens and then actually got to feed some of the counselors that are there already. It was short and quite fun actually. During one of our breaks we threw together a game of kickball. I'm hoping that my group and I later in the week can manage to get along and function at five in the morning and survive til eight at night.
Other interesting happenings at culinary school:
I sauteed and ate my very first foie gras. It was crazy because our professor showed us this graphic video of how the duck liver is acquired (let's just say forcefed and electricity) and then she wants us to go into the kitchen and eat it!? Everyone but me liked it. The taste I could handle, the texture was a whole other story.
We also made homemade mozzarella in this class and it was super good!
Unfortunately I haven't had baking since my last post. Of all the classes- why must the one I love most be delayed?
In Food Prep 2 we've been preparing for boys state. Made brownies last week and managed to get my chef's jacket covered in batter thanks to Cody. Needless to say- the stains still have not come out (yeah...not a happy camper). Made chicken stock in this last class and it was really fun though time consuming. Smoked up some pork to take to boys state for bbq sandwiches.
I decided to stay in my Menu Planning class. I am slightly behind the rest of the group at the moment though. I have a restaurant name, location, concept and all that good stuff. I even have a few recipes picked out. I have yet to decide which recipes I will really use, how to cost it all, and properly researching some of my basic concepts (i.e. trademarking my name, researching demographics of prospective location, etc). It is indeed a lot of work but I'm finding it very beneficial.
It may be another week before I blog again. With boys state going on, classes are cancelled. Woot woot.

2nd Semester

Only three days of summer school have gone by and I'm already counting down the classes and waiting for them to be over with. Sure, I'm finally finally FINALLY in baking which I have been looking forward to since the day I decided to attend culinary school, buuuuut waking up at 7 AM four days a week and sitting through hours of lecture, trying my best not to fall asleep, is really hard!
On Wednesday I had baking. We started out going over the syllabus and then proceeded onto some of the basic principles and laws of the bakeshop (i.e. we call them formulas and not recipes) and then came the fun part...going over the history of bread starting from 10,500 years ago and working our way to present day. Yeah, let's just say that on page four my page has a mark from where I drooled on it. Haha yes, I fell asleep in my very first summer class right as we were talking about Baron Zang introducing the poolish pre-ferments into French bread production. Although I did fall asleep or fight sleep most of this part of class, I still learned quite a lot. As Chef Easter says, "bread is life, bread is power," and the history of bread is very evident of this. Next after a short break to allow us to properly wake up from our naps, Chef took us into the kitchen and started going over the basic tools we would be using for the day in our production of baguettes. After having a slight problem with remembering how to use a baker's scale, my partner Katie and I completed making our dough by hand and placed it into the proofer before going off to lunch. Upon returning we were instructed to do certain folds at certain times and to allow rest in the proofer for various lengths of time. While we waited, Chef Easter demonstrated the various parts of a grain (endosperm, germ, bran) using his finger and a table covered in flour as his white board. We learned about patent and clear flours and the various other types of flours extracted all from the same grain. Our dough completed its necessary proofing time and then we scaled it into 18oz pieces, rounded it into three rounds, allowed it to rest, then formed into the actual baguette shape, panned, slit the tops, and finally handed it over to Chef as he put it into this fancy stone hearth oven. The result? Amazing baguette bread that my family all devoured within the same day. Only had time to drop off my baguette, change, eat lunch, and then drive to work.
Thursday I had Food Prep 2 class in which Chef Carey simply went over the syllabus and then Chef Anderson came in and we talked about Boys State for a long time. After he left we had to read a whole chapter to ourselves and it took forever, everyone was falling asleep. Afterward we went over what we read and discussed the conversion formula used to shrink or expand recipes. Luckily we got out of class around 11:30 so I was able to come home, eat lunch, take a nap, and then go to work (after a slight delay due to no oil in my car).
Today (Friday) I had Menu Planning from 8-11:15. It is going to be a VERY intense class as we have to construct our own business plan which is about 12 pages minimum and then we also have to create a menu with a minimum of 29 items in which we have recipes for and have evaluated the cost of not only the total end product but also supplies. Chef Carey said it's going to take about 40 hours a week outside of class to work on.
So 28 hours a week for classes. 40 hours a week for "real" work. and then another 40 hours a week for this project alone. Are there even that many hours in the week!? Sheesh- I really hope I survive this all.

With power comes responsibility

Ever since turning 21, I’ve been given a lot of responsibilities. Way more than I ever could have imagined in fact. I had no intention of ever becoming a manager, and it never crossed my mind even when I constantly joked with Matt that I could take over the whole store. So it’s been over a month since I’ve been one of the managers at our store. I feel like I’m just scratching the surface in everything I need to know. I want to know how to do every single aspect of the store and I wish I knew it all already! I grow impatient with myself just as much (if not more) than Ryan already does. So I guess I was doing a pretty good job working over in the café and, when Laura quit, Josh asked me to take over her position as well. So goodbye market side of the store- hello café! I live there six days a week now. It is a completely different atmosphere and I like it at times (when Ryan or one of the chefs isn’t yelling at me or I’m not screwing up orders). On Thursday I ran registers in the café for the first time and boy was it stressful! I had constant lines of like 10 people and I’d take their order (pretty efficiently) but then wouldn’t have time to pour their glasses of wine so they’d get that really late or a smoothie for example. Ryan was managing that night and he had to come over to help us for awhile and he kept getting mad at me saying “strike one” or “strike two.” I gave up trying to be perfect a long time ago so I was just like “is it possible to strike out in one night?” Oh this was also the night I got in trouble for Tuesday night when I locked the doors five minutes early and Debra ratted on me. Ryan said that if it happens again I’ll no longer be a manager. I tried to explain the situation but as Matt told me later on, not the best idea. I guess Ryan doesn’t like to hear explanations; he just wants to hear “okay it won’t happen again.” And Matt was also telling me that when he came back from Campbell’s that people were out to get him and he related that to how Debra is trying to sabotage my manager job. I feel like I’m bending over backwards for this place and it is never good enough for them. There are moments when I feel accomplished and proud and there are other moments that often outweigh the good ones, when I just want to bawl and walk out. And in a few short days I will not only have all this loveliness but also summer school to deal with. Let’s pray for survival, shall we.

Moving up up UP

<--- the fam at Easter

Ah. To blog with no motives. Such a great and new thing for me.
I have officially been out of school for a week now and I'm starting to go crazy. Sure, I work 6 days this week, but what about all the other time I'm not at work. I need a purpose to my life and sleeping in until 11 is great, but I feel useless (as I have been recently told I am).
*Note to self: never ever EVER call someone useless.
Anyways, so since mid-April I have been acting as a manager-in-training at my store Gateway Market in West Des Moines. This just means that on one or two nights a week I close the whole store. So I check employees out before they leave, I stock and face everything, maintain the appearance of an exceptional store, answer questions (or redirect them to another manager at a later date), and take care of all the cash and sales of the day. At first it was overwhelming but it's beginning to become easier. It can be tough at times, when fellow employees turn on you, but for the most part I'm very blessed to be in this position at such a young age. Today I also found out that I will become a cafe supervisor. So this means that my jobs include the following:
-MOD (manager on duty)
-cafe clerk
-cafe supervisor
-market cashier
-catering server
and I still have a lot to learn. It's a very stretching experience but will be very beneficial in the long run.
School starts May 27th- let's just hope I can maintain 10 units and a full-time job during the summer :-)