Rattle Those Pots

Prenez garde! Les Américains font cuire.
(Beware! Americans are cooking.)

Tomorrow we wrap up our first week at Cordon Bleu, and I’m happy to report we’re impressed by how the school is run. We’re laughing at each other because we’re already looking pretty tired, and in five short days the apartment already has become a shambles, but we’re having a ball.

Our section has 17 students, and our class only has eight (three women), which is great news (more individual time with chef instructor, a lot of space to work, etc.). Age-wise, students vary (from 20s up to 50s). One of the fellows in our section, John, is in his 50s, and drove here from Alabama – very nice fellow. People come from radically different backgrounds and careers.

Here’s how things work: we have a three-hour demonstration class first, during which the chef lectures on terms/concepts, shows us how to make particular dishes, and demonstrates related skills, followed by a three-hour practical class where we go to one of the kitchens up one floor and replicate the dishes. (We’re then evaluated on our individual dishes and graded each day.) We each have our own workstations with oven, stove, fridge, stainless counters, supplies, and the school provides dishwashers for us (who are extremely nice, but keep speaking to me in French, even though I only understand every 30th word and have tried to tell them so). I was nervous using the enormous gas stove/flattop at first (these things are huge, and have all sorts of features and platforms I’m not familiar with; not at all like a standard stove), but I’m gradually getting more comfortable with it.

Our chef for these first three months is Chef Philippe, the school’s technical director, who teaches in both the cuisine and pastry programs. He’s got a really impressive pedigree from European restaurants and resorts, and a biting sense of humor. We quickly discovered that he’s definitely a drill sergeant, but is also very funny, and patient with the many questions that come his way during each class. It’s absolutely amazing to watch him at work, and he seems to thoroughly enjoy teaching. His enthusiasm for cooking really shows, and we both think it acts as a great motivator.

A few funny stories: On our first morning in class, he reminded us that our kitchen shoes need to be steel-reinforced (we could drop something heavy or a drop a sharp knife on our feet; they’re for safety, and are actually pretty comfy). He proceeded to inform us in his thick French accent that he’d soon be testing whether we’d bought the correct shoes by jumping on our toes.

Today in our practical I cut my thumb while “turning” an artichoke for a vegetable dish we each had to do, so I meekly followed Chef Philippe over to the industrial-sized first aid kit, where he checked the cut (a small one) and “Band-Aided” my thumb. (The cut’s not bad at all; we knew that keeping our knives sharp meant fewer cuts, but we learned the other day that it also means cuts will always be clean, not jagged, and will heal neatly and quickly.) Anyway, I was turning to go back to my station and have another go at the Instigator Artichoke, when he said, “Here, could you also wear this,” and proceeded to hand over to me what looked remarkably like a miniature prophylactic. I must have looked dumbfounded for a second, but when I realized it wasn’t a really bizarre joke, it still took me a few seconds to try to figure out how to actually get it on my thumb (which direction). This, of course, finally made me bust out laughing right in front of him. (I honestly couldn’t help it. He seemed to be trying not to smile, though, so it made me think this must happen often to the rookies. I learned later that kitchen slang for the item really is “finger condom,” so I wasn’t imagining things; it’s used in kitchens to seal the Band-Aid so you don’t get any blood on the food.) Lesson learned. Très intéressant.

Today during grading on our dishes, Philippe pointed out that he could see that several of our plates hadn’t been wiped clean around the edges after plating. I thought, “Oh, I wiped my edges clean; I’ll be fine,” only to be told when he got to mine that if he “turned my dish to a certain angle and the light hit it,” he could “see the smudge” where I’d wiped bouillon from the plate’s edges. This is funny because, even though we got a free pass today, he informed us that in the future, if anything at all is on our plate that shouldn’t be, our grade is automatically lowered for that dish by 50%. This includes even “misplating” an item – for example, serving a cut of meat with the bone on the right side of the plate instead of the left (since most diners are right-handed, and the bone would be more in their way while cutting if on the right side of the plate).

The cuisine chefs and pastry chefs have a good-natured but definitely noticable rivalry, so it’s funny to hear the slams they make about the competing program. Example: “You could do this the easy way like the pastry chefs, where everything has to be spelled out, or you could actually learn to cook.” It’s pretty funny, and happens quite a bit.

In addition to classes, we also rotate shifts working as production assistants (basically working a shift where you help the chefs of Signatures – the Cordon Bleu restaurant located at the same location as the school – prep food for dinner service and other classes, and learn about ordering, storage and substitutions), and we all also rotate as chef’s assistant for the classes other than ours. We learned during orientation last week that Signatures just earned its fourth star (Canada). The restaurant is open now for lunch twice a month, and for these lunches, students in the advanced classes will “take over the kitchen,” plan the menu, and make each item on it. They just started this lunch service, and Cordon Bleu invites exec chefs from around town and press to dine; so far, the reviews have been really positive.

The school also has a bunch of additional lectures and events where we can assist chefs. Next Thursday we’re helping out with food prep for an annual charity event that serves 400, so it will be pretty interesting to see such high volume. (I’ll bring my Band-Aids.) We also have a lot of seminars and five-hour workshops outside of class during the term (on things like safety and hygiene, supply ordering, chocolates, wine pairing, etc.) We also have the option of “staging” in area restaurants and hotels (similar to what we’re doing now at Beckta). It’s a pretty full schedule, but it’s great to have so many opportunities to learn in so many varied settings.

Re courses, it looks like we may be keeping No-Doz investors happy for the next few months (we just learned we have to memorize all recipes and French cuisine terms for exams). Our syllabus for the first term:

Kitchen intro and vegetable cuts, vegetable intro and turning, garnishes, pie dough, yeast dough, other dough, entremets, frozen entremets, salads, white stocks and brown stocks, mother sauces and liaisons, emulsified sauces, soup I, soup II, compound butters, emulsified butters and marinades, braising, sautéing and deep-frying, grilling and gratin, poaching, roasting and poeler, fish, poultry, shellfish, snails and frog legs, braised slices of veal knuckles, pork chops with pickle sauce and mashed potatoes, rabbit stew with fresh pasta, pork tenderloin with sweet and sour beer sauce and vegetable julienne, roasted guinea fowl on bread with straw potatoes, veal chops with creamy sauce and french peas, lamp saddle in a salt crust.

We bought fun bikes to get around town, but are still adjusting to having to get up at 6 am and pedal over to class. All of the Ottawa snow has melted, and today was up in the 40s (people were actually wearing shorts when it hit high 30s; we couldn’t believe what we were seeing). All of the outdoor patios have become flooded with Ottawans since the weather warmed up a week ago and all of the snow and slush disappeared. And this has been in the middle of workdays, so we’re curious to see what things are like this weekend.

Quotables

“The only time to eat diet food is while you’re waiting for the steak to cook.” – Julia Child

“All you see, I owe to spaghetti.” – Sophia Loren

“I like a cook who smiles out loud when he tastes his own work. Let God worry about your modesty; I want to see your enthusiasm.” – Robert Farrar Capon, Episcopal priest; seminary dean; professor of theology, Greek, and cooking; food writer for the New York Times

“My mother’s menu consisted of two choices: Take it or leave it.” – Buddy Hackett

“Americans can eat garbage, provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup, mustard, chili sauce, Tabasco sauce, cayenne pepper, or any other condiment which destroys the original flavor of the dish.” – Henry Miller, American writer (1891-1980)

“You first parents of the human race, who ruined yourselves for an apple…what might you have done for a truffled turkey?” – Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1775-1826), French lawyer, magistrate, politician, and author of Physiologie du Gout (The Physiology of Taste)

“Another peculiarity of this country is the absence of napkins, even in the homes of the wealthy. Napkins, as a rule, are never used and one has to wipe one’s mouth on the tablecloth, which in consequence suffers in appearance.” – Baron Louis de Closen (on American eating habits) (1780)

“Only a fool argues with a skunk, a mule or a cook.” – cowboy saying

Quote of the Week: “Your eyes are like limpid pools of chicken stock.”

Chocolate Guidelines

Helpful advice I stumbled on recently:

Put “eat chocolate” at the top of your list of things to do today. That way, at least you’ll get one thing done.

The problem: how to get two pounds of chocolate home from the store in a hot car. The solution: eat it in the parking lot.

Diet tip: eat a chocolate bar before each meal. It’ll take the edge off your appetite and you’ll eat less.

A nice box of chocolates can provide your total daily intake of calories in one place. Isn’t that handy?

If you can’t eat all your chocolate, it will keep in your freezer. But if you can’t eat all your chocolate, what’s wrong with you?

Chocolate has many preservatives. Preservatives make you look younger.

Take care, everybody! (If you feel like sending any updates about happenings “down South” – that, we learned, is what Canadians call the U.S. – feel free. Hint, hint.)

Jen

P.S. Vicki, our paperwhites are up to 8”.