Week Five - Vegetables

Well, as you can guess by the title, this week was rather dull. Other than the two mid-terms and birthday of course. Thursday before lecture, we were given our written mid-term which was 75 questions, about 40 multiple choice, 20 true/false, 13 match term to definition and two essay (describe the process for making brown stock and consomme). It was open book, but I really wanted to do as much of it as possible without looking, which I managed to do. I looked up maybe four or five to be certain I was correct. And I was! I finished in about 30 minutes...turned it in, he went through and graded it with me and after some... discussion over what the correct answers were, I had a perfect score. I went to work on my knife cuts and finished the seven of them, with a perfect score, before anyone else was done with their tests. I'm that jerk. So I set to reading for this week's topic, Meat Cookery. After everyone finished their tests, slow woman in our Group ended up taking like 3 hours, we had a bit of lecture and q&a for the next two days of cooking.

Friday and Saturday we made the following: Grilled Vegetable Skewers, Braised Celery with Basil, Baked Butternut Squash, Stir Fried Asparagus with Shiitake Mushrooms, Beer Battered Onion Rings (all on Friday), Parsnip Puree, Broccoli Almondine, and White Bean Salad (on Saturday). Quick rundown: Basic and delicious, disgusting in theory and practice, tasty, delicious (even the mushrooms!), delicious and easy, a nice variation on the standard mashed potatoes, boring, and surprisingly refreshing and good.

We got read a bit of the riot act on Friday night. There was yet another meltdown by Uppity. Sigh. The woman just needs to accept that not everything she knows is correct. And that she isn't the instructor. And that if Chef tells us to do something a certain way? DO IT THAT WAY. She kills me. We also were made aware that the highest grade we could get at mid-term is a B+. GMC told Chef to start us at a C, but Chef was nicer than that. So frustrating. I got a B+ with perfect test and quiz scores. Grrr. Saturday we were assigned new groups. He chose the three strongest and then split up the rest based on skill level. I'm now the leader of a group that is made up of three people who I could have given birth to. If I started having sex when I was 14. Which I didn't mom. Start breathing again. You okay? Okay. So I've got the good, cool 18 year old guy - we'll call him Alton because he and I always talk about Good Eats; one of the young girls - the giggly baking one who is super sweet but Ditzy; and Island Boy who is going to be our group's problem. I like the kid, he's pleasant most of the time, but I won't stand for any crap he tries to pull. Expect issues.

Saturday was our Serve Safe mid-term. The one we've all been stressed about since we need to know the receiving, holding, storing, cooking, reheating, etc. temps for all foods; about 15 foodborne illnesses and their symptoms and whether an employee exhibiting such symptoms should be excluded or removed. And a whole bunch of other information that is overwhelming in scope. The mid-term was to be a practice test similar to the final, which is a 90 question certification test. It was 40 questions and took me about 5 minutes. I got 100% and an A in the class so far. Yay!

All in all, it was a good, but stressful week. Now I'm off to make cupcakes as a test run to see if I want to enter the cupcake challenge at school next week. Lemon with buttercream meringue icing. I'll let you know how they turn out.