Week Three - Chicken *is* First

As I packed up for class last night, I noticed the quiz I'd completely forgotten about...ooops. So I rushed to get that done in 15 minutes and then had a friend do a google for me to double check two answers while I was on my way to class. Yay friends!

Air Force, Cake Girl and I discussed the quiz while we got changed for class (even on lecture days we must be in chef coat, checked pants, hat, neckerchief, hat, two towels, apron, etc.) and there were two questions we agreed were written poorly. When we got to class, Uppity brought up one of the questions and was unable to understand the actual point. The question was "Why is it necessary to make a roux when thickening a soup with flour?". She could not get past asking why a roux needs to be made with flour. Long story short is you can use alternate starches, but the book explicitly states a roux is made of flour and fat. However, that was not the answer to the actual quiz question, which is you make a roux to 1) cook the flour before adding it to the liquid and 2) the fat coats the starch granules and keeps them from sticking together.

So after a half hour going over that (my fellow students are not known for their brevity), we moved on to how the two syllabi (one for lecture, one for lab) are different. We're now all straightened out and tonight will be making a white wine marinade, grilled chicken with red pepper butter, and chicken with onion, basil, and tomato. Depending on how those go, we will either finish early (please please) or move on to one of tomorrow's three recipes.

A number of the recipes call for chicken stock. We've been using a base, which is ridiculously salty, to make "stock" the last couple classes. None of us are happy about this, but if you don't have bones, you can't make stock. We went over to GMC's class to observe them deboning pheasants, ducks, and chickens. Not looking forward to that class..... I asked GMC if we could steal some of the bones they weren't using for stock so that we could make some and of course he said yes. yay good products for our cooking this week! We all headed back to class and made the stock, which has now been simmering and developing overnight. Island Boy cut his finger pretty deep chopping up the celery...we've managed one cut a week so far. Not too bad, right? I mean, everyone still has 10 fingers, so success!

During our lecture, we also discussed the difference between a duck and a goose. Which led to us discussing the plurals of animals. An entertaining conversation to say the least. At the end of class, Chef once again brought up being professional and warned us that if there were any problems, he would be breaking up the groups. Grrrrr.

Off to do errands, reading and lunch with Jim.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T