Knives Out

Well it's been over a week since my first post. I apologize for the lateness, but as you can imagine, these past couple of days have been quite busy - stressful, scary, and yet exciting at the same time! I'm still kind of getting used to the pace of culinary school - VERY long classes and lots of homework as well. But I'd like to catch you all up on my first week!

(I apologize for no pics just yet, I still haven't had time to figure out my mom's digital camera.)

My Monday and Wednesday classes were just classroom lecture classes. Monday is Foundations of Culinary Techniques, which is the lecture portion of my Thursday and Friday Cooking Skills class. My teacher, Chef Morris, is quite an interesting character. He likes to interrupt lulls in his lectures with cheesy jokes like "If quizzes are quizzical, then what are tests?" Har har. This guy would get along great with my mom's boyfriend, let me tell you. This class just basically teaches us a good culinary vocabulary and educates us on basic culinary principles outside of the kitchen. We spent four hours debating the difference between a bechamel sauce and a veloute sauce - FOUR HOURS. I can tell you the difference in four seconds - one is made with milk, and the other one isn't, but don't ask me which is which because after four hours of it being drilled into my brain I completely forgot. Result! (OK I googled it because I'm probably going to need to know the difference - bechamel is made with milk and veloute is made with stock. Got it?)

Wednesday is Food Safety and Sanitation. I know, that sounds like a rollicking good time, huh? Luckily, my teacher, Chef Whitcomb, is quite a looker! Imagine a young Tom Waits with a southern drawl and a chef's coat. I know, HELLO, right? Plus I found out he went to Berklee just like I did! Pretty sweet. And I get to do a 5-page research paper on mad cow disease. You know you're jealous.

But I know, Thursday and Friday is what you guys really want to hear about. This is my 5-hour-long cooking skills class with Chef Costa. He seems very young, and he manages to be approachable and intimidating at the same time. Thursday we didn't do any actual cooking, just touring the kitchen and learning how everything works. But Friday we got down to business - learning knife skills! Knife skills are the basis of every chef's technique, and without learning these, you'll probably get nowhere in culinary school. Here are the knife cuts we have to learn to begin with -

STICK CUTS
Julienne
Batonnet
Frit

SHAPES
Brunoise
Jardiniere (small dice)
Macedoine (medium dice)
Parmentier (large dice)
Fondant tourne - 7-sided, football-shaped

We also learned how to chiffonade parsley, which I thought was kind of fun. I figured out the julienne, batonnet, and dice cuts pretty quickly. The scariest one here is definitely the fondant tourne. Let me give you an image to work with here -


Yep, that's a tourne potato. I still haven't quite figured out how he did it. You have to get seven equal sides, two flat ends, and that nice football shape. You look at it and might think, "This won't be too hard." But, for me at least, it IS. I guess practice is all I need. I hope.

Then, each of us were given a whole chicken and taught to cut it into pieces. My whole life, I've always been nervous about touching raw chicken (it is kind of gross, come on) but I've gotten over it in the past year. But I've never actually cut or cooked a whole chicken! It was so much fun to learn, though, and Sunday night my mom brought home two whole chickens for me to practice on. I cut them perfectly and we roasted them with a little olive oil and thyme. It was so simple yet so delicious! I'm quite proud of myself for cutting the chicken. A week ago, I wouldn't have even attempted something like that.

Chef Costa also gave us a lesson on preparing stock. Most restaurants rely on stock as the basic foundation of all of their dishes. Stock is the main difference between restaurant cooking and home cooking. Chef Costa was preparing a stock with turkey bones, water, mirepoix (essential to every stock, it's a combination of 2 parts onion, 1 part carrot, and 1 part celery) and various spices. He earned my eternal respect, when, after the stock was finished, he picked out the turkey bones, scooped the marrow out onto a plate, and ATE IT. Sounds disgusting, but bone marrow is actually a delicious delicacy and a favorite snack for discerning chefs.

The thing that excites me most about skills class is that we'll be learning recipes in class, preparing them, and then eating them! Any class that involves eating is alright with me, especially a 5-hour-long class with no lunch break. Chef Costa actually gave us a syllabus of all the recipes we'll learn to prepare this quarter - check this out and tell me you're not as excited (and hungry) as I am!

(Notice how it starts with simple dishes and gets increasingly more difficult) -

Potato salad
Cole slaw
Duchesse potatoes
Eggs Benedict
Macaroni and cheese
Cream of mushroom soup
Tomato sauce
Gnocchi
Braised Vegetables
Consomme/chicken broth
Egg noodles
Chicken fricasse
French fries
Poached chicken breast w/basil sauce
Poached fish w/tarragon sauce
Osso Bucco
Roasted tourne carrots and rutabaga
Stuffed tomatoes
Risotto Milanese (OK I've totally made that on my own already and it was delicious!)
Potato pancakes
Risotto con funghi (that's risotto with mushrooms)
Fish ravioli with sauce Bercy
Grilled squash and zucchini
Sauteed beef tenderloin au poivre
Glazed carrots
Whipped potatoes
Grilled marinated chicken breast
Roast whole chicken with pan gravy
Herb roasted red potatoes
Fresh fettucine with herb cream sauce
Roast pork tenderloin with a Port wine demi-glace
Braised chard
Stuffed flank steak

Yep, I'm going to learn how to cook ALL of that. This should get interesting. Stay tuned!

The Girl With The Most Cake

So. Tomorrow's the big day. My first day of culinary school. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Ayala, and I'm 28 years old. Starting tomorrow, I will be an aspiring pastry chef studying at the Art Institute of Atlanta. This is a huge change for me, in more ways than one. Actually, let's go back even further...

My first love isn't even baking. It's music, now and forever. I graduated high school in Columbus, Georgia, in 2000 and went straight to Berklee College of Music in Boston. I studied voice performance there for two years, and while I loved the city, I hated the school. It's impossible to make friends in a place that's virtually nothing more than a tiny petri dish of the burgeoning music industry - people only want to be your friend if you can help them in their career, i.e. "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours." I had talent, but no patience for ass-kissing, and therefore no friends. So I left.

Then I thought, well, if I can't make music, I can at least write about it. So I moved back to Atlanta to attend a "normal" university and study English. I ended up getting an internship at Paste magazine and even got to interview a few bands and actually get published. But once again, just as it had been at Berklee, I hated the job and I thought the people I worked with hated me. It put me off that career forever. I figured I had to get out of the music industry before it killed my love of music completely.

That was in 2006. So what did I do for the next 4 years? Well, honestly, pretty much nothing. I attended school sporadically, but didn't care for it. Everything they taught me I either already knew or didn't care to know, and I wasn't making any friends except for my coworkers at the bookstore I've worked at since 2004 (those are still my closest friends, by the way). I slept, read, daydreamed, attended concerts, worked, but pretty much, I just did nothing. Somewhere in between doing nothing, though, I found myself baking.

This isn't something that just came out of the blue, though. I grew up in a family full of amazing cooks. My grandmother, Irene Rainbow, started her own baking business that she ran out of our home. Her specialty was pound cakes and cheese straws, as well as chocolate cakes, coconut cakes, and a caramel cake that my cousin Lauri and I would always get in trouble for picking the delicious, candy-like icing off of when no one was looking. She sold her treats to women she would meet at the salon, at our synagogue, at her mahjongg games. She built up quite a name for herself and would bring home a nice chunk of change from it as well. My grandmother passed down all of her recipes to my mother, Judy, who still runs this little business out of our house in Atlanta. It's a business run completely on word-of-mouth and a loyal customer base who appreciate our age-old family recipes. And, sure enough, I guess some of my grandmother's and my mother's talent for baking must have planted itself in me.

Of course, me being the youngest of the family and a bit of a rebel, I like to do things my own way. I learned how to make the classic pound cake my grandmother perfected, and even a chocolate layer cake or two. But, like I said, I do things my way. I took my grandmother's pound cake recipe and one day decided it would taste better with strawberries and coriander mixed into it. And it did. I also love cupcakes, because they're so easy to experiment with. I've tried them all - cinnamon chai cupcakes, devil's food cupcakes with cardamom and vanilla bean frosting, chocolate cupcakes with chocolate chip cookie dough baked in the centers...you name it, I've tried it. I've made chocolate brownies, butterscotch brownies, peanut butter brownies, Nutella cheesecake brownies. Don't even ask me about my signature strawberry "Sugar Coma" cake.

I've even tried my hand at cooking other foods as well. Lately, I've realized that if there's a food you want to taste and you can't find anywhere that makes it, well, figure out how to make it yourself! It's this realization that inspired me to try making Vietnamese pho and coconut rice, as well as gnocchi with a sage-butter sauce. My mother won't even go into Whole Foods with me anymore - she knows it will cost her a fortune if she's buying.

But my real love is still in baking. I've always thought that it would be fun to have my own little bakery. I'd name it after my grandmother, of course - Mama Irene's, we'd call it. And I'd serve her famous pound cakes, as well, but also any other tasty treats I can think of making. But I have to learn how to do it right. That's why culinary school, while it seems to be somewhat out of the blue given my past history, seems like it could be a good fit.

I'm still terrified, though. Sure, I get hella excited when I think of all the things I'll be learning - tarts, ganaches, puff pastries, eek! All the things I've been too scared to try on my own because I'm too afraid I'll mess them up! YAY! But I still wonder what I'm getting myself into. I tried on my chef's uniform for the first time tonight and felt like an impostor. I'm still not sure I want to be a CHEF, per se, I just want to bake and experiment and be able to do something that I enjoy for a living. And maybe I've read Kitchen Confidential too many times (I can blame Anthony Bourdain for a LOT of this life-changing decision, actually) but I'm terrified of what kind of environment I'll find myself in. Kitchens aren't always the most inviting places, especially for female chefs. I don't know why I seem to be drawn to professions where women are the clear minority. I think it's the feminist deep inside me trying to kick ass and take names and not be afraid of what those stupid, stinky boys think! I hope that's it anyway.

So, anyway. Phew. Long post, I know. Thanks for reading this far. This blog is hopefully going to be a place where I can share my thoughts and fears and excitement with you as I make my way through culinary school. I hope it will amuse you and entertain you, maybe even teach you something, or at least increase your love for food in a way that makes you more adventurous with the things you eat. That's what I'm trying to do for myself, I guess. (And as soon as my mother gets her digital camera back from a friend she loaned it to, there will be pictures! Glorious pictures!)

So if you please, join me on this terrifying, exciting, culinary adventure on my way to becoming....the girl with the most cake. (And if you get the reference, I already love ya like family.)