BLOCK 1: Day 4

The start of my culinary schooling blog. All I learned today was a few knife skills that I already know. Mincing shallots, dicing and julienning onions, segmenting oranges and grapefruits and chopping garlic. Out of all these things, the only new things I've learned is to make for a more even julienne for onions, you separate the layers and cut them so they can lay flat. Orange segmenting which is basically cutting out oranges between each of the membranes for a more pure texture I've done before but it was nice to learn some new things in order to make it smoother.

I'm gotten more acquainted with my fellow classmates, already there are some cliques that are forming. Funnily enough (or luckily enough) when I planted onto my station for cutting, I was at the table with the most girls of the class even though they did not consist entirely of the group I usually converse with. It's hard to imagine with the stringent policy of attendance (3 missed classes = expulsion) that the entire class might make it through. I've heard from one of my co-workers that out of 20 students at the beginning of the year, 12 were left by the end of the program. Since we do have to partner up with people (with an apparent unwritten rule of no "two female" pairs) conversation with the class is good because you get to know their background. You get to know their talents, their skills but most importantly their weaknesses. I've encountered 3 people that I might have problems with (names changed to protect their identities):

AL 1: There are 3 people in our class whose first names start with "A" and "L". I basically listed them off in order of how I met them. AL 1 is pretty cool, working at a place with nigh sous-chef responsibilities. He might make a great partner except for one fucking thing. Talking at the wrong fucking time. While I do like to make conversation, I know when to stop talking and listen to instruction which is every fucking time. However it's not only that, it's more the idea that you anticipate when the instructor is going to speak. There were some times I wanted to tell him to shut up because he's saying something witty while the instructor is speaking which I imagine is partially my fault because I am such a conversational person and thus almost invites this sort of behaviour with people around me. It's this one thing that might lump me into getting into the bad side of an instructor just because my partner doesn't know when to shut his yap.


CHUCK: Chuck I have no problem with. He's a pastry chef and aside from me, was the only other person who took notes during a time when everyone else didn't bring a notebook. Work ethic great...however it only goes so far if he's asking me questions all the time. As much as the industry will no doubt lead me to a leadership position, this is something I don't want to be doing in school. I will volunteer information when asked, but it will get annoying if I have to babysit someone through something. Might be good, might be bad.

NEMO: I'm going to make it perfectly clear.

Nemo is fucked.

I hardly want anything to do with Nemo here. I look at this fucker and I can see that he doesn't have the chops to make it through. How do I know? By his example today. He did two things today that basically made me write him off unless he does something to redeem himself. We were cutting shallots. While we were picking them from the bag, he dropped one, picked it up and tossed it into the garbage. My brain nearly fucking broke.

The restaurant business is possibly the most frivolous and the most stingy fucking industry that you'd encounter. We toss out a LOT of food but at the same time we always ALWAYS look at "food cost" The constant monitoring of food that will never get served to a customer as a result of expiration, bad handling, contamination, rot, burning, overcooking, fucked up ingredients, not up to par, whatever the result. Mainly, anything that you can save to use for food is ESSENTIAL to maintaining the profits of a restaurant. Yes we get rid of a lot of food at the end of the night, but we don't want to be wasting perfectly good food either.

So there was a fucking shallot, perfectly fine still in it's skin. I ask Nemo what was he doing? He replied that it was dirty. That isn't dirty. It fell on the floor. If it was cut and chopped and then fell onto the floor...THEN it's dirty. If it was part of a dish that fell into the garbage can....THEN IT'S FUCKING DIRTY. But as it is in it's most pure and raw state with nature's own protective armour KEEPING DIRT AWAY FROM IT'S FLESH!...it's not fucking dirty. You can pick it up, rinse it off and use it, which is what I did. Shallots are expensive 5 times more than an onion.

Speaking of which, when we came to chopping onions he threw away a entire one. He said it was dirty which I did see some black under the skin for the scant second he held it above the garbage bin before letting it fall into it. I nearly fucking blew a gasket. However it really wasn't worth it. As confrontational I could be with people, especially when it comes to experience that I can rub in their fucking face, I just realize that we are all equals here. What little common sense Nemo has right now will obviously be apparent to future instructors who will either whip him into shape or send him to quit the program. I have no right to take the role of the instructor in order to teach him anything and chances are he'd probably won't listen to me. Especially considering his response to my shallot question.

So that's my 4th day of BLOCK 1. I'll explain all these later since now I have to go to sleep. I'm fucking tired and waking up a 5:45am isn't getting any easier.