And in the other kitchen...

So Moozh (aka my husband) has made it through the first week of the program, which consisted of knife skills. And knife skills consisted of eight hours of hunching over vegetables, satisfying the classical French requirement of seven points on a turned carrot and a julienned potato being four centimetres long by two MILLIMETRES wide. The first meal in Casa del Dempsey from the Chef was Caesar Salad from scratch, including tuiles, which are piped cookies (savoury in this case) which served as an alternative to croutons. Since he has learned beef tartare which I'm sure will be making it's way to our plates sometime soon. Our small group meets every Sunday and have altruistically offered to be our guinea pigs. Next week is beef tartare.

The thing I've noticed about Moozh is that his gift with cooking is his imagination, and his creativity on the fly. The reason he's a great cook is that he can start to make something on a hunch and kind of go from there. If something goes awry, he improvises and understands the tastes he likes enough that he can fix it and still produce something that tastes amazing. I know that he likes what he's doing right now. There's a nobility to French cooking and all of the specifications of it that he kind of geeks out on, but I'm pretty sure he'll become more entrenched in school when he starts learned more about the actual cooking side of things.

First, I want to introduce you to Chef Patrice Suhner, Moozh's chef. Chef Patrice wears those yellow glasses every day. He rides a Harley and is pretty much just a bad ass cool dude. If I had the balls, I would call him Chef Dude. He really just reinforces every stereotype that I have about French people: that they will always be cooler than you, they will do things (or wear things) that you never thought could be pulled off and pull it off (panache is a French word after all), and they are pretty much effortless at it all.

Look at all those canapés! I don't know the rhyme or reason to when Moozh learns what he does, but they are starting off it seems with small canapés, sauces, vinaigrettes, etc. But that's productivity right there.

I am currently posting all of this while Moozh is still at school making it. So once I know what it all is, I will post that.
The culinary students, once they reach the advanced kitchen, cook for the students for lunch or dinner, depending on which shift they are on. Right now, they cook their own meals in order to learn a lot of the recipes that they will be using in the advanced kitchen. Pastry does the same thing. We in the baking kitchens are being taught recipes right now that we will be using in the advanced kitchen when we bake for the catering side or the bakeshop. Back to culinary however, because they made these cute little Greek Salad baskets and the same day, Advanced made it for the rest of the school for lunch. Yum city.

Plating man. I'm sure anything would look ritzy if it had balsamic reduction twirled all pretty on the plate. But that is why they are the chefs and we are not. These are the things that I wish I knew what they were because they already look tasty but imagine if you had tastes to associate with all the pretty goin' on on that plate.

Both Moozh and I will be developing our own recipes through the course of our programs and it will be fun to post the progress (the mishaps and the successes) here. If anything, it provides a visual guide as to our progress. The primary failure of a food blog in my opinion is that the foundational evaluation of food is the taste. Yes, presentation plays a part too. But taste and smell are the things that you do it all for. I am just sorry you won't be able to taste it. Of course, sometimes I won't be sorry. Sometimes you will have dodged a bullet. But given the tutelage that we are receiving, life is gonna get real tasty.