Moozh doesn't get a lot of air time here. He's the talker in the relationship. I'm the typer.

I ate (and/or gave away -I swear) all of my creme brûlée and thus have no documentation. We made a million and the ramekins we needed for our creme caramel. So we shared them with the rest of the school for the staff meal. I had to run to advanced pastry to grab something and on my way back I heard one of the advanced pastry kids bitching, "Just throw them out. They're not even done properly." So. Maybe not as successful an outing as I convinced myself it was.

 We made chocolate pots du creme which is akin to a custardy hot chocolate. Aka holy delicious.

We finished with creme caramel. My most dominant memory of this dessert is how hard it was to clean the caramel that didn't form a sauce from the bottom of the ramekin.

There was a rather rapid 'turning out' of the creme caramel. They were set and cooled but creme caramel (an really anything baked in a ramekin) is not really transportation friendly. We had to scoop them out into a container to take home. So it looks like salad dressing. Custardy, vanilla salad dressing.

But Moozh has done fun stuff! He did butchery all last week and then aced his butchery exam this week. Mucho proud wifey.

Moozh beat me to both creme caramel AND soufflé. I thought that pastry would have the market on that but turns out I have competition from someone who can hack through a pig carcass and balance our check book all in one day. I need more skills. We do soufflé on Monday, I remind myself.

Moozh told me an interesting story about sablefish (below). Turns out that the sablefish you are dying to try on the menu is the same Black Cod that you could have taken or left. It's a beautiful example of the role marketing plays in food culture. When the fish was under the name Black Cod, it couldn't compete with Atlantic Cod, Halibut and a lot of the other more familiar fish that are used for Fish and Chips, seafood chowders and other classic fish dishes. So someone decided to instead call them 'sablefish'. This bumped them up to an entirely different category because we all know that sable is so much better than black. More exotic. And quality obviously.

Yesterday they made scallops. My favourite part of getting pictures from Moozh is the plating. Plating is one thing that pastry only learns late in the program. You have to know it before you get into Advanced but it simply does not factor into any of your learning for the first month and a half.
Look at those scallops!

And notice the tourneed vegetables. Even though I bet learning that was really frustrating, it's good to know because after the first week, it's in EVERYTHING.

Each day, the foundation culinary students make a three piece meal for themselves.
An appetizer:

And entree:

Flank steak and grilled zucchini.
And a dessert:

I don't know what this is. I should because it's a dessert. But it does not look like anything I have seen before. I will reread this passage with egg all over my face one day when I say "Oh THAT'S what that was. Ooooh……."
Moozh has come home with an angry stomach everyday this week. It's a wonder French people are so chill and skinny. Because their contribution to the culinary world has been bereft of anything easy to digest.

So tomorrow is Savoury Day for us Pastry folk. We're making spanikopita (or Spank-i-topia, as Lex calls it), tortiere, which is a ground beef pie with chunks of potatoes and yummy spices. There's sausage rolls, empanadas, samosas, an onion tart, and a tomato-ricotta tart. We  also get out knife skills tomorrow. *Saying it like that makes it sound like they come in a box or something.* No, we have our knife skills class tomorrow. The first day of the pastry class having to use their knives, two of us cut our fingers in a major way (I wasn't one of them -go figure!). So some of us got indignant (that may or may not have been me) and demanded that our ineptitude be rectified by a knife skills class. So one of the VERY FRENCH teachers is coming in tomorrow to help us work out way around the sharpest knives I have ever been around. On the day where we will be slicing more onions than most of us have probably ever seen. (C'mon, it's Greek food. Super smelly but smelly in the best way.)I feel like I have a leg up because Moozh sat me down and showed me all of the slicing methods he was learning the first week. I sliced an onion in class today and I didn't even cry. These are the big things of life, let's be honest.

Next week we start cakes, which basically means we enter one of the seven circles of hell. Chef has straight up told us that if we were deluding ourselves that anything up to this point was hard, we may as well just sign our careers away because cakes take it all (just about said, 'takes the cake' but I restrained myself…kind of). But of course, Chef says that about everything. That is the Italian Pep Talk.

Find some veggies. Slice 'em fancy. (Strips are fancy) Put some parsley on top. Top it with a steak. Feel like a genius. Repeat.