Day 14

Today we have day 3 of European. Originally we were supposed to do Norther Italy cuisine for class, but the Chef found a great piece of tuna loin to use so he moved Southern Italy up to today. I won't be in class till afternoon though, so I am starting out my day working internship hours. I was supposed to make breakfast, but we didn't even have any eggs, but then someone showed up with pastries so I was spared the responsibility. I spent most of the morning just helping out the morning class get their ingredients and wash dishes. Lunch was great with stuffed pork loin, handmade orechietti pasta, a squid, shrimp and fish salad, foccacia, and tuna palermo style. After lunch it was my classes turn. We were going to do Southern Italy as well, but the Chef thankfully has tons of other recipes to try. He put together another completely different menu for us to use. This menu was selected by picking a few of the best known dishes from each region of the South. I think it's a better starting menu than our book provided. I chose to do some Sicilian Arancini, which are stuffed rice balls. Basically I would make some sticky rice, then make my own meat sauce and reduce that down till it was near dry and then mix it with cheese, peas and some other seasonings and then make balls with the meat sauce filling in the center and rice on the outside and then bread and fry them. Everything went great. The Chef gave me great compliments on the outcome which is high praise. In fact everyone did an excellent job tonight. Carlo, the Italian sous chef who has been cooking with Chef for a very long time commented that he never believed that Americans could cook Italian food that well. It was a great boost for us all, especially since we have just a small class of 6 to get everything done. After clean up I went home and took the night for myself. Since I am sick all I wanted to do was relax and sleep, just hoping to get over this cold quickly.