Day 15

Today April 13th, I have World Cuisine in the morning. So it was an early rise for me once again. I still felt terrible getting up, but at least I got some decent sleep because today was going to be a long day. This morning we are doing Middle Eastern Cuisine. It's not the most exciting cuisine if you look at it on paper. We started out with our breakfast and then we got a class lecture on Middle Eastern traditions, culture, and of course the food. Chef Polegri says that the cuisine is really boring though. They just aren't happy in the Middle East so we should just drop some gelato for them from a plane. Chef is getting famous for his unusual gelato concoctions. He made saffron and vanilla, English tea with honey, chocolate and cinnamon, even going as far as making a fish gelato which apparently was still pretty good. Today he would just make one inspired by baklava. I took a lamb dish to make with my partner for the day. It was a very simple dish to make because really it just required you to throw it all together and then braise the lamb for a long time. The time consuming part was that I had to break down the lamb from a shoulder with the bone in. It takes skill and practice to debone something like that easily. After we had our lamb braising, we each set off to help the rest of the class wherever we could. I helped roll out some whole wheat flatbreads. What was interesting though was how Chef took some of the recipes and made them a little more exciting. We were supposed to do an omelet with some shredded salted fish which sounded disgusting. Chef turned it around though and we used regular cod fillets, breaded and fried them and then made a thin omelet and wrapped them around the fish. I also made some green beans to go with the lamb which we were originally supposed to use okra, but we just can't get it here, what a tragedy. It was all great once again. The lamb was beautiful, with a ton of flavor. The green beans I had just cooked off and lined a serving dish with them and put the lamb and all the sauce on top. The beans worked great picking up the sauce and the lamb was perfectly tender. It was a great meal we prepared for everyone even though we were missing half of our group somewhere. After lunch and clean up, I just stayed and started working again. I mostly just did dishes right as they came in. The restaurant was closed, so the only thing we had to take care of was any messes the afternoon World Cuisine class made. It was kind of boring work wise, but it was fun just hanging out talking to everyone. We have a great group with a lot of characters. I ended up working till 6, we had an Italian language class, which I still think is very unhelpful a lot of the time. After that we ate dinner as a group and then it was off home. Tonight I had to write a paper for Latin class and my journal for my morning class. I ended being up till after midnight so I wasn't too happy about that, but tomorrow is another day.