Day 7

Today is the first day of classes. I have World Cuisine at 7 am and then I am working my internship at 3:30. One thing I do love about doing school here is that it is very laid back. Some of my friends back at school might be jealous. We don't wear hats. A lot of time there are some of us interning so they can do our dishes for us. As far as the recipes go we are extremely flexible. We can't get everything you need here, so we have to improvise. We started out class with cappucinno's of course, and then we went through a powerpoint about Spain and its history. There was absolutely no rush to it. We got there at 7 and didn't even begin cooking until 9. One thing my friends wont be jealous of is the work. Chef Polegri wants us to have a small paper prepared each day before class. We have Spain cuisine on Wednesday so we have to have a 2 page paper on something about Spain, it could be anything. Also, I have classical European cuisine tomorrow and I haven't had a single class yet, but already I have to write a paper on the British isles for tomorrow. That's how the rest of the quarter is going to go. We will have 3 days of Italy and 3 days of French so that means we need 2 pages for each day. We of course also have journals for each class that are still due the next class, so today's world cuisine journal, is due Wednesday. However, no recipe cards as of yet. They photocopy the recipes for us. Cooking here is a lot of fun. The kitchen is very well stocked, all we ever need to take out of our kits are our knives. We also have small classes so instead of separating into groups, we work as one large team. So today, with Spanish tapas, we are multiplying each recipe by at least 4. We will be cooking for ourselves and all our classmates and instructors. We will basically cater ourselves for lunch today and we are charged with making a high end tapas display. I started out working with someone to prep a calamari dish, but the calamari was still a little frozen, so I helped another teammate start the Spanish omelet. This dish is something we do regularly at the Spanish tapas restaurant I work at. Simply its a frittata with potatoes, eggs, and onions. You can put into it anything you want though. At the restaurant there is tomatoes, spinach, garlic, red pepper flakes, but we make them small, in 4 inch pans. The smallest we had was 6 inches, which just means increased cooking time. We started out slicing onions and potatoes thinly, and then prepping everything we wanted to put in the omelet like red and green peppers, tomatoes, cheese, and parsley. We quickly browned the onions, potatoes, and peppers, at the restaurant we usually deep fry the potatoes briefly to partially cook them. When that was done we started out with our pan with some oil, added the potatoes, onions, peppers and cheese and then the eggs, mixed it all up and let it sit. You need to just let a crust form on the bottom, shaking the pan once in a while to get the egg to move a little bit so it doesn't cook unevenly. A short time later you throw the pan into the hot oven and let it bake until the eggs completely set. The first one was a trial, and it did turn out ok, but it's not what I wanted, the pan should be completely full to get the right final product. We used almost all of the potatoes we prepped on just the first one. It looked alright, but I knew what I wanted to have for the second one. This time I mixed everything in a bowl the potatoes, fresh tomatoes, onions, peppers, cheese, parsley, until it had the right ratio of eggs to everything else. Got the pan real hot, and then poured it all in at once. It was the perfect amount, the pan just barely held it all. So we let it sit there and get that crust on the bottom, threw it in the oven and about 20 minutes later, we flipped out a perfect omelet. Everyone liked both of them a lot. The food from everyone was very good, there was a lot of interpretation and display techniques used in different ways. We had sweet and savory empanadas, garlic shrimp on toast, battered deep fried olives, calamari, croquettes, and many other dishes. The display looked great. We all had a huge lunch and there was tons left over. We got the kitchen cleaned up, because we were already way over our time for class, it was 2 pm by the time we finished and the afternoon class was supposed to start at 1. I briefly went home and figured since I was supposed to be at the restaurant in an hour and a half anyways, I would just go back and start working. Today I just jumped in where ever I was needed. I helped get a mystery basket together for the afternoon class, because they would also be doing tapas, but they would get a limited amount of ingredients and have to make something from it. I helped prep a few things for dinner service, but mostly I washed dishes. The afternoon class didn't even start class then until about 4, so the dinner they would be making would be late, and we were supposed to have Italian language class at 6. That quickly got cancelled for the night. At 6:30 I went home, got changed for dinner and came right back. The afternoon group did a great job with the tapas as well, they didn't make a buffet like we had, because we were set up to eat in a different room. It was another great dinner. Afterwards we all went home and most of us had our papers to write. I wrote mine on the cuisine of the British isles, the influences behind it, the ingredients, and some of the favorite dishes. As soon as I was done, it was off to bed, because I was expected at the butcher shop early the next day.