Well, if I am going to be balanced in my blog and crow when I achieve I must sing the dirge when I fail. I didn't do something as mundane as forget a homework assignment, or burn the soup. I forgot my knives. Being without your knives as a chef is like ... a musician without his instrument! How can you play?? Yes, on the first day of our knife skills class I left my beautiful Mac knives at home, sitting snugly in their designated spot in the laundry room. After driving 25 of the 30+ minutes to school it dawned on me what I had done. Even though I was very early, I had no hope of returning through that gosh darned traffic and even making it 30-45 minutes tardy. I had to confess to the chef - you can't really hide the fact that you forgot you knife kit. He wasn't happy - that kind, French chef gets this very flat look to his eyes when he is not happy. I hate that look. To make matters worse the Executive Chef came in (which he rarely does) and witnessed my serious lapse in mise en plas and professionalism. Woe is me!
Now for a little perspective... At lunch I jumped in my car and only sped moderately home, grabbed my knives and high-tailed it back to school with enough time to set up my station with my own knives (my classmate shared one of hers with me for the morning). You can't reach my exalted age without figuring out a way to regroup from these types of blunders. I did my best to engage and after my initial apologies to then tried to forget I was such a birdbrain.
Knife skills was actually fun - but can I say it is quite hard to cut squares from carrots. For our final the chef will measure our vegetables for the correct size of our julliene, brunoise, and batonnet, not to mention the tournay. My favorite cut was the losange - diamond shaped.
More knife info in my next installment...
But wait, did you know that one "s" in a french word is pronounced like a "z"? If there are 2 "s's" it is pronounced with the esss sound!
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