Day 1 - First Day of Lecture

Today was the first day of real class, well lecture. But before I got to school, I had a few things to do to get ready for school. First I woke up and went to an alteration shop to get my five pair of chef pants hemmed. They were at least 6" too long. Fortunately the alteration lady was able to take care of this in just a couple of hours. Then I got to school a little early to exchange my chef jackets. The story behind this is that I got measured more than a month before for my uniform and decided on a size XS for my chef jackets. But as luck would have it, I was given XXS jackets which I didn't really notice till I got home and tried a jacket on. I would have had to be a toothpick to button up the bottom few buttons. Fortunately, the school exchanged them for the XS that I ordered.

Class started about 3:00pm, and that is after I found the classroom. My class schedule doesn't list the room numbers, so I had to get some people to search for me and they finally determined the correct location that I should be in. Room numbers on the class schedule would be a nice addition, especially since they have a column for room numbers. I joined my classmates late as I'm exempted from the first session, College Success, which is from 12:30 - 3:00. Since I have an Associate Degree with great grades, it was no problem getting credit for the class. At 3:00 - 5:30 is Food Science, which uses the Serve Safe text. I already have my Serve Safe certification, but it won't hurt refreshing my memory. This class will last for 8 days. For those who are curious, Serve Safe is all about food safety. It's about how to keep a sanitary kitchen and how to handle food safely to keep it from getting contaminated. Today we covered "Providing Safe Food" and "The Microworld" which covers the type of contaminations such as Viruses, Bacteria, Parasites, Fungi and Biological Toxins which are grouped together as Pathogens. Oh boy, not what you want to be thinking about while dreaming of delicious food.

The first task was to ask Chef Reynolds how to tie my cravat (kerchief). Of course he made it look easy, but I'm sure I'll get better with practice. Chef Reynolds seemed very nice and the lecture was OK. He mostly followed the textbook with some additional personal experiences thrown in to keep the lecture interesting. I'm guessing there were about 24 students in my class with only four of them being male. If I had to guess at student ages, the age spread was probably running from 18 to 40 years old.