3rd Week of School

During second week of school, I only had two Hospitality Classes and Fundamentals of Cooking, since Labor Day was a Holiday.

No holidays this week, so I had all my classes. On Monday, in Principles of Cooking, we started in the kitchen for the first time. Even thought is was the first day, it still seem more chaotic than it should have been. We started the class by going over a few things. We did a measures conversion test (not graded) on tablespoons, teaspoons, cups, pints, quarts, and gallons. I missed two due to simple math errors. Oops! Need to slow down a little and think. Then we did the morning line up, where everybody lines up and the Chef checks the uniforms. Then we went into the kitchen and got ready for class. Getting ready meant washing our hands, getting a sanitation bucket and wiping down the tables, and then get a cutting board.

Then the teacher demonstrates a few things and then we started cutting vegetables. Some different cuts, ex. Julian, small dice, medium dice, and large dice. The instructor did not truly pay attention to the correctness of the cuts. All of our cuts were going to be used for the stocks. The funny thing was, we did not get to make stock. I know that our class is not long, but it made me disappointed. What is the point of attending culinary classes, if you don't do any hands on. I want to learn, which is why I went back to school. In my opinion there is only one way to learn cooking and that is hands on. There is only so much a person can get out of a book.

The next thing we started was making our lunch that we the students were all going to eat. It seems like making our own lunch is more of a concern than teaching us how to cook. My group was responsible for making the Caesar salad. The other groups made other dishes. The only part that didn't turn out correct was the foccasia bread, because that group didn't have the right amount of time to let it rise. It turned into a flat bread. The teacher almost did just about everything for each team. The instructor put together my teams salad dressing, team 3's pasta, and team 4's soup. After all the dishes were finished we sat down and ate it, and then it was time to clean up the kitchen. The soup was pretty good, the pasta and cookies were good too.