To start from the beginning, I must say I've had a dream to go to a professional culinary school already for a while. At first I had some hesitations, as I don't have exactly a specific plan for using these skills (if we leave behind crazy thoughts about home restaurant or home cooking classes) but at the end I thought, what the heck: I will eat all my life, so why not do it at my the best. And at least after the first day I can't be happier that I finally went through with my not so reasonable plan. I understand that for some people it might be difficult to understand what is so great about cutting vegetables all day. But I feel like in heaven, even if in the schools kitchen it's hot like in hell (what a great idea I had today to wear super warm Damart t-shirt under the other clothes).
If any of you is interested, the school I'm going is The French School of Culinary Arts Ferrandi . I'm taking there intensive short course "base de cuisine". Sometimes I will use some terms in French, as I'm too lazy to find out all the vocabulary in English. After all, I'm on vacation. So no translations and lots of grammar mistakes coming. I won't be typing all the recipes either, as I'm not sure if I have a right to do that and it would be pretty long to translate and to retype them. Besides that's chefs secret ;). So there will be rather tips and descriptions of what we do in the class.
The days start actually pretty early, at 8.15am. But to recompense the effort, there are warm and crispy croissants waiting for us every morning (so I will probably look like a croissant when I arrive back to Brussels). Everything is like in a professional kitchen, so we have to wear professional clothes, girls have no right to color their nails (actually boys neither), no telephone calls, no watch neither jewelry (exception made to a wedding ring which is pretty surprising as I'm sure there are as much bacterias in a wedding ring as in any other ring). There are rules on how you should place things on a cutting board, in witch bowl to put what and what knife to use. Today we measured in millimeters the peaces that we were supposed to cut. Everything has to be the same size. I did of course almost everything wrong. First I cut all peaces of carrots, potatoes, leaks etc too big and then I started to cut them one by one smaller. The purpose was to make a sort of minestrone soup with pesto ("soupe au pistou avec crostinis a l'ail") and use the rest for a "fond de veau". For the first time I made a soup without a Knorr cube neither home made stocking. The result would have been pretty tasteless if we hadn't made the pesto with it. So at the end we spend about 3-4 hours making a soup of which we tasted two soup spoons. I hope they gave the rest to somebody. Maybe it will be in the canteen. And tomorrow I absolutely have to take the camera with me, so that all the effort to serve the food nicely wouldn't be just for the eyes of a trash bag. So what's the tip of the day? If you want your green beans (or some other vegetables) keep their natural green color, you should put them after you have boiled them for a couple of seconds in a bowl filled with cold water with ice cubes. And you shouldn't add black pepper to a soup (don't ask me why).
To be continued ...
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