Author Archives: chriswardpress

Vignette: Tired

13 Wednesday Aug 2014

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The working year will end at about 1500 on Friday, and I can’t wait for it. There have been many, many days this year when all I can think about is when I’ll next be able to go to sleep, and today is just another one of them. At 3 o’clock this afternoon I’ll be able to sleep again, yippeeeee.Today is going to be a good day, that said: I’ve got half a dozen shoulders of lamb (épaules d’agneau) waiting for me to de-bone in the cold room right now, so that’ll be fun; we will also be turning some of the veg for tomorrow as well (group of about 30 for lunch).Late night last night, but not as late as some recently; we had two 1 ams in the past 10 days, and it’s VERY hard getting up the next day after one of those; a real case of not believing the time when the alarm sounds.But like the lamb shoulders today I’m doing more and more cool prep work. For yesterday’s group of 25 I got to butcher the faux filets – de-fatting, ne-nerving, cutting and then stringing them up into portions, which was cool indeed.I do love this job. But I do need a break, and can’t wait for Friday as I say; then we’re back for one day on January 3, then four more from the 9 to 13, then closed for a month. I’m planning to sleep for my holidays this year.

Vignette: Washing jackets and slacking off

13 Wednesday Aug 2014

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Just a quick tip for all those of you who buy stuff in supermarkets and grocery stores, and an aside for the cooks who have to prepare the stuff you buy: If you buy titchy little onions and potatoes, we’re going to make you peel the damned things. Do you have any idea at all how long it takes to peel a kilo of pearl onions? And that you can buy them ready-peeled and frozen? Eh?And while we’re talking about buying stuff, allow me to pass on a hint for those of you who do the buying of washing powder in your households. Having spent a year living on minimum wage, I’ve naturally gravitated towards the lower, cheaper portions of the display shelving in Carrefour and other supermarkets, and have found that the very, very cheapest washing powder you can buy – currently called Tex’Til but this will change next month as it does every month – is just as good as the stuff I used to buy, Persil Non-Bio and then Persil Regular. I have tested this most extensively over the past nine months on the dirtiest objects known to humankind – the work jackets of restaurant washer-uppers, so I can promise you this is a real test, not one where you pour ketchup on something and then rinse it under the tap.Tex’Til has, unfortunately, recently gone up in price. But then so has Persil – probably something to do with the price of oil. But still, at €2.57 (it used to be €2.50 although has been as high as €5) for five kilos, it represents a fairly decent saving over the price of Persil – €13.57 last time I bothered checking. Look for the big, blue boxes down the bottom of the display, you won’t be disappointed with the results. And if you’re a manufacturer of washing powder, can you explain to me why your posh products cost five times more and don’t wash any better? Seems to me the only reason it’s sold at such a price is (a) to pay for the adverts and (b) because you have the bollocks to demand such a price.Anyway.One day back at work this week, just me and Chef for a group of 14 Wednesday lunchtime; I did prep. and plate decoration for his entrées and desserts, and wasn’t very happy with what I did. I sliced the kiwis unevenly and failed to slice the right number (nearly twice what I should have done, somehow) and my radish flowers were mostly askew. Not good enough, must try harder.I do find slicing and chopping and cutting stuff evenly one of the hardest things to do. The secret is to actually look at what you’re cutting, rather than assuming it’s all OK because it won’t be. That and 10 years practise should do the trick.Another day at work next Tuesday and then school starts the following Monday, with three more days at the kitchen straight after before we have a month-long break while they do some building work in the hotel.Think I’ll go and watch another DVD.

Vignette: Random Thoughts on Being a Plongeur

13 Wednesday Aug 2014

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*****

Chef discovered honey yesterday. Now all the saucepans, ladles, plates, spoons and staff are covered with the bloody stuff, and it’s my job to scrape it off and flush it down the sink. And even I have limits, let me tell you.

*****

I have a favorite moan where I explain at tedious length that I have a real job, here look at my hands, that’s washing-up hands for you not the damp-but-otherwise-perfect model items you see in the Fairy Liquid adverts. Peeling skin, that’s washing-up hands for you; holes the size of Ecuador in my knuckles, that’s washing-up hands for you.

*****

Oh yes, and if you’re the person who stuck your chewing gum to your coffee cup saucer the other day – step out the back round by the dustbins and wait for me, would you? I’ll be the one carrying the baseball bat.

*****

Vignette: Soirée Vigneron and Stagiaires

13 Wednesday Aug 2014

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We did 98 covers last night for our ‘Soirée champagne’ – six courses starting with Carpaccio de St Jacques and finishing with moelleux de chocolat. We’ve been doing the prep for this for two or three days and it all went well, but I didn’t get out of the joint until gone half-past one this morning; the waitrons were still there when I turned out the light in the plonge, poor things.I often wonder what waiters think, in the same way you wonder what your dog is thinking. I reckon it goes something like this: “Hmm, where’s my arse gone? I’ll have a quick look with my left hand….nope, nothing. I know, I’ll try my right hand…nope. Ah, I know! (light bulb pops up over head) – I’ll search for my arse with BOTH hands…nope, still nothing.”Not that I’m trying to disparage waiters, you understand. They do a good enough job of that for themselves. Like, “Scrape the plates into the bin before you give them to me.” Last night I kept a 2.5 litre ice cream carton handy to dredge the bits of food and salad leaves and slices of bread out of my sink – just the ‘morceaux’ they’d left on the plates. How can you think you’ve scraped and stacked a plate when there’s a half-inch gap in the middle where it’s still covered with cheese, bread and mâche, lamb’s ear lettuce?Luckily for me I had a stagaire assigned to plate removal duty; washing 800 plates is hard enough, but carrying them all back out into the kitchen as well would be impossible. And, for once, after a few kickings and repeated explanations (that’s right, dry them AFTER they’ve been through the dishwasher…) he did OK.And luckily for me the Seconde de Cuisine and the Chef de Partie (entrées) came and helped dry the cutlery; 1,600 knives, forks and spoons take a LONG time to wash and even longer to dry.It’s a lot of plates and cutlery because they all had amuse bouches, starters (two plates), main course (two plates), cheese and pudding (a plate and a soufflée dish, chef doing his special raspberry soufflées for pudding). Which means 100 x 8 = 800 plates plus all the batterie, the saucepans and what have you to assemble all this. Busy night for me. I was reading a restaurant review the other day where I was invited to have pity on the poor plongeurs who between the three of them have to do up to 600 plates a night (a fourth one does the pots and pans). Slackers.The thing which takes most of my time is taking the cleaned pots and plates back out into the kitchen, especially difficult when the five cooks are working an assembly line to plate up those 1000 dinners and you can’t get by them but have to anyway because there’s simply no room anywhere in the plonge for the next load of stuff that’s about to come steaming out of the machine. Luckily chef and his seconde and the new chef de partie are all professional enough to take an armful of stuff out with them when they pass by, which helps a lot.The stagaires don’t, of course. We have a new one who Knows Everything – he explained his recipe which he’d invented by himself and which was his recipe and he had designed it all by himself and which was his recipe (etc…) for a dish which involves slicing a choux bun in half, sandwiching in a boule of glace vanille, putting it on a plate decorated with a little creme anglaise, adding a few more similar buns and then covering them with hot chocolate.The silence which followed the announcement of this Great New Recipe was broken by Chef saying, “So, profiteroles then?”And then he insisted on speaking English to me all night. Very, very bad English, presumably on the grounds that my French is so appalling only everyone else in the restaurant can understand it. So when someone arrives in the plonge with a hot saucepan they normally cry, “Chaud!” to warn me it’s hot. This one arrived shouting, “Cold!” I thought he was trying to make a joke, but it turned out he thought “Cold!” means “Hot”. He has an English exam on Wednesday, apparently, and offered me €100 to sit it for him…Anyway. So I finished late. And chef insisted I eat two of his soufflées which were, frankly, delicious. Choose them if they’re on the menu.

Vignette: Power cut

13 Wednesday Aug 2014

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Last night was fun; six tables reserved, about 25 covers and we’re halfway through serving the starters at 2030. I’ve just finished cleaning up the batterie of saucepans and whatnot from the prep and have half-drained my pots ‘n’ pans sink when the power goes off. I re-plug the sink and wander into the kitchen, where Chef is checking the fuses. I check my fuse box in the Plonge and it’s not us, so I go up the drive and look up and down the street. The traffic lights aren’t working, so it isn’t just us. In fact, it later turned out that about a million people throughout Provence had their electricity cut off because of a forest fire.I collect my bike lamp and back in the kitchen we’re working by emergency exit lamps, torches, cigarette lighters and candles, and continue to do so until 2200. At about 2130 Chef comes to tell me that the emergency puit, the well-water supply has failed so that quarter sink of muddy brown water I’ve been using for the past hour is all there is. I use a sieve to strain out the big bits every now and then, and the Plonge gradually fills up with plates and saucepans.But the service goes well and quite a lot of extra customers arrive when they work out that (a) they can’t cook themselves because they’re on all-electric deals, and (b) the restaurant down the road (us) cooks with gas so will have hot food. We light the restaurant with lots of candles and it’s very romantic for the customers. The Patissiers even find an old silver candelabra to light their workspace. I work by the light of my bike lamp.Then at 10pm the ‘leccy comes back on, and I push everything I’ve stacked up through the dishwasher. I’d just been discussing with Chef whether to come back in the morning or afternoon tomorrow, assuming the power ever comes back on again and this isn’t just the end of the world – not a prospect I was relishing (coming back tomorrow, my half-day off, not the end of the world).Chef sends me a stagaire to carry stuff back out into the kitchen, a very needed helper considering I have three hours worth of washing up to do in one hour. This particular stagaire is stupid even by stagaire standards; finding nothing to do during the power cut, he literally stood in a corner of the room next to the plonge, wedged between the wine fridges, for 45 minutes without moving. Weird.He also thinks that the best way to clear the trays that hold the plates I put into the machine is bit by bit, picking things out of the two or three cleaned trays and leaving stuff in each one; I fiercely tell him to clear one tray at a time and then give it back to me so I can put more stuff into the machine, and he takes this advice badly – as he always does. I’ve tried telling him before that now he’s in the kitchen he has to work by kitchen rules, but he doesn’t believe me; he assumes he’s due the same respect and so on that he got in his former life (he’s 38 and a former accountant for the Epargne, the big French savings bank). He refuses to believe that, in the kitchen, as a stagiaire he’s less than nothing and even I, the Plongeur, out-rank him. The other night he refused to believe this so much that he shouted at me in my own Plonge that I had no right to tell him to take stuff out with him and put it back on the shelves if he didn’t feel like it, he didn’t see why he had to do things like that if he didn’t want to. This allowed me to shout back at him and wag my finger in his face, as well as using lots of French and English swear words. He didn’t speak to me for two days after this, which was a blessed relief – he only knows how to talk crap.Anyway. Then the Patissier came along to help, too, having finished the puddings (and bringing me a plate of strawberries and almond ice-cream too, which was nice of him) so things really sped along.In the end we were out of the building by 2330, about the same time we’d have finished normally. I just hope the finance director doesn’t hear that we managed to do most of a service without water or electricity – he’ll want us to do it like that every night.

Vignette: My First Day in Avignon

13 Wednesday Aug 2014

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It’s great not starting work until 9 am, and then in a place that’s a two-minute drive up the road. I didn’t have to get up until 8 and it was already light. Chef was just arriving when I rolled up and it’s straight to work, really. It’s a quiet week until the weekend, when the groups start arriving – mostly people celebrating the holidays I guess, and in fine style too.So this week I’m working through a number of cleaning jobs, starting today with the dustbins and then the copper pans.The dustbins are those giant wheely bins they use in factories; dumpsters, they call them in the States. Five of them, wheeled round the back, hosed down and then scrubbed out with a special cleaner, a broom and lots of elbow grease. It takes me a good hour.Then mix up a special ‘pâté’ to clean the copper pans, all 30 of them – gros sel (coarse sea salt), flour and vinegar: equal quantities of the dry and then add vinegar until it makes a paste. Use this to scrub the pans until they gleam in and out, handles too.This goes on all day. We do a very small service for lunch, just half a dozen people, but I’m fully occupied until I finally get home at 4. And I really enjoyed it. We had a great lunch, eating up what the customers haven’t scoffed so today it’s terrine de foie gras, terrine de port aux pistaches, lots of turkey steaks and pasta, and some of chef’s fabulous chocolate mousses – there’s a secret ingredient in them which he says is absolutely not chopped up grapes. Hmm. Delicious anyway – and if this is how the staff eat just imagine what the customers get.Back this evening; chef points out that because I haven’t dried the saucepan handles properly each one has a very fine film of rust on it already – mild steel handles, you see. I say I’ll go and do them again but he says not to bother. So I ask myself what I should really do, and throughout the evening take them all and clean them again. Now they gleam. This, I think, was the right thing to do. He seems pleased.We eat again this evening, finishing up what we couldn’t manage at lunch and really I have to waddle afterwards. This stuff is good.And it was that easy and non-eventful really; no bollockings, even when I made a mistake, no shouting, nothing horrible. Just smiles, compliments, pleasant greetings. All really weird. 

Vignette: Real Work

13 Wednesday Aug 2014

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I actually enjoy the washing up. No, really, I do. There is, to me, immense satisfaction in making something clean. Really clean. As in, cleaner than the last person who cleaned it left it. So today I have at some of the aluminium oven pans which are, shall we say politely, a tad neglected. Five kilos of elbow grease later and voila, clean. Cleaner anyway, some of them are a tad beyond hope.And then Chef gets me to clean up the salmon he’s just brought in. Cut out the gills, scrape off the scales, give them a good wash.Next, the encornets – baby squids. These are even more fun: pull out the insides, peel off the tissue-thin skin membrane, separate out the body parts, cut off the tentacles, remove the cartilage. All very satisfying.And finally the greatest challenge, 50 ecrevisses, small fresh water lobsters for want of a better word. 50 live ecrevisses, that is. The secret here is to keep them in the fridge for an hour or two first, which calms them right down. Then, you remove that vein that runs up their spines (or where their spines would be if they weren’t crustaceans) by gripping and gently twisting the middle paddle in their tails and pulling the whole thing out in one go – it looks rather blue in the middle, a navy blue compared to the very dark blue of the ink of the squids.About 20 ecrevisses into the pile, the heat of the kitchen starts waking them up and they begin to fight each other. And then one of them decides to fight back against me and pinches my finger, so I finish them off working in the walk-in fridge – with a good few handfuls of ice cubes in their container to help calm them down a bit more. You can’t blame them really, I suppose – how would you react to someone trying to pull out your intestinal tract via your bottom?Yesterday I got to do some vegetables too: endives – just pull off the dirty outer leaves – and then some carrots and courgettes, cut en biseau – basically, round off all the sharp edges of the pyramid-shaped cuts to make sure the clients don’t hurt their delicate mouths.And we eat well at lunchtime again: roti de veau stuffed with foie gras; roast chicken; pate de campagne; and then a special huge brioche stuffed with sweeties of some kind.It’s not all hard work, you know.

Chapter 30: Result!

13 Wednesday Aug 2014

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I now  have a CAP Cuisine. Yes, I’m a qualified chef. Believe it or not.Those results in detail:WARD Chris né(e) le 23/10/1960

APPROVISIONNEMENT ET ORGANISATION 15.00 /20
VIE SOCIALE ET PROFESSIONNELLE 16.00 /20
COMMERCIALISATION&D.P.CULINAIR 12.50 /20
FRANCAIS 09.50 /10
HISTOIRE-GEOGRAPHIE 09.00 /10
MATHEMATIQUES,SCIENCES 14.50 /20
LANGUE VIVANTE ETRANGERE : ANGLAIS 20.00 /20
PRODUCTIONS CULINAIRES 175.0 /200
TOTAL de points 394,50 ADMIS
 

ADMIS means I pass. The numbers don’t all add up because some subjects have a ‘coefficient’ multiplier which makes them worth more than others.The important one, though, is ‘Productions Culinaires’, worth 200 points all on its own (out of 400). Fail that and you fail everything. Pass that and one other thing and you have your qualification. And effectively 175 out of 200 means I’m very, very proud of what I achieved. I note that my ‘Commercialisation’ note of 12.5 was the one given by Christian Etienne, he who doesn’t get on with my restaurant chef. Lowest mark of all. Huh.20/20 for English. Ha!Only 15/20 for ‘Approvisionnement et organization’, how I organised myself while cooking the food that scored 17.5/20. Bit of a surprise that, I’d expect it to be the other way round if anything. Still.Ah. And then the secretary of the Ecole d’Hotellerie d’Avigon where I did my CAP called to tell me that I got the best mark of all my class in our exams. 57 students in all, our class, the other adult class and all the teenagers who took it at the same time. And that my 17.5/20 for the ‘culinary production’ is the highest mark they’ve ever had in the exam.So yeah, I’m pleased with that. Proud, even. Good on me.Cool.

Chapter 29: The Exam

10 Sunday Aug 2014

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30: The examIt’s been around 20 years since I had that Exam Morning feeling – nervous, trying to read notes at the last minute, a feeling of dread in the pit of your stomach because you’re sure the one thing that’s definitely going to come up is the one that you didn’t revise.I have a week – well, three days – of exams starting on Monday, when I’m normally at school. So up at 5 am this morning to leave at 6 for a 0745 exam start all the way over in Cavaillon, about 30 kilometres away. The plan was to meet Pascal at the bus station and take a bus there, but when we arrive there appear to be No Buses Today. I don’t have a car any more since I sold it to pay my school fees, so we end up taking a €40 taxi to our exam to make sure we get there in time.And then the exam doesn’t get underway until 0830 because they were waiting for one of the examiners and two of the students. What? If you’re not there on time for your exam, everyone else will wait? What nonsense.And I then end up waiting all morning to do my English oral exam because of that missing examiner. At midday there are three of us who haven’t been examined yet and the two examiners who did bother turning up have gone, so I wander round and find the secretary’s office. Ah, he says, kindly interrupting his chat with the missing examiners, sorry, your examiner didn’t turn up so come back next time.Next time I say? Tomorrow?No, he says. Next year.Next year? I repeat, a little loudly it must be said, and then launch into a big rant. He has the good sense to look a little uncomfortable and, reluctantly, agrees with me about the injustice of the situation which, unlike him, I do not think can be resolved with a shrug of the shoulders.I appeal to the two examiners still there and ask them to examine us. There’s only three left, I explain, it won’t take long.Ah, says the woman reluctantly, but you have to have 20 minutes to study the text and then 20 minutes each to talk about it so that will take me an hour.Right, I say, I’ll go first without any warm-up which means it’ll only take 40 minutes. Deal?Reluctant deal.So into the exam room and she gives me a text to read out loud about mountaineers leaving rubbish on Mount Everest, which I read through pretty quickly.OK, she says a bit nervously – I’m starting to think that my French is better than her English and she may not understand everything I say in English.. Do you think people leaving rubbish lying around is much of a problem here in Provence?I give her both barrels about litterbugs, whom I hate, and gabble on for five minutes.Right, she says, a little dazed. That seems to be fine. You can go now.Total time elapsed: 8 minutes. I’d better get a good mark for this.Tuesday’s the same story. It’s the presentations of our history or geography projects. I’ve done the influence of geography on food (a subject which I now teach for a living), and the importance of the press in promoting the restaurant industry for my history project.The order in which we’re to be examined is posted outside the exam room, and several students haven’t turned up when it’s their go – we were all supposed to be in place by 9. My turn comes up three times, only for me to be invited to wait as those who’ve turned up late can now have their turn. Same as yesterday – I think frankly, as far as I’m concerned, if you ain’t there on time for your exam then 0/20 and tough shit, organise yourself idiot. It’s a big part of cooking, you know, organisation. If you can’t organise yourself out of bed I don’t want to have you mucking about with my millefeuille d’asperge, thankyouveryymuch.After lunch we do our written French exam and then maths. For the latter I pull out my mobile phone to use as a calculator, as we’ve been told we can. Except this examiner thinks I’m going to be using it to ask someone else the answers and tells me to put it away, so I have to do all the calculations by hand. Luckily they’re not too difficult, but still. I haven’t done a formal maths class in….hmmm…30 years now.Wednesday and we have our practical cookery exam this morning, then the written paper this afternoon.The practical exam is a Big Deal: Fail it, you fail the entire exam. Fail any other exam, you can make up the points exam. It’s ‘Eliminatoire’, as they say here.We have four hours to make fricassée d’agneau hongroise (i.e. Lamb stew with paprika in it) with riz créole (rice with a few bits of pepper in it) and choux chantilly (cream buns).I had a really panicky moment at the start when I thought I wasn’t going to have enough time. I tore, almost literally, through my lamb shoulder (thank you, Chef, for making me practise on so many at work), turned all my veg for the stock and the service, got it all squared away and the stock on the boil and then turned around to see the other students in the kitchen with me all busy deboning their lamb shoulders. Eh? I thought, what have I forgotten to do first? how come they’re only doing their lamb shoulders now when I finished mine half an hour ago? What should I have done first that they’ve all done instead?The observing Chef is a friend of my restaurant Chef. I casually asked, when he passed to observe the state of cleanliness of my workstation, in a jokey voice ‘What are they doing that I’ve forgotten? Ha ha ha….’ It turns out that they were taking nearly an hour each to debone a single shoulder, and hadn’t even thought about veg yet. Which was a relief. ‘Don’t worry,’ said friendly Chef, ‘you’re doing fine.’I had also thought to check my ingredients – we get given a box of what we need at the start – and I was missing an onion and the paprika so called for them, then asked for a couple of rondeaux (large, shallow saucepans with lids) for my fricassée and the rice. Two hours later Nassima from my class comes along and tries to snaffle one, on the grounds that she needs it. In fact she just picked it up from under my counter and started to walk off with it. Get yer own, I growled, think ahead. She wasn’t happy and said she’d complain to ‘someone’. Well tough shit. Get yourself together at the start of service, it’s all there in the year-long course we’ve been doing. Try paying attention, miss, and think of this as payback for all the grief you’ve cause me this year…Yes, this was the one who kept swapping name labels on dishes in the chilling room to take my dish as her own. Well, now it counts karma’s a bitch, miss.The cooking went well, too well almost. I had lots of time to turn my vegetables nicely as required by the photos in our text books, to make some decent stock, to carefully time everything so that it came off the heat at the same time.But in the end I had to send my stuff out first when I’d been anticipating sending it 15 minutes and three people later. Again, Someone Else wasn’t ready so Friendly Chef asked me to step up and keep the examiners happy.So I sent it all too quickly, forgot to add the final salt to my rice and didn’t put enough sauce on the plate. And my choux buns weren’t dry enough so I should have cooked them longer. Huh. Luckily as I was carrying the choux out to table, Friendly Chef stopped me and asked, almost casually, ‘Are you planning on serving them without a dusting of icing sugar? That’s very brave of you…’ Icing sugar was listed on the recipe and, hence, a vital ingredient. Thanks again, Chef.Still. Eh?And then I got Christian Etienne as my Marketing Presentation chef. He knows and dislikes my restaurant chef – they’re rivals in Avignon – and when he learned where I’d been working all year immediately wrote down my mark even before I’d started my Marketing spiel. It was my lowest score in the entire exam, 12/20 – my average was 16.5.We had lunch in the school canteen in Cavaillon and then did the written paper this afternoon. It was harder than I thought, demanding a greater knowledge of traditional Escoffier-type dishes than I have. I said that the mystery missing ingredient in the Sole Dieppoise recipe was fumet de poisson (it’s cream), but did remember that it takes 20 minutes to cook a fumet (not 2 hours as everyone else told me afterwards).I think I’ve passed, and I’m certainly not going to do it again if I haven’t. I’ll just lie instead and say I passed, it’s easier and cheaper and I’ve never been asked to produce an exam certificate in my life.Restaurant and School chefs both tell me later that they’re sure I’ve passed, based on what they’ve ‘heard’ from the examiners (Avignon is a small town when it comes to chefs), but more than that I don’t know.Three weeks until the results.

Chapter 28: Week 26: Last day at school

08 Friday Aug 2014

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Last day at school today. We cook poulet chasseur, chicken in mushroom, tomato and wine sauce, pommes au four (roast potatoes) this morning and do it without having to be told much. This afternoon we spend going over a few basic techniques, ideas and problems to revise for our exam next week. Chef says he’s pleased with us and doesn’t think anyone will fail. I’m nervous, not because I think I’ll fail but because I don’t think I’ll succeed well, which I want to do both for him and for Jean-Remi my restaurant chef.I have mixed feelings about the year; I’m very glad I went, but the whole process has literally worn me down to a state of permanent and total exhaustion. I’d originally intended to go on and do a second year straight away in Patisserie or Traiteur, but (a) I don’t think I’ll ever be good enough to be a patissier and (b) sod that for a way to kill yourself, Armagnac is much more fun.Really, 10 months of having just one day of rest a week is not recommended, don’t try this at home. Tonight I’ve just got back from school half an hour early and, unlike last week, don’t have to go to work. Last week I got only Thursday off and spent all that writing two ‘dossiers’ – reports for my exams. And not cooking exams either, I have to do French, Maths, Physics, Geography and, best of all, English. My first exam, in fact, next Monday – a 20 minute English oral exam. I shall be complaining if I don’t get 20/20.So, what next?Well, Les Agassins (not the Chef, the management) are buggering me about this year over contracts and it looks like I simply won’t be able to work there after September for financial reasons (i.e. they won’t pay me). Much as I’d love to stay, it’s really time to move on. I don’t want to let Chef down now so I think I’m going to do my very, very best to finish the season unless something super-startling turns up.Then my plan is to find something, anything to do until the winter and then go and work in the Alps for the season there. Dunno if I want to do a restaurant or be a Chalet cook-and-maid. The latter attracts me more but I would probably learn more doing the former. We’ll see.Still, back in the restaurant I’m now a proper cook. Chef de partie des entrées, it says on the newest line of my CV. I’ve even managed to persuade Chef to put something on the menu – smoked quail eggs. OK, it’s only one item in a dish with a number of other ingredients, but hey, you have to start somewhere. We smoke the eggs ourselves and serve two (one cut into quarters, the other plopped inside the star-shape created) in a nest of alfalfa sprouts surrounded by ‘waves’ of smoked salmon. Looks very pretty, the nest presentation was my idea, too.Yesterday we did 70 covers for lunch, me, Fabien – the new Second de Cuisine – and Carole, the stagiaire patissier who, for once, is within simmering distance of competent. It was Chef’s half-day off (he chooses carefully) and I’m proud to have gotten through it without forgetting or f-ing up anything. The waiters, on the other hand, were all over the place – especially when the group of 13 from Radio France (who should have sat down to eat at 12h30 but who arrived at 13h30) announced that they were going to be eating outside, necessitating 20 minutes of table and cutlery moving. A-holes, I didn’t even send out their starters until gone 2 o’clock.Tonight was even worse. Everyone turned up at half past seven, when they normally arrive between 8 and 9 in discrete lumps. I was in the middle of farting about with my Trilogies (dried tomato, goat cheese and aubergine caviar in layers) and hadn’t even put my amuse bouches in place.Luckily Chef was there to jump in and do my orders for me and he managed to do just about everything while I was just cutting up tuna for six tartares. Embarrassing and an indication of just how much I have to learn still, notably Get Your Arse In Gear.If it had been the plonge I wouldn’t have had a problem, partly because the mise en place is easy (Squeezy bottle full of washing up liquid? I’m good to go!) and partly because, having done it for 18 months, I know how to do it quickly. I’ve been in the kitchen doing services less than 18 days, so that’s a good excuse. Reason. Whatever.Still, it felt shitty not keeping up. I later learn that 45 covers last night didn’t leave until 4 am in the morning, inconsiderate a-holes. It was a wedding party, so in France 4 am is a pretty early finish. This is why I’m glad I’m not a waiter. Still, I’ve learned the very hard way that getting my mise en place in place BEFORE service starts works well, along with putting all the amuse bouches onto dishes before service starts. That way I can keep up with the flow of orders, I think.Lunch is easier as the menu has only two starters – evenings there are up to six starters, depending on what kinds of guests we have in the hotel, which can go out as Menu items (miserly portions) or à  la carte (splendiferously generous portions).Then again, I managed to embed a box containing litre of cream inside €180′s worth of foie gras tonight (although it was Chef’s fault), so perhaps I should shut up.School is only the beginning; I’ve had a great opportunity and feel in turns over-confident and full of self-doubt. I see what I can do compared to some of my classmates and I’m clearly better than them; then my chef takes over my station and does in five minutes what I’ve failed to do in half an hour. And he does it better. That level of competence can only come with experience and I’d like to gain it here but know I won’t.