…now, what’s your point?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_drawings.jpg if you want to be offended (NB: Those practising medieval superstitions should send complaints to the usual address)

BBC Masterchef has an interesting series of quizes on its website designed to see if you’re good enough to be a cook. Try doing the first lot without reading the articles – I got one question wrong in the first 50 thanks to my superior cook’s training. The last lot you’ll need to read the articles first, so that’s easier.

Thanks to Duane for this one:

Are you tired of those sissy-ass “friendship” poems that always sound good, but never actually come close to reality? Well,here is the way it REALLY is….without the feel good gingerbread.

1. When you are sad — I will help you get drunk and plot revenge against the sorry bastard who made you sad.
2. When you are blue — I will try to dislodge whatever is choking you.
3. When you smile — I will know you finally got laid.
4. When you are scared — I will rag on you about it every chance I get.
5. When you are worried — I will tell you horrible stories about how much worse it could be until you quit whining.
6. When you are confused — I will use little words.
7. When you are sick — Stay the hell away from me until you are well again. I don’t want whatever you have.
8. When you fall — I will point and laugh at your clumsy ass.
9. This is my oath….. I pledge it to the end. “Why?” you may ask; “because you are my friend”.
And my favourite:
10.Remember…….A good friend will help you move…..a REALLY good friend will help you move a body.
Send this to 10 of your closest friends, then get depressed because you can only think of 4.

Once again Chef (restaurant – as opposed to Chef (Ecole) – I gotta find a better shorthand for these two) came up trumps by getting me to make a few kilos of puff pastry in advance of this week’s school session. Normally in the restaurant we use bought-in sheets of puff pastry, one of the very (very very) few ready-made things we use, for several reasons: It’s good quality; it’s not expensive; and we don’t have a patissier. Chef spent three months at the start of the year looking for a decent patissier, and even thought he’d got a good one signed up until, at the last moment, he instead accepted a full-time contract in a restaurant on the Cote d’Azur in one of the Palais down around Nice. There is a HUGE lack of cooks in the entire French catering industry – not just in restaurants. Overall the country is about 70,000 cooks short, and good patissiers are worth their weight in truffles. We were offering a large salary and good benefits but someone even richer offered him more – so, if you fancy working in France, bone up on your pastry skills – there’s work waiting for you.
The only caution I’d offer is that its virtually essential to speak French at least a bit, simply for your own comfort. We’ve had stagiaires who didn’t speak French and, luckily for them, my Chef is easy-going and prepared to work his schoolboy English as I wrote in the last episode, but they’re not all like that. There are, unfortunately, chefs too stupid to realise that in a market where there’s a lack of talent you have to treat the talent you can find nicely – which is how come I was able to have a blazing row and quit my last job with a traiteur in front of a shop full of customers (“Je m’en fous de ce putain de merde de travail! Je démission!”) and walk into a good job the next day.
So, a couple of kilos of puff pastry last week gave me a head-start on doing it at school this week and, again, an interesting insight into different techniques of doing things; at the restaurant I mixed the détrempe in a big bowl; at school direct on the worksurface, which made more mess for no apparent gain. We also used margarine at school instead of the ‘beurre fin’ (butter with less than 16% water content) at the restaurant. The butter was easier to work but gave a much poorer quality taste at the end. But it is cheaper.
We used the puff pastry to make some sardine tarts, so we also got to practise our fish gutting skills again; a Chef I know in England has told me about his old Portuguese kitchen porter who could disembowel and de-bone a sardine just by running his thumb up along through its guts and then ‘sort of twisting it’, but I can’t work out how to do that so have to stick with the knife technique I do know. A quick ‘tomate fondue’ (sweated shallots, concassé tomatoes, a touch of garlic all stewed together) makes a base and finishes off a simple tart.
We start the afternoon with our ‘droit’ class, business administration; this is the most boring thing we do – the teacher, who normally teaches recalcitrant 16-year-olds, thinks that the best way to teach us anything is to read stuff from the text book at dictation speed so we can copy it down into our own exercise books; I’ve short-circuited this process by simply buying the text book for myself and I read along with her. As the final exam will be based exclusively on exercises drawn from this book, most of us have started using this class as a time to tidy up and correct our recipe books.
More interestingly we do a mayonnaise this afternoon, our first ‘sauce émulsionné. I’ve made it a fair few times in my life before but today it just does NOT want to work. No obvious reason why, it just won’t take and stays runny. My cooking partner wants to throw it away, but I show him how to take another egg yolk and use the runny rubbish as if it were oil, and this time it works fine. Chef was impressed I knew how to do that, too.
The rest of the afternoon we spend making a ‘tarte fine aux pommes’, a posh apple tart with the other half of the puff pastry we made this morning. A ‘tarte fine’ has crème patissière on the pastry base and then poshly-sliced apple on top. Again, it’s all about knife skills, cutting up apples into thin slices rather than giant chunks, which is much harder than non-cooks think. But my workstation partner, who never, ever cooks apart from in our lessons, has a hard time doing this sort of stuff because he simply never handles a knife anywhere else. He’s only doing the course because it gives him a wage increase at work (he works in a hospital canteen ‘conditioning’ the food prepared elsewhere, i.e. freezing/defrosting/reheating it for patients and never gets to cook – nor does he want to. Eating at home is done via a microwave, takeaways or in a restaurant) and while I get on great with him and like him dearly, it’s maddening to be always next to someone for whom food is just fuel and cookery simply a way to get a pay rise rather than make something others want to eat.
Still.
Then this evening they have a big group in the restaurant and Chef has asked me to come into work, so I cycle up there from school. I get there just in time for the staff meal – roast chicken and ‘pommes de terre coin du rue’ (potatoes cut in quarters lengthways then into a large dice, sautéd very quickly with some chopped garlic and parsley and bunged into the oven for 20 minutes – the name means ‘street corner potatoes’), one of my favourites and Chef’s, too. He suffered during the summer when our (Dutch) Seconde de Cuisine (or Sous-Chef) always cooked potatoes and roast chicken on his days off so he never got to eat them. Now every time we have potatoes everyone makes a point of moaning about how they can’t face any more because we ate so many over the summer; never fails to get him going in a good-humoured sort of way, so it’s worth the effort.
47 covers don’t finish eating their puddings until gone midnight; I have to wait for their dessert plates but can leave the waiters to put their coffee cups and saucer into the soaking bowl to finish overnight and get home just before 1 am. I left at 0715 this morning, so it’s been a long day. Delphine, my girlfriend (she’s a florist in Orange about 20 minutes up the road) is already fast asleep, and I manage to get into bed without fully waking her. Luckily for me she’s very understanding about this sort of thing and works public holidays and weekends herself, so restaurant hours don’t bother her at all.
I’m a lucky chap.

Next week: Boning a shoulder of lamb.

Chef asked me today what I was planning to do once I get my diplome in June. “I suppose you’ll be looking for a post as a Commis somewhere?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’ll be looking around I suppose,” I replied.
“Well how would you like to be a Commis here?” he said.
“I’d love to, but I don’t think I’m good enough,” I replied.
“Of course you are, the job’s yours if you want it from the new season, as soon as I can get a new plongeur,” he said.
Cool! And I don’t even have to cover on the new plongeur’s nights off! Cooler!
And the hotel flat is probably not gonna get renovated this year, so we may have few or no stagiaires either! Coolest!

1. I’m ill: old problem of tremblings, fever, swollen leg etc. but this time our new Avignonaise doctor has diagnosed the problem: an erisypele, a Streptococcal bacterial infection of the blood via cracks in my poorly maintained feet. She’s the first one ever to do so, but I still can’t walk, stand up, eat or do any of the other basics of life so I had to skive off school today, bummer.
2. Pascal my Best Mate at school phoned to say I got the best mark in the practical for the ‘examen blanc’, test exam practical we did at the end of last term. Hurrah! And I also got 20/20 for ‘droit’, which is business administration, law and shite, our most boring lesson for which I did absolutely 0/20 revision. I can clearly cut this amount of work by half and still pass! Hurrah! And all they cooked today was Black Forest Gateau and Fish Croquettes. Welcome to 1973!
3. There is no 3.
4. Lapin à la moutarde tonight, what’re you having?
5. You can read some of my stuff now on http://www.cheftalk.com in the Culinary Students/A Year Back At Culinary School forum, which is all mine.
6. A new version of the program which runs this place, WordPress, is out. It tells me, amongst other things, to ‘run upgrade.php’ on my remote site. How the HELL do I do that?
7. That is all.
8. TTFN.

In case you haven’t read about it elsewhere, there’s a serious security problem which affects just about ALL Windows machines going right back to version 3.
http://www.drkeyboard.net/viewtopic.php?t=3068 for more information and links to (temporary) fixes.
This one is VERY serious, you need to do something about it right now. Exploits are already out in the wild and you really can get infected this time just by viewing a picture in a web browser.

http://www.pandora.com/