Well the vacation is over and it’s back to the kitchen to learn lots of new things to cook. First the trip to Italy and the cruise was great. We toured Venice and Rome for a couple days at each end of the cruise and saw lots of cool stuff in the ports the ship visited. We took about 1000 photos and now I need to review and edit them. Like I need more stuff to do. I would like to think once my writing class project on foie gras is done I should have more time. What’s that all about you ask? My writing class made the decision a couple months ago to do a group writing project and the subject is foie gras. Each student in the class took a different aspect of the subject and is writing a paper on it. I took the production of foie gras as my topic. We plan to present the papers in an auditorium and invite all the students and faculty from campus that are interested in learning about foie gras to attend in a couple weeks so we are in the final stages of writing and reviewing all the papers. Until next time.

Well I know I did a posting last night but I have a little time today as we finished early and I am staying on campus until the morning for my field trip to the foie gras farm so I thought I would let you all know how I did on the practical final test. My consume came out great it was as crystal clear and had great taste and my Hollandaise Sauce also came out fine and had great taste.
Have a great day

Sorry it’s been some time since the last posting the time just flies by here at the Culinary. I have been making all kinds of soups and sauces the last couple of weeks and well as pureed potatoes and several vegetables.
Tomorrow is second day of final exams for Skills 1 class. Today we had our knife skills test. For this test we had to make small dice of one onion, medium dice of one onion, small dice of three cloves of garlic, small dice of one shallot, dice some parsley, make tomato consaceeconcasse out of two tomatoes cut several potatoes into 11 different cuts, Fine Julienne, Fine Brunoise, Julienne, Brunoise, Batonnet, Small Dice, Large Batonnet, Small Dice, Medium Dice, Large Dice, Paysanne, and Fermiere (all described in the post below) all done in one hour and the quality of your cuts was check and graded by the Chef. Tomorrows test is to make a Chicken Consume and Hollandaise Sauce both are challenging to do but I have done both before with success so I have confidence I will be successful. After tomorrow we are on summer break until the end of July but I am going on a field trip with some members of my writing class on Friday to the Hudson Valley Foie Gras farm. Our writing class is doing a group project about foie gras and we plan to print a booklet and make a presentation about foie gras in August to anyone interested in attending. The field trip is for research as Hudson Valley is the largest foie gras producer in the United States and its located about one and a half hours drive from school. There will most likely not be any posts during break as I will be on vacation spending two days in Venice then a 12 day cruise that stops all around Italy and the surrounding countries then two days in Rome before flying home so I will not have access to a computer during that time so look for a post in late July about the trip.
By the way despite the difficulty I had with Fish class I surprisingly earned a grade of B- so I was happy. My current GPA is 3.39 and I am happy with that as the book work is more than I expected and it’s been some time since I was in the school mode. My grades in writing class have been good so there is a change I could get an A or A- in that class and I think I am doing well in Skills 1 so that should be a good grade also.