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.