"Rainy Days and Mondays"

Well, today was the big day: Group One (Dava, Jim and I) was in charge of running the class for the morning, splitting up the chefs-in-training and supervising them while they cooked our dishes. Jim failed to show up. Chef said, "Well he told me last week that his grandfather died so he might not be here. I wonder how many grandparents he has." Dava had laryngitis ("How convenient," as the Church Lady would say), so the bulk of the "running" was left to me. At least the verbal part. Dava communicated by note and hand signals.

Our assignment was to create a menu of vegan dishes, with an assigned geographic slant. Dava did vegan/Spanish, and my dishes were vegan/North African. We split the rest of the class in half so we were each leading a team of five — plenty of people to carry out our wishes.

Before class even started today, Julian said, "I want to make the soup," and so he did: Moroccan Cold Tomato Soup, which we changed up and served hot today, to match the weather.


Tashana and Sarah collaborated on the couscous, which was done in a flash, and Rudy took on the vegetable ragout ("Give me something hard, man!"). I realized when we sat to eat that he'd neglected to add the raisins, which he'd plumped on the side of the stove in some hot water.


Jordan handled dessert, oranges in syrup with pistachios. The first job was to peel the zest off of some oranges and cut it into julienne. He made that job last half an hour. Tashana and Sarah were cleaning up before he got to step two.



With so much "help," we had our buffet set up by 9:45. Thanks to Tessie for loaning me the lovely African table cloth. When I spread it out, Jordan moaned and said, "Man, you keep raising the bar."

Mid-morning, Chef Vinita looked out the window and exclaimed, "Oh look! It's a red Beetle! That's a special color. You can't get it on just any car!" I laughed and said, "I'm surprised that you know so much about Beetles, Chef." She said, "Oh, it's the color. When I was a younger person, I thought that by the time I was fifty, I'd have a red Porsche. But I have a hybrid. And it's black. But I love to have red things around me. My canisters are red, and my daughter bought me a lovely red thermos cup."

For the rest of the week, my job is to show up and cook for the other four groups. Hopefully I won't be the last one picked for the team, like in kickball.