Scratching Things Off the List

Chef Glenn's grading requirements include 80 points of skills competency: we have to dice and sauté onions, make rice, poach eggs, make hollandaise, turn potatoes, make consommé, and make pasta. At the end of last week, I still had rice, pasta, and consommé to do. I knocked the rice out first thing. It's just like on the package, except I used a paper cartouche instead of a lid. Nothing fancy like pilaf, just basic cooked rice. I've been avoiding the consommé and the pasta, because they're not things that I make very often, but in retrospect: piece of cake.

Consommé is well-clarified and seasoned stock, and we have gallons of stock in the refrigerator. I started with 2 cups of chicken stock and 3 cups of veal stock. The stock is clarified by use of "clearmeat", a combination of ground meat, mirepoix, egg whites and tomato. Beat three egg whites until frothy. Add ground beef and mix the eggs whites thoroughly into the meat. Stir in the mirepoix and tomato, and add this mixture to your cold stock. Bring the stock to a simmer, stirring just a bit at the beginning to make sure the clearmeat is not sticking to the bottom of the pot. The clearmeat forms a "raft" on top of the stock, catching the impurities in the liquid as it gently simmers. After about 15 minutes, carefully ladle out the stock and pass it through a strainer lined with a coffee filter. If life is good, your stock will be clear and ready for seasoning. Today, life is good.

I rarely make pasta dough from scratch, so I left it to the very end. But seriously, it took less than 10 minutes to combine 3 cups of flour, 5 eggs, 1 teaspoon salt and 1 teaspoon oil in a large bowl, stir it together with my hand, and knead it until smooth. Then I wrapped it in plastic and refrigerated it until tomorrow, when I'll roll it out, cut it, and cook it up. Then I'll be finished with everything in this class, except showing up every day, and taking the final on Friday.

Today was a prep day, as the restaurant's closed on Monday. I made a big pot of ratatouille, which will be served tomorrow with lamb chops. There wasn't a whole lot of work for our group today. Sara braised oxtails, which will become ravioli filling tomorrow, and Miggi made pasta in quantity, and Kristina worked out tomorrow's sandwich, a salmon BLT. Cho was involved with cutting mirepoix for most of the morning. At one point, he was chopping onions with two parallel knives, Benihana-style, and Chef Glenn told him to chop the way he learned in skills.

Chef Weller joined our class at 7am to announce that two of us have made it to the finals of a $10,000 scholarship contest being conducted at the CCA. We had to submit a recipe for an amuse-bouche, as well as a 500-word essay describing how the appetizer was appropriate for the CCA's 30th anniversary. The winning recipe will be the starter at a big school fund-raising dinner. Five finalists were selected based on the recipes and essays, and we have to produce 10 portions of our appetizer at a competition on Saturday, when the winner will be selected. I am super-excited to be a finalist, and so is Andrea.