"You can make mistakes but don't do anything stupid."

We congregate at a large round table in the back of the Careme Room before class starts. I usually arrive first, and I read the sections of the paper that I bring with me (Datebook every day, Food on Wednesday, Wine on Friday), and do the sudoku puzzle. Derrick comes next, then Alex and Nico, and Andy, and Andrea, and Silvia sometimes arrives before class starts, but she usually walks in just as Chef begins taking roll. This morning, Alex announced that after today, we don't need our thumbs any more, when counting down the days, and he held up four fingers on each hand.

Chef Al came and sat with us this morning, with his cup of coffee. It's the first time that's ever happened, with any of our Chefs.

Because yesterday was an off-day, we had an extra-heavy load of work in the kitchen today, in order to complete our products in time for Friday's buffet. We're now the Meat group, and our list of protein to fabricate was lengthy: deboning 3 ducks and 3 chickens (keeping the skin intact; tomorrow we'll stuff them with forcemeat); butchering two rabbits; cutting apart a breast of veal; deboning a veal rack; and trimming two pork tenderloins, two racks of baby back ribs, and two lobes of foie gras. We made 5 gallons of poultry brine and 5 gallons of meat brine.

Before we left class, we ground about 30 pounds of meat: the veal, and some lamb, and a couple of roasted duck livers. Actually, we put them through the grinder three times, using progressively smaller grinding dies. Then we made forcemeat, mixing the ground meat in a 20-quart Hobart mixer (in two batches), adding seasoning salt, then ice water, then cream, then back fat. We cooked off a patty of the mixture to make sure it was juicy and well-seasoned. Yum. The big tub then got stashed in the walk-in, and we'll put it to use tomorrow.

In the middle of the morning, Chef's voice rose above the ambient noise in the room. "Why are you cutting that apart?," he said to a member of the Charcuterie team. "That's your pork leg! See the skin on it? That's supposed to become ham, not cubes!" This obviously qualified as "stupid".