1 part Cornmeal
1.5 Parts Water (Or Chicken/Veg Stock)
1.5 Parts Milk

(scale to your needs)

1 egg for every, say, 300 - 500 ml liquid)
Grated Parmesan, a quarter cup or so for every 300 - 500 ml liquid
1 tablespoon of butter.
Finely chopped lemon zest
Fine cut herbs (basil, thyme, marjoram - whatever you like)

Bring the liquid to a very low simmer. Add the cornmeal very slowly and stir continually. If you add the cornmeal too quickly and/or don't stir you'll end up with lumps.

Keep stirring the polenta over low eat for 8 - 12 minutes. Taste it every once in a while - you just need to cook it out until it's no longer gritty.

When it's smooth and not gritty remove from heat and add the egg, cheese, herbs and zest. Salt and Pepper to taste.

Pout the mixture into a pan lined with saran wrap, or small greased ramekins and leave it to set. Maybe a half hour or so.

Mist both sides with a little olive oil and sear in a hot pan to warm and brown each side. Serve with sauteed spinach, tomato sauce, a pan sauce or gravy, anything liquid and tasty.

I like it plain and eat it cold for breakfast quite often.

I love squid, but you don't often see it on menus in any form other than deep fried calamari. This is a nice appetizer, or a light dinner if you served it with some nice greens.

1 Japanese eggplant cut into wedges about 3 inches long.
3 or 4 Tablespoons Soy Sauce
1 teaspoon of sesame oil
1 tablespoon of honey
A few basil leaves cut fine (Thai basil would be nice here)
1 glove of garlic sliced thinly
Cayenne Pepper
Some sweet asian chili sauce

5 or 6 small squid tubes, cleaned.

In one pan saute the garlic in a little vegetable oil. Add the eggplant and fry over high heat until lightly coloured. Dissolve the honey in the soy sauce and add to the eggplant along with the sesame oil. Cook until the liquid has been absorbed and/or evaporated. Sprinkle with a little cayenne and set aside.

In a really hot grill pan, lightly grill the squid. Don't overcook the tubes, they turn into tasteless erasers if overcooked.

Lay the eggplant on a plate and arrange the squid tubes on top. Dot a little of the sweet chili sauce over and around the squid and sprinkle with basil.

I'm halfway through my midterm. I wrote the theory test today, tomorrow is the practical.

The theory test was fine. A few mistakes here and there. A couple of paragraphs of pure bullshit. Describe in detail the steps to make Ficelle. Ficelle? Huh? That's a bread right? Italian bread?

I know how to make bread. So I described the process and threw in handy dandy phrases like "make up and form to the desired shape" and "bake until golden brown" (Every one likes golden brown, right? Safe guess I think.)

I blanked on a couple of things. And really, I think some of the questions were pretty vague and well open to interpretation. "Describe the two similarities of bechamel and veloute..." What does that mean exactly? Both use flour and fat? Both are sauces? Both are white? Both are mother sauces? Both are smooth? I don't know - that seems like a hell of a lot more than two similarities.

I'm not sure what they were looking for, but I was so thrown by the vagueness of the question that I listed the two ingredients common to both, and am sure now that's not what they were looking for.

I forgot to mention that you should season your lamb shanks before browning them. An easy mark lost.

Overall I think I did well. I usually do on written tests.

Tomorrow? Tomorrow is the scary day. 6 as yet unknown tasks. Make a sauce. Do some knife cuts. Cook something. Who knows. I know the knife cuts will be a big part of it, and I still suck big time in that department. I did a little more practice today, but I get easily frustrated by my lack of improvement. I'm not seeing changes fast enough, and so practice seems like more and more time just spent doing things wrong. (Anyone with extra patience and discipline is encouraged to send it my way).

I'll do some more cutting tonight - but let's face it - at this stage either I can do it or I can't. No sense fussing over it all night.

I've done some cooking in the last couple of weeks, but I'm not going to document any of the recipes until I make it through midterms.

Good recipes, coming soon.

Wish me luck.

So you know how on the TV show "Cooking School Stories" the students seem to do nothing but make up meals using whatever basket of mystery ingredients they've been given?

That doesn't happen all that often at my cooking school. But tomorrow we are doing exactly that. It's been given a fancy shamncy name: Menu Development Day. Doesn't "Menu Development" sound far more exotic than standing in front of an open fridge door thinking "what the hell am I going to cook tonight?"

Keep that in mind next time you find yourself communing with an open fridge door. You're not failing to plan, you are having your very own Menu Development Day. And you didn't drop 10k on tuition!

I spent large portions of the weekend thinking "if they give me this, I will make that, and if they give me that I will make this, and if it's that I will make this other thing.." And then I got hungry so I made risotto.

We made choux paste and various eclairs on Friday. A chef instructor who I admire very much examined my work, turning the plate this way and that, and said slowly "this is very good work. This pastry is cooked perfectly."

And then he banged the table and shouted "Atta Girl!" I was so thrilled with the praise that I forgot to be pissed off that he called me 'girl'.

You win some, you lose some.

Wild Mushroom Risotto with Seared Quail

2 minced shallots
1 minced garlic clove
Leaves from 5 stems of thyme
2 Tables spoons Sherry
1 1/2 cups Arborio Rice
Chicken stock or Mushroom (a couple litres)
2 or 3 cups various wild mushrooms, cut into pieces
1/2 to 3/4 cups parmesan cheese

3 boned quails. (I would give instructions on boning quail, but I bought unboned quail for the first time this week, and when it came time to bone them I realized I had no godly idea how to do it. )

1 tablespoon brown sugar.

Marinate the quail in a couple glugs of olive oil and the brown sugar and the leaves from two stems of thyme. Set aside.

Sweat the shalots and garlic in some olive oil and butter.
Toss the rice and mushroom pieces in the shallot butter mixtures u ntil evenly coated.
Add the sherry and reduce by half.

Add ladles of chicken stock and stir the rice regularily (some people would say constantly. I say, who has time for constantly?)

Continue until rice is al dente and coated in a thick starchy sauce.

When the rice is almost done, pan sear the quail, carmelizing both sides. Move to a 400 F oven to finish.

Add the parmesan cheese to the risotto and stir until melted.
Finish with a knob or two of butter (entirely optional)
Season to taste.

Remove the quail from the oven and slice into two pieces.

Ladle the risotto into bowls and stack 3 quail halves on top of each bowl.

This is one of my favourite dishes. It's easy but incredibly tasty, and perfect for a foggy fall day. And - it's impressive. People think yo've done something exotic when really all you've done is stir the rice.

So, just like that, I'm over it.

Thanks to the insight and efforts of an instructor who I vented my frustrations to last night. He can't change any of the details that were making me mental, but he went out of his way to cheer me up and bring my focus back to centre.

Thank the lord for good teachers. Where would we be without them?

Mushrooms make things better.

Gather up as many and as varied wild mushroom as you can find and afford. Augment with button mushrooms. Brush to clean and cut up into fairly uniform sizes.

In a saute pan sweat some minced shallots and a minced small clove of garlic in butter.

Saute the mushrooms until soft. Add some olive oil and a little thyme.

Sprinkle over a couple tablespoons of sherry and the juice of one lemon. Salt and white pepper to taste.

Stir to incorporate and toss the entire mess over plates of mixed greens.

Serve with crusty bread, with pears and blue cheese for dessert.

I left my brain in San Francisco. It's down there somewhere checking out the butts of cute half naked men at the Folsom Street Fair. Or maybe if it's lucky it's having martinis with Selila or tossing back a Maker's Mark with Jenfu. Either way, it's not here with me, which leaves me kind of blurry and disjointed and largely incapable of maintaining a thought process for more than two or three seconds.

I'm having a love hate relationship with school these days. I love the classroom. I love the kitchen. I love my instructors. Except for the few I actively hate, I love my classmates. All good.

But.

This school has one of the most god awful appalling administrative teams I have ever encountered. Phone calls don't get returned. Some students have had their credit cards charged for the same tuition fee more than once. Materials that have been paid for in full take weeks and constant nagging to arrive. Courseware is riddled with misspellings and typos. Tables of Contents are inaccurate. Student ID's (for which we all dutifully took time to have pictures taken on the third day of classes) still have not arrived. (Week 6 of a 17 week program, and no student ID's yet. Come on.)

Small shit, all of it. In the classroom and in the kitchen, where it really matters, things are great and I have no real complaints.

But. The small shit, it all adds up. It adds up in two real ways for me. I am a professional administrator. And I am good at it. And I am bossy and a perfectionist. Toss those ingredients together with a large splash of being helplessly dependant on a shitty administrative team, and you get a very cranky agitated Sasha. Serve with a side order of snark and plenty of booze to soothe.

Okay. I should just get over that. People are allowed to do a bad job. We are not talking about the cure for cancer. Not everyone is neurotic and uptight about the details. Small shit.

But. Here's how it adds up to something more troublesome for me. I am not good at reconciling conflicting messages. My tiny little brain likes things to be fairly tidy and cohesive. If you say this, then it follows that you will do that. If you say this, and then do something completely different, I get frustrated and agitated and wrapped up in a little emotional snit about how these two messages don't make any sense. And if left unchecked, I can get so wrapped up in my little snit that it colours everything and leaves me emotional and angry and tired. This is a character flaw, a shortcoming, I know. I'm not really sure how to change it, and I don't know how/why I got to be this way. I blame, oh, I don't know, Britney Spears.

So half of my day is spent in a classroom that rightly emphasizes perfection, care, attention to detail. I mean, while one misspelled word does not ruin an entire paragraph, one foul mussel does indeed ruin an entire dish. Cooking well is about doing it right. There is very little room for halfway, and very little room for mistakes. And I love this. This appeals to me. This rigidity and emphasis on perfection, on doing it right aligns itself pretty perfectly with my neurotic little noggin.

But. The other half of my day is spent dealing with mistake after mistake. No emphasis on perfection. No emphasis on care. The little details, they don't matter. One institution, two conflicting messages. Bad pedagogy. Cognitive Dissonance.

And me? I react really badly to conflicting messages. Really badly. Damn Britney Spears.

So, I've left my brain in San Francisco to enjoy naked butts, martinis, and Maker's Mark, and not think about this crap.

I'm going to get over this, or I will end up losing the entire experience because I am too busy stewing about the fucked up details and inconsistent messages. And that won't do me, or the institution, even the tiniest bit of good.

And as soon as I am over it I will send for my brain, and then send out a posse to kick Britney's ass.