To everything, (turn turn turn) there is a season. And now is the season for basil. Gone are the days of little tiny stupid plastic boxes of sad wilty basil leaves shipped from Mexico, at the bargain price of $3 per box. The days of heaping big bags of basil for $1.50 are here.

Go to your farmers market and get yourself some basil.

Basil Pesto

You don't need a recipe for basil pesto. Get some basil, stuff it into your food processor. Toss in a garlic clove or four. Add some pine nuts. Pour in some olive oil. Run the machine until you have a nice paste. Too runny? Add some more basil. Too dry? Add some oil. Throw in some finely grated parmesan cheese. Add some salt. Keep tasting it and adjusting it until you like it.

Spoon it into ice cube trays (metal trays, or cheap plastic ones that you don't mind sacrificing for the cause) and freeze it. When it's frozen hard, pop the pesto out of the trays and seal them in ziploc bags, one or two cubes to a bag.

Next January when it's cold and gray and it's been raining for 87 days straight and you come home exhausted and starving, you'll throw some noodles in a pot, pull out a cube of homemade pesto, and in 11 minutes you'll be savouring the flavour of summer.

Basil Oil

Again, no real recipe here.

Take some basil, a good couple of handfuls (stems and all) and blanche them in boiling water for just a second.

Plunge the basil into a bowl of ice water to stop the cooking. Drain it and squeeze the excess water out. Chop coarsely.

Fill your blender, say halfway, with canola oil (don't waste your expensive olive oil). Put the basil in, choose the highest setting your blender offers and let it do it's thing. Blend for 3 minutes.

Pour the pulpy mess into a container, cover, and let it sit for 24 hours.

Strain it. Strain it again. Strain it through cheesecloth.

Pour into a couple of plastic squeeze bottles. You can add a little bit of olive oil now, if you want the flavour.

Drizzle the oil on pasta. Pour a little on top of your tomato soup. Use it in salad dressings. Decorate your plates with it. Go nuts.

Sweet Basil Oil

This one doesn't have a very long shelf life (4 or 5 days) but it's quick and easy, and great for fruit salads, cocktails, ice cream, etc.

1 handful of basil, blanched, schocked, drained, and chopped coarsely.
1/2 cup of simple syrup (if you don't already have simple syrup on hand, then you are not drinking Mojitos this summer and something is seriously wrong with you)
1/2 cup almond or walnut oil.

Blend everything in your blender for 3 minutes.
Strain through a very fine mesh strainer.

Slice up some peaches, sprinkle with sugar. Give them a dollop of mascarpone cheese and a drizzle of sweet basil oil. Just pour a little bit of it over fruit and yogurt, and breakfast gets a whole lot tastier.

People ask, more than any other question, "Is it like Tony Bourdain describes in Kitchen Confidential?"

Well. No. No, it's not.

I'm not sure why that is. You hear stories about kitchens like Mr. Bourdain describes. I talk to people who say they've worked in them. You hear stories about the day so and so froze so and so's knives in a block of ice. But, not in our kitchen.

Maybe because our chef is a woman. Maybe because we're all so damn Canadian. Maybe because the profession as a whole is struggling to gain acceptance as a respectable vocation. Who knows.

Our kitchen is incredibly civil, and incredibly polite.

Please and Thank you bookend every request.

"Sasha, could I please have 2 grilled asparagus and 3 carpaccio. Thank you"

"2 asparagus, 3 Carpaccio. Right away. Thank you."

"I have 2 asparagus and 3 carpaccio up and ready to go"

"Thank you. Now I need 2 greens and a bruschetta, please."

"2 greens and a bruschetta. Right away. Thank you."

All night. Every night.

I don't know if Tony would be pleased or appalled.

I recently acquired an espresso maker. I love the espresso maker and don't understand how I ever lived without one.

Everyone needs an espresso machine.

Without an espresso maker you cannot have vanilla ice cream with espresso poured over. (Affogato? Is that the right word?). And you cannot be happy without vanilla ice cream and espresso. You simply cannot.

I haven't been cooking very much lately. I've been working, outside the kitchen.

(Which has served as a great reminder about how much I don't want to work outside the kitchen anymore!)

And the recipes I have been working on I can't share with you, because I'm actually being paid to develop them for someone else. That's the big news around here.

I got a small contract to develop recipes for a small local chain of lunch counter type restaurants. It's a great opportunity, and so far a lot of fun. And a little intimidating!

The two week contract that has me slaving away outside the kitchen wraps up this week. So I'll be back in the kitchen, and back to posting soon.

My goodness there certainly are a lot of you all of a sudden. Welcome. Thanks for stopping by.

It is my aim to make this site a little more active than it has been. I plan to be doing A LOT of cooking in the next few weeks, and will be posting recipes and thoughts as I go.

A facelift for the site is also in the works. Just like cleaning up your house for company, you know? I didn't really mind the boring and ugly design until all you people starting dropping round to see it. But, I'm sure you all deserve better than this old mess.

Eat well. Be Happy.

Paris seems to be in grip of Mojito Mania. Chalkboards in cafes and bars all over the city advertise "Mojito! Mojito! Mojito!".

Every night at the cafe around the corner the waiter tries to convince me to have a Mojito. I like a Mojito as much as the next person, I do, but it's 4 degrees celcius here. And raining. I don't think you could conceive of weather more diametrically opposed to Mojito weather.

I tried to exlain to the waiter last night that a Mojito is a drink for hot summer days. He looked at me and shrugged sympathetically, making allowances for my foreignness.

I looked around the place and noticed that every third person was drinking a Mojito.

In January. In the rain.

Quite apart from just loving food and wanting more more more, I need to eat at very regular intervals. If I have screwed up my planning and am without food much past 2:00pm I turn into Super Angry Hungry Bitch. SAHB is not likely to communicate reasonably and cannot be reasoned with or cheered up. Nothing but food will banish her. (And you want her banished as quickly as possible. She's a real piece of work.)

Temperatures here in Paris have plummeted again and yesterday was painfully chilly. Early afternoon found James and SAHB, very cold and very hungry, wandering around the Marais on a quest for falafel.

I wanted to go to the famous falafel joint whose name escapes me now, but it was crazy busy and the wait for a table was 40 minutes. I rejected three different kosher delis on unknown grounds. I wrinkled my nose at the notion of going to a slightly less famous falafel joint. I rejected. And rejected. And rejected.

The hungrier I am, the less able I am to make a decision about where to eat. The discomfort and anxiety I feel when I am not fed (and blood sugar levels are dropping ever downward) makes me feel like everything has gone to shit and been ruined beyond repair. In this state I beleive that only the absolute perfect meal can pull the day out of the crapper. But the hungrier I get the less rational I get, and the less able to make solid choices which would result in the acquisition of said perfect meal. So I reject and reject and reject.

And eventually all authority to participate in decision making must be taken away from me. Decisions, right down to what I am going to eat, must be made for me by someone else.

(I generally carry food on my person so as to avoid this situation. It's no fun for anyone invloved.)

So James decided we were going to Le Petit Dakar.

I didn't like it because, I didn't. The room wasn't warm enough. I couldn't read the hand written menu on the chalkboard. There were only 4 choices for lunch. And so on. I didn't like it because my blood sugar levels were disastrously low and I was being a big nasty bitch.

James ordered for us and in no time the most perfect meal, the best meal I have ever eaten in all of France, was put in front of me.

It was exceptionally good. Gambas with a sort of sweet coconut curry sauce, and rice. Simple, but incredible.

SAHB was banished. And I want to go back at least once more before we leave Paris.

Le Petit Dakar is a Senegalese restaurant in the 3rd Arrondissement of Paris
Address: 6, rue Elzévir, 75003, Paris

For shits and giggles today I dropped by the opening day celebrations at the very first Starbucks in France. That's right. Starbucks. In Paris.

And despite the party line being "why would I want to drink the sock juice coffee of the boorish American chain when instead I could...", Parisians were lined up out the fucking door waiting for their first taste of a vente frappucino. Seriously, out the door. Standing on the sidewalk.

In addition to being the third sign of the apocalypse, this is truly a testament to the power of marketing. Paris already has a coffee culture. A wonderful, tasty, coffee culture with a long history. There is no need for Starbucks here. The coffee at the corner cafe is better and cheaper than anything Bucks has to offer.

But, I guess the beauty of marketing is that you create the need, and then you provide the product to fill the need.

I am curious to see what Paris will look like in 5 years. In North American cities public garbage cans are often filled to overflowing with empty take away containers and to-go coffee cups. The portable food culture generates an awful lot of garbage that is disposed of in the public sphere.

Not so in Paris. For the most part, you eat and drink where you purchase your refreshment. There are public garbage cans, but they are absolutely not designed to accommodate the volume of garbage generated by 500,000 people swilling Cafe Mochas on the run.

We didn't stop for coffee at Starbucks. Instead we went down the street to a neighbourhood cafe where J paid 8.40E for a large Coke. Because, you know, damn the man and all that.

Paris is insanely expensive. So expensive that, while you do your best to keep costs sort of reasonable, there comes a point (far beyond any normal definition of reasonable) when you just have to put it out of your mind, or else lose sanity altogether.

It's possible to pay $10.00 for a coffee and $8.00 for a coke if you are not careful. And even when you are very careful you'll likely pay $4.00 for a coffee. (The coke you can buy at the grocery store for $0.75)

But cheese, my beautiful friend, cheese, is not expensive. Cheese is dirt cheap, and plentiful. Cheap. Cheap.

2 euros for a round of cheese I would easily pay $9.00 for at home. Handmade artisanal cheeses at the local cheap ass institutional looking grocery store? 1.50E.

And bread to eat it with is also cheap. And oddly, oranges are also cheap.

Could be worse. Much worse.

I got my marks back. I did not make honours. Very very close (less than a percentage point) but not close enough.

I did get the highest grade in my class. And a corresponding prize. That was nice.

I have insanely high standards and expectations, and I am a sucker for external validation.

I am off to France for a month in January, and am planning to fill this space with my gastronomical experiences and adventures there. Until then - Joyeaux Noel!

I had two exams in two days. One written, one practical.

I studied all weekend. Wrote the written exam on Monday. The practical exam was at 8:00 am this morning. I was home by noon.

What a weird day. 4 months of hard work capped with 4 solid days of fussing and stressing and being intensely focused on one thing, and then, poof, it's over practically before breakfast. I came home and walked in circles for an hour, trying to dispel the large knot of excess energy that had taken up residence in my stomach. Then I... I don't even know what I did. The rest of the day passed in a haze. I paced. I slept on the couch. I drank a hot buttered rum and gazed blankly at the television.

I have a day off tomorrow. A grad ceremony on Friday. The grad ceremony seems weird somehow. It's only a 4 month course. A very intense 4 months, but still just 4. A big ceremony (one at which I have to give a speech by the way) seems like overkill somehow. And on the other hand, I feel like I can just barely remember what my life was like before I started this course, it's been so all consuming, and to let the end pass without a marker more public and full of pomp than snoozing on the couch while a hot buttered rum becomes cold and greasy also seems weird.

So I'm done. And now I guess I'm supposed to figure out what I want to be when I grow up, so to speak. Huh. How about that.

I think first I'll go on vacation. That seems like the grown up thing to do.

I am generally not a big fan of Fine Dining. Somehow along the way fine dining in North America turned into a big masturbatory exercise in which the Chef crams as many ingredients as is possible into a dish and stacks the plate way up high to the sky. (Sweeping generalization, I know. There are exceptions, and the tide does seem to be turning.)

Give me a perfectly prepared piece of fish with a simple sauce and the freshest vegetable possible, and I am happy. Keep your whatever rolled in porcini dust and glazed in reduced balsamic chili sauce, with deep fried mashed taro root croquettes, thank, I don't want 'em.

I like my food to look and taste like what it is. Food is a pretty amazing thing. The universe provides all of these incredible things, each of them practically perfect in their own right. No need to fuck around with it - just treat with respect and care.

It's a lot harder to cook food that is simple and keeps the integrity of the product than it is to mask the natural flavours in a sea of what is hot and trendy. So I am often disappointed with contemporary fine dining.

But when it's done right, it is amazing. I was not disappointed this weekend. J and I went to a local food and wine festival and sprung for a big deal fancy pants dinner. 6 courses, each served with 2 different wines.

And it was gorgeous. Each course was simple and clean and damn near perfect. I could have lived without the underdone snail ravioli - but other than that, it was damn fine food.

Six courses. 12 glasses of wine. I may never eat or drink again.

I need to be able to replicate the poached sablefish and pine mushroom broth. I'll try to post a recipe for it once I've figured it out.

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.

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?

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.

I don't cook at home anymore. I try to eat nothing but fruit and vegetables before school everyday, because we eat a hell of a lot of rich, calorie and fat intense food at school.

After lectures and demos we cook, and then we eat each night around 6:45. I get home around 8:00 or 9:00, and I have absolutely no interest in food when I get home. J, who has been so supportive of this whole cooking school thing has barely had a decent home cooked meal since the semester started.

But it's Saturday today, and I didn't have to go anywhere or do anything today, so I decided to take it easy, enjoy the nice weather, and cook a real meal.

Tonight's Menu:

Oysters on the half shell (okay, no cooking there)
Steamed mussels in a white wine sauce with leeks and carrots
Baguette with Lemon Mayonnaise

and for dessert, raspberry frangipane tart.

I'll post the recipes sooner or later. For now it's enough to just be cooking in my own kitchen.

Stupid Turned Potatoes.

I take back anything I may have ever said about turned vegetables.

They are not cool at all. They are pointless, stupid, and entirely impossible.

Bah.

When I was sixteen and learning to drive I could not parallel park. At all. I just couldn't do it. It was like there was some sort of parallel parking switch in my brain that had only two options - on or off. Mine was permanently set on off. I couldn't even sort of parallel park. No dice. Off.

I think my turning switch is set on off. I am choosing to believe that it is some sort of gene hidden deep down in that double helix that is turned off, or malfunctioning, or absent.

I did, however, eventually learn to parallel park. It's possible that I may also learn to turn vegetables, but I am not feeling particularily optimistic at the moment.

Tonight's menu:

- an absolutley beautiful Beef Bourguignonne
- fresh baguette
- and some fucked up half turned roast potatoes

It's Thursday. That's what day it is! Almost at the end of week three.

This week we've made:

Consomme: I don't know. Consomme is kind of a pain in the ass for really nothing very spectacular. It's supposed to be a demonstration of the cook's skill - perfectly clear, delicious broth. I have never been a big fan myself. I'd rather have a demonstration of the cook's skill that resulted in something fantastic. But, it's a classic. The chef instructor tasted mine and said, "Nice. That's a nice soup." Given that we're talking about consomme, I'm happy with that.

Quiche: Whatever. It's quiche. Real men don't eat it. You know why it's important to know how to make decent quiche? Because it's how you maximize your food costs. Quiche = leftovers with eggs and pastry. Remember that the next time you want to order quiche.

Baguettes: My baguette was decent, but not great. I've made better ones at home a hundred times before. Mine was a little undercooked, but over browned on the bottom.

Kale and Chorizo Soup: Portuguese Style. This was really nice. Great recipe. Simple method. My group's was a little thin, but tasted wonderful.

Chicken Stock and Veal Stock: This is a french cooking school, so it's all about the stocks. Our stock was decent. Not bad, not great. We will be making a lot of stock - it's the basis for everything.

Chicken Soup: Whatever. It's chicken soup. An extension of the chicken stock. The recipe we used was pretty dull, and meant to highlight knifework, more than anything. Julienned leeks and carrots.

Tomorrow we do quickbreads. Muffins, Scones, and Cornbread.

I'm a little tired today, and a little bit cranky. I get frustrated with my classmates occaisionally. Everyone needs to learn their own way, and everyone needs to make their own mistakes. When we're doing something that I know how to do well already, it makes sense for others in the group to do it. But, if you're going to do it - do it right! So I get anxious and frustrated in my little corner and fight the urge to butt in and dictate how it should be done.

There are a couple of people who are so amazingly spaced out and obnoxious in their idiocy that I am amazed they manage to find their way to school each day. And there are a couple of people who are pretty damn rude to the students who are immigrants. That kind of low level cloying racism, you know? I don't know how to deal with it.

As I said, I am a little tired and cranky today.

I made two silly mistakes on an exam this morning. Which sucks. It also means that I got an A+ on the exam, which doesn't exactly suck - but is not perfect. I am fixated on perfect.

We made bruschetta, greek salad, and steak tartar. I don't really understand why this is, but I am slower at school than I am at home. I could make tartar, bruschetta, and greek salad at home within two hours in my sleep. But at school it's a hectic rush. Part of it is working as a team I think - co-ordinating the efforts of two people takes longer than just doing it yourself. Learning to work as a team is important, conceptually, but is almost counter productive when you are trying to produce only two plates of food.

(and at home I don't concasse tomatoes for greek salad. Who concasses tomatoes for greek salad? The Greeks sure as hell don't.)

I am a "get the hell out of my kitchen" person at home. That obviously doesn't work at school, and it obviously won't work in a professional kitchen.

It's also a struggle for me to not just bowl my partner over and dictate how things are going to be done. I'm bossy. I admit it. Sometimes it's called "leadership ability" sometimes it's just plain bossiness.

I am afraid to say this in case I jinx myself, but my knife cuts are improving.

Our food tasted pretty good today. Our plating was mediocre. Things got a little hectic at the end, and I'm not sure why - we had a decent checklist and were relatively organized. I need to review the startegy and find what went wrong.

It's Friday, and I'm tired. Hence the non-sequitars and near monotone.

Week 2 is over.

...is the shortest distance between two points. And also essential for completing the classical knife cuts. And also completely and totally beyond my reach.

If what you want is a tiny perfect little parelellogram cut, I'm your girl. You want a cube or a rectangle? Go talk to someone else.

Practice. Practice. Practice, I know. But goddamn it's frustrating.

I cut potatoes for an hour and a half tonight, and nary a straight vertical cut. Even, consistent, straight across, but all skewed on the vertical axis.

So yeah. Bah. I'm frustrated, and tired of cutting potatoes.

In other news, I aced my food safety exam, so while I may always serve you slightly skewed vegetables, at least I won't poison you.

I missed the report on day 4 because I was so so tired.

The highlights:

- Lecture on cooking terminology

- Knife cuts - pommes pont neuf, pommes frites, matchstick, brunoise, small dice, medium dice, and large dice. My god, do I need to practice. My routine has been to walk home and pick up some of whatever it was that we cut in class that day and practice at home the following morning. Practice, practice, practice. I hate not being good at something, but, knife work is all about practice, and no-one is good at it right away. (But damn - do I wish that I had been practicing all these years and not just making "close enough" cuts)

- I cut myself. Twice! Which was a good thing. I am afraid of cutting myself. No-one wants to cut themselves, but I am afraid of cutting myself to the point of distraction. Which is weird, because I am not afraid of cutting myself at home, at all. And further - I have practically no nerve endings! I have an extremely high pain tolerance, and very little actually hurts me.

But at school I am really afraid of cutting myself. (hmmmm - possible that all of my anxiety about not being good enough is being focused on fear of cutting myself? uh-huh.) So I cut myself, twice, within about 2 minutes. When you cut yourself you are required to report the chef instructor immediately so that s/he can inspect your wound and dress as appropriate. So, not only did I cut myself, I had to tell my instructor that I had cut myself, twice. The third time I needed to speak to her in class, I started with "Chef, I didn't cut myself!" and she laughed.

Day 5.

- Lecture on the Brigade System and some chat about career paths and financial compensation. (Short version - don't rush to become a chef, and expect to not make a big whack of money)

- More knife cuts. Julienne, Zesting, and Turning. Turning is very difficult, and incredibly wasteful, but if you do it right you end up with a fancy little football shaped thingy, which actually looks pretty cool. I, at present do not exactly do it right. Again with the practice.

- I did not cut myself. Not even once.

I said I wanted to do something physical. This is physical. I am tired when I get home at night. Tired in a good way, like after a good workout. My body aches a little bit, but mostly it just feels warm and used.

So, that's week one.

One of the reasons I decided that I wanted to go to cooking school was that I really needed to be doing something physical and not sitting behind a desk eight hours a day.

First two days of cooking school? Sitting behind a desk going over administrative information.

As a professional administrator I know how important all those details are. I understand the legal and liability issues. And as a trainer I know all about teambuilding exercises and introductions and fostering a sense of group. I know it needs to be done, but damn, I don't want to sit through another second of it.

Today we entered the kitchen.

We cleaned the kitchen.

We chopped shallots.

We chopped onions.

We chopped garlic.

And it was fabulous. It was hot and sticky and rushed and overwhelming, but also great fun and the hours just disappeared in an instant

As it turns out, I suck at chopping.

There will be a lot of onion chopping practice in my immediate future. Anyone know of a good use for several pounds of diced onions?