Confessions of a Stagiere -- Week Seven

It happened. People at Lumiere finally read my blog. So from now on every week's entry will feel like a book report. Oh well. I knew this was going to happen. Now my neurosis about, well, everything, is out in the open.

But that's not why I write.

My six day work week is starting to wear me down. In fact, I went in on Saturday last week because I had to work six days at CBC, so technically it was my seventh day of work.

I don't know what it is but I'm constantly exhausted now. So now I struggle to pay attention to anything. I hate it. Sadly I don't drink coffee (traumatic childhood event where I realized that it doesn't taste NEARLY as delicious as it smells) or do cocaine so all I can do is silently scream at myself in my head. Dammit, there's a job to be done!

Like peeling fava beans and almonds. I spent a great deal of time peeling both of those last week. It's for the new char dish. The old char dish required me to cut perfect squares out of blanched leek slices. This new one has morels, fava beans, almonds and these beautiful little potato croquettes that are apparently shaped, frozen, reshaped and refrozen no less than three times each. But damn, is it ever a gorgeous dish.

Things have picked up. There are more people booking for dinner every night. In fact, the day before I got there it was apparently a madhouse with just over twenty booked at the beginning of the day and ending with fifty people coming in for dinner. Apparently nobody expected it and things were...well...less than calm. I silently thanked god I hadn't been there.

The highlight of this week had to be breaking down lamb racks, or "frenching" them. You know that quintessential lamb shank look, with the teardrop of meat and a bone sticking upwards? That's frenching apparently. I finally did some work on the meat station, something I have never really done because it requires a lot of precision and knowledge and skill, things I do not possess in terms of meat. It was great because a) I had never done this before, b) I got to work at a new station and c) the meat cook is one of these people who is almost overly encouraging because everything I did he remarked by saying "perfect" despite the fact that nothing I did was so.

Who doesn't love a compliment?

Frenching lamb is a series of cuts, tears and scrapings that I think I remember but not enough to articulate into words. I felt like a miserable failure trying to make the same clean strokes that the meat cook was. But, as he says, do it sixty times and you figure it out. It's amazing to me how you can take a thick rectangular piece of meat and turn it into dainty presentable morsels of flesh. It's very, very cool.

After getting closer instruction from the cook working garde manger, I was supposed to go home and practice making quenelles. I've watched many people do it and it still boggles my mind. You take your spoon, get it very hot in some boiling water, scoop whatever heavy cream it is you're trying to get shaped and curl it up along the edge of the container it's in until you get a nicely uniform egg shape. Then slide it onto whatever it is you want to slide it onto. It's one of those things that, once you've mastered, it looks effortless. I have a feeling it's hell to pick up though. I was supposed to go home and get some Cool Whip and practice. I really meant to. Then my work week started and I forgot. Dammit. Will do that next week, I swear.

Meanwhile I'm continuing to watch and learn. Not just about how the kitchen runs but this little microcosm known as the food industry. The people, their personalities and idiosyncrasies. The kind of people who are drawn to this life and why they stay in it. These are the stories that I'd love to get at. Let's see how far I get.

Confessions of a Stagiere -- Weeks Three and Four

I've combined two entries into one...from April 17th and 24th

This week I felt a nervous excited energy in the kitchen. Daniel Boulud was coming in a couple days. I mean, you'd be nervous if he was coming to visit in any case but if he's actually your boss...well...that's a whole other story. Apparently he's coming from Sunday to Thursday. I breathed a sigh of relief. Nothing would make me more anxious than having to do anything around him in a kitchen setting. As amazing as it would be to watch him in action, I'm just not ready for that kind of scrutiny.

Because they all spend so much time together, the cooks know just about everything about each other...in excrutiatingly minute and descriptive detail. I, however, remain monolithic enigma. So they've taken to asking me questions like, "what do you like to eat?" "where do you go to eat?" "what do you make at home?" etc. etc.

I keep giving these cryptic answers, stuff like, "oh, nothing really..." only because I don't know how to tell a room full of talented chefs that my favourite meal is a giant bowl of mashed potatoes, sitting on the couch, preferably with no pants on (the waistline gets in the way). My brain freezes up as I try to think of something more intelligent to say than "fried rice". It's these rare times I find myself at a loss for words. And it pains me because I feel like I come off as an incoherent moron. Which I'm not. I'm just a glutton who'll eat anything. I cook simple food because I usually eat alone anyway.

It doesn't help that their conversations about home cooking centre around their sour dough starters and litres and litres of stock that they apparently keep stashed away. Of course, this is all par for the course for them and they work on average about 14 to 16 hours a day.

I don't know a single non-chef who does these things. It could also be a Chinese thing where we don't tend to use stock in a ton of dishes. Whatever. The point is: no homemade stock or sour dough starter at my house. Which makes the whole mashed-potatoes-with-no-pants-on thing even more shameful on my part.

I'm also starting to get asked a lot of questions that I don't have answers for...but they are answers I'd like to have. "What's the best thing you learned today?" I spend so much of my time just trying to focus and learn the next task that I don't fully process anything until I go home and write it down. But if I had thought of it, here's what I would've said:

-how to avoid cutting yourself while peeling shrimp
-which way a piece of leek should be facing when you're trying to scrape off the membrane
-that you can control how you split a snap pea in half, but you can't control how many peas there are inside (damn you, nature)
-men gossip just as much as women do and they're just as bitchy about it too
-hazelnuts can burn really fast in butter

I'm also discovering some of my own talents. Apparently I'm pretty handy when it comes to forming ravioli. I guess a lifetime spent helping my mom make dumplings and folding origami shapes was useful after all.

Every cook has this rolled up arsenal of knives at their disposal. I do not. I used to be really concerned that I don't have any knives to bring in with me. I still kind of am. But I never realized how important it was going to be to have a spoon with me at all times. They look just like your regular spoons at home but ideally it's fairly flat, wide enough and a bit shallow. You use it to taste, plate, mix, etc. After a few weeks of never having one, the sous chef finally assigned me one of his spoons. There's actually an "x" on it. I now bring it in every week. It stays in my pocket. I just love the idea that the utensil I use the most when eating is also one of the best tools I can have for cooking as well.