Confessions of a Stagiere -- Week Twenty

I have missed a couple of entries here, and I figured it's better to be accurate about what week I'm talking about rather than having them all sequential.

This week was my last week at Lumiere -- at least, my last week going consistently. I've had an incredible six month run. When I first started I was working just to become familiar with my surroundings. In the last few weeks, I finally nailed down the art of forming a quenelle of cream with one spoon.

I've been referring to my final day at Lumiere as my "final exam". It's very appropriate. The minute I walked into the kitchen the meat cook says, "you know today's the Steve Nash dinner right"?

The Steve Nash dinner he is referring to is the fundraiser for Steve Nash's foundation. A $1500 a plate dinner. I had gotten multiple emails about this through work via press releases, but for some reason it hadn't sunk in that if I showed up that day, I would in fact be working for the dinner.

It also hadn't sunk in that executive chef and restaurateur extraordinaire Daniel Boulud was also going to be there.

"I assumed that's why you were here".

Noooooo, no no no. I had been so glad I wasn't there on another weekend Daniel had come to town because I specifically wanted to avoid having anything I was doing scrutinized by this legendary chef.

So the dinner involved prepping for a yet unspecified number of guests ("thirty to sixty people" is what I heard). The dinner was happening at db Bistro -- they closed down the restaurant for the event. The only dishes coming out of the Lumiere side was the crab dish from the garde manger section. Keeping in mind that when I say "only" I mean we ended up prepping enough crab for about 100 dishes...on top of the regular prep for dinner service.

That's ten pounds of crab that needs to be picked over, then mixed with half a litre of chopped herbs among other things. I don't even know how many mangoes they went through, slicing them with a mandoline and cutting strips to wrap the crab with. Then preparing half a litre of mango bruinoise and piquillo peppers. Then forming and wrapping all the crab. Then wrapping over eighty crab rolls with rice paper wrappers.

It was go time.

In the midst of all this, as I'm squeezing a dozen grapefruits into juice, I hear a deep rich voice calling out behind me. I know it's Daniel. The Vancouver Sun was there to film Daniel and Dale making the scallop dish with corn succotash. I didn't dare turn around to watch, but listening to Daniel direct the action was amazing. He's a producer's dream. He knows what angles are the best, what to shoot, when to shoot it, what to say, how long to talk...considering he does this kind of thing all the time I'm not surprised. But I am in awe.

What's Daniel like in the kitchen? A pro. He doesn't have time to waste, he knows what he needs to get done and gets it done. I got to see that first hand during "the" dinner service. We had set out 87 plates on tables in the narrow hallway that joins the two kitchens. I had been tasked with plating the bruinoise of mango and piquillo peppers onto all the plates. The staff at db were tasked with building the crab stacks, slicing the rolls and plating all the rest.

We were right in the middle of Lumiere's dinner service and I we've run out of the coriander sticks we're using in the crab stacks. The rest of them are all in the db kitchen. I go out into the hallway and everyone is right in the middle of trying to get these 87 plates of crab out of the hallway and to the tables. Because it's so narrow nobody can fit around each other. The servers are on one end, the chefs are at another, the chefs are yelling for people to take certain plates away. Not all the plates have the same design on them so a lot of juggling is involved. Add to this the fact that the crab stacks are plated on top of mango puree which is making the stacks slide around and you can imagine the pressure.

Of course, I know better than to actually try to get anything from the other kitchen during all this. I head back and wait for the rush to subside.

The dinner was supposed to run from 7 to 8 pm. That was going to work out perfectly because the Lumiere dinner reservations had a gap between 7 to 8. There would be free hands available. At least, that was the theory. The dinner got pushed back to 8:15...when a bunch of reservations would have just arrived. It's amazing what you can do when you have no other choice.

And that's what really divides people who work in kitchens and others who don't. There's a breed of people that thrive on adrenaline and stress. The thrill of getting it all done and knowing you can do it.

I got called over to the db kitchen for the main course plating. Picture two lines of cooks on either side of a massive stainless steel prep table. db's chef, Stephane, yells out instructions. I end up near the end of the line, plating the beef and adding a romaine garnish to the plate just before Stephane sauced them. We probably plated everything in five minutes or less. I loved being part of that.

In the middle of everything Dale comes over and asks me if I want to take a picture with Daniel Boulud. Note: you do NOT say no to a picture with Daniel. I'm pretty sure that's a law somewhere. I was thrust into a corridor with him. He has no idea who am I or why I'm there but takes the picture anyway, which you can see to the left. Yes, I'm planning to print that out and hang it somewhere in my house. I don't even have pictures of my family hanging in my house yet, but you can be damn sure there'll be one of Daniel.

So the dinner went off successfully, as did the dinner service we did. Lots of momentary panic but it all got done as it always does.

I've had a bizarrely circular relationship with Lumiere over the past year. When I ate there the first time it reopened last November I met Daniel, as a patron. I gushed about it profusely in this blog posting. Now I've met him as a pseudo-employee. I won a chance to eat and work in the restaurant and ended up staying for six months. I don't know how it all worked out so seamlessly, but I know this has all been a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

People ask me what I've learned. Everyone thinks I'm hosting these incredible dinner parties now but the truth is that the most thrilling experience I've had is getting to be around people who genuinely love food. It's an egalitarian love. You can love ham and cheese sandwiches just as much as duck confit. I could talk about wanting baked Alaska and have a roomful of people talk about their awesome baked Alaska experiences with no hint of snootiness, just a pure love for food. I got to be a part of the monumental task of putting a fine dining meal together. I found out what lengths people will go to work with food just because they love it. Oh yeah, and I finally nailed one-spoon quenelle making!

My time at Lumiere has been absolutely incredible. I am so lucky that chef Dale Mackay and everyone in the kitchen not only allowed me to be there but took their time to work with a total novice. I used their tools, I made mistakes but I hauled ass as best I could. Thanks so much to those who've stayed and those who've moved on: Dale Mackay, Nathan Guggenheimer, Doug King, Alex Amos, Brad Hendrickson, Jesse Zuber, Rhys Jones, Suyin Wong, Celeste Mah, Tony Chang, Trevor Bird and all the people at db Bistro as well for making me part of the team. I'm going to miss working with you but I know I'll be seeing you all around.

Confessions of a Stagiere: Week Fifteen

Last Friday was my first time back in two weeks. I really did miss being at Lumiere last week.

Although I haven't worked in any other restaurants, I know the kitchen at Lumiere totally kicks ass. All the counters, cabinet doors and drawers are stainless steel. Refrigerated areas are built into the back part of each counter for butter and other refrigeratables during prep and service. All the drawers are refrigerated. It's large enough to accomodate the six to eight people who work in there a day. It's beautifully streamlined. It's even air conditioned (at least, the area that's close to the front of house is). I'm guessing this is necessary for the pastry station with all their meltable chocolate creations.

It's gorgeous. And because I generally don't spend much time near the stove areas, I never really get that hot.

I got a nice dose of heat last Friday though. The temperature outside was over 30 degrees Celsius, which is about as hot as it ever gets in Vancouver. No amount of air conditioning was going to keep things cool in there. The poor cook working the meat section had to change his jacket halfway through the day after sweating so profusely it had pretty much turned into a transluscent sheet.

I should mention that I'm far from the only stage working at Lumiere. Although I seem to be the only one that comes in consistently, there are a number of people that come in during the week for a day at a time. This week there was Jennifer, a student from the Pacific Culinary Institute on Granville Island. She was there at the same time I was. She came fully prepared (as one is supposed to) complete with all her tools. I continue to show up wearing my camo canvas sneakers and NO tools.

I'm continually amazed by the people drawn to food. I've been getting to do a lot of food stories as a result of my work for The Early Edition. One of my favourite pieces of all time was one I did last Thursday. It's about a Vancouver chef named Don Guthro who's started a culinary school of sorts at a North Vancouver homeless shelter. His students are mostly residents at the shelter -- either homeless, formerly drug addicted or disadvantaged in some other way. These students work all day long learning to make food, which they in turn serve to the residents at the shelter. They do a lunch AND dinner service every weekday. After sixteen weeks, they go on to an apprenticeship and then hopefully onto paid work and a career in the culinary world.

When I got there, they were just finishing up lunch service. They had made Monte Cristo sandwiches. After a quick break it was onto mayonnaise. They were whisking it by hand. If you've never done this before, it takes FOREVER. I'm talking over an hour for a decent bowlful. It was a wonderful sight, seeing these people from various backgrounds in their whites, patiently measuring out Dijon mustard, separating egg whites from yolks and whisking away steadily. Everyone was concentrating hard. You could tell they really wanted to be there. It was incredibly heartwarming.

Contrast the above mentioned hour long whisking with my failure to properly whisk a chick pea mixture over the stove on Friday. It's supposed to be whisked over the stove until it's thickened up enough to form a cylinder that stands on its own. I don't exactly have strong arms. After a couple minutes trying to force my forearms to keep going in the tremendous heat I was melting. I will NOT be making mayonnaise by hand anytime soon.

I kind of redeemed myself by whipping some cream later on. I didn't have to stand over the stove for that. Plus the pastry chef showed me an uber easy way to do it. Just move a balloon whisk rapidly back and forth through the cream in a metal bowl rather than in a circular motion. Apparently my method of whisking in the traditional motion would've taken "a month" to finish.

While I was whisking I thought about those students at the shelter making mayonnaise. I thought about how much food can bring people together, not just eating, but creating. It's what keeps you going even when you're ready to burst into flames.

Confessions of a Stagiere: Week Fourteen

I'm really late posting this one. I actually ended up missing last week's stint because of money transfer issues re: my new mortgage. Here's some of what happened the week before (which would be July 17).

When I first started at Lumiere they had a whole slew of menus going. There was a five course menu, a seven course menu, a nine course menu, a BC menu (three courses for $55) and a la carte. It's no wonder I never fully figured it all out. Now they're back to tasting menus (three of them). The way it was explained to me, this was supposed to make things easier on all the stations because there were fewer dishes to prepare.

However, the fish station was eliminated, shifting the prep from that station onto two others instead. When I first started I used to go from station to station waiting for someone to give me something to do. This week I ended up with people waiting for me to be done one thing so I could do another.

I ended up making a giant batch of sable dough. We put the tiny sable crackers under the morel and pea quiche for the amuse bouche. They've got a lovely crumbly sandy texture. When the garde manger pulled out his notebook for the recipe, he warned me "it's going to take you half an hour to measure this out". I thought, there's no way. There's like, six ingredients on that list. Of course he was right.

At home you end up measuring everything using volume. Teaspoons, tablespoons, cups, litres, etc. In the kitchen everything is measured by weight. Because of that, I now know that an egg yolk weighs about 20 to 25 grams. Flour, butter, salt, yolks and something called inverted sugar. Wikipedia tells me that it's a "is a sucrose-based syrup, produced by splitting each sucrose disaccharide molecule into its component monomers, glucose and fructose. The splitting is achieved through the action of invertase (a glycoside hydrolase enzyme), or an acid. Comparing solutions with the same dissolved weight of sugar, inverted syrups are sweeter than sucrose solutions; at equal molar concentrations, inverted sugar syrup has only 85% the sweetness of sucrose solution but complete inversion of a solution of a disaccharide (such as sucrose) doubles the concentration of sugar molecules - this makes the resulting, inverted, syrup sweeter than the original sucrose solution." All you really need to know is it's a very very dense sugar syrup.

There's also ground up Szechuan peppercorns in them too. When I first got to the spice shelf I had no clue what to look for. There are at least five different kinds of peppercorns, none of which are labelled. When I asked I was told they were the ones "that smell soapy". Sure enough, they have a spicy soapy smell that is very distinctive from the other ones.

Anyway, I finally had all my ingredients together. Everything had to be blended in this industrial sized mixer.

To make the actual crackers, you take some of the dough, roll it out until it's a few millimetres thin and then cut them using a dough cutter set to about an inch and a half. You bake the squares on a Silpat until they're just golden. Too long and they get a funky darker brown, which is still fine but not that perfect golden colour.

The more I learn about what goes into each item, the more I weep (inwardly) when I see someone send it back.

While I wasn't actually in the kitchen last week, I have spent the past two weeks filling in for the reporter on the morning show. She gets to do the food column every Wednesday and this week I got to do it. I finally got to tackle some food stories! I got to make THE quintessential Brazilian dish of feijoada (pork with beans) with the "Queen of Samba" Lucia Azevedo. I can't believe there aren't any authentic Brazilian restaurants in Vancouver. The one that existed apparently shut down some time ago, which is sad because I'd actually eaten there and enjoyed it a lot. Anyway, Lucia and I (mostly Lucia) made enough food for a small army. From Lucia I also learned that chefs are the same everywhere, whether in a restaurant or at home. They all want things done their own way, so the best thing to do is just stay the hell out of the way. Her way works though. Her feijoada is delicious, as is all the side dishes she made as well.

This week I took a tour of the UBC Farms with chef Andrea Carlson from Bishop's Restaurant. Bishop's is all about utilizing fresh food from local producers and sustainable growing. It was great meeting chef Carlson and talking to her about the industry, women in the industry and the kind of people who get into it. Apparently they've had a stagiere in their kitchen for some time. He's a lawyer who isn't changing careers. He just wants to keep a hand in. I'm happy to learn I'm not the only one in this limbo. And it was great to make just a salad, but not just a salad. Pea tips, baby kale, mizuna, etc. with turnips and raspberries and a fresh raspberry vinaigrette. Exploring different kinds of greens is something we rarely do nowadays because what you find in the supermarket is about as diverse as the gene pool in the Ozarks.

Andrea also told me about her most vivid food memory, involving a shipment of turnips from a local producer. Her description of the crisp, sweet taste was the one thing I had really wanted to hear out of everything else. I find that people who love food have the best food memories and it usually involves something simple, like turnips. I love hearing those stories because everyone's face changes when they tell them. It's like they're remembering their first loves. It's a reminder that the simplest things can bring you the most joy.

Confessions of a Stagiere -- Week Eleven

Whenever you take someone out of a kitchen equation, there's a noticeable difference. After what sounded like a great staff outing at the beach (which of course included some great food) it turns out the sous chef broke his arm during a touch football game. His absence was particularly missed during Thursday when apparently the number of diners hit a peak. I think he was supposed to be out for two weeks. Yikes.

Which meant, as usual, prep time was that much more precious and scarce. I know the drill by now: pick chervil tips, shaving turnip carpaccio, prepping shimiji mushrooms...

Lately I've also been making beet juice. I've mentioned this before, but not what the process is. The beet juice is used to give the hamachi a beautiful colour and flavour after it's been cured in salt. When you cut into the hamachi, there's a beautiful ring of beet juice on the outside with the pale flesh inside. It's gorgeous.

For the juice, you just peel, trim and cut up the beets and then use a juicer to get out all the blood red goodness, then strain to get the foam and solids out. The fun part is seeing the awesome red colour. The annoying part is the fact that this juice will stain ANYTHING. I wear gloves for every step of that process, including cleaning up the machine afterwards. I pray every week that I don't accidentally spill it all over myself. This hasn't happened yet. Knock on wood.

I got to tackle foie gras for the first time. If you've never seen a lobe of foie (and why would you have unless you worked at a restaurant) it's the size of a smaller papaya fruit, which is to say pretty damn large for a duck's liver. I had to devein it, the first step in making it palatable. Having never handled foie before, it was surprising to see how soft it is. It's just pure fat, basically, and it handles much the same way. You have to spread it out with your fingers, layer by layer, as you remove the stiff large main veins. Honestly, it was kind of disgusting. Fascinating -- but didn't really make me want to eat it. I think foie gras is one of those things that is less pleasant the more you know about it. But it is damned delicious. Why else would we eat it when there's not a single nutritional redeeming factor?

I will reiterate that I love learning new stuff. I mean, that's why I'm there and I think they know that. Sometimes I think they give me new tasks just to give me something to write about. Either way, keep it coming!

After weeks of hearing about it, Fernando finally came in to visit the kitchen. I could see the pride that Dale felt hosting someone, showing him his brigade, his food. Fernando was impressed by the professionalism of everyone there, and I'm glad that what I do with my Fridays is no longer an intangible mystery to him. Yet another example of how food brings people together.

I have to address something that keeps coming up. My radio coworkers keep asking me if I'm switching careers. Here's the thing. I have been working as a journalist for the past ten years. Working at the CBC was always my goal. I still love my job, even when I'm ready to throw myself out a window. As much as I love being in the kitchen, there are many, many reasons why making a switch would be almost impossible. The main reason being that I'm just that into my current career track.

But I will say that I frequently think about working at Lumiere when I'm not there. I can totally see the pull of working with food. Despite the long hours, usually terrible pay, verbal abuse and stress, clearly there's a love that many people feel that transcends all that. It sounds idealistic but it's true: why would so many people still do it if they didn't have to? It's because they want to be. That's something you only really figure out by being there, working, talking to the people who've chosen this as a career. This is precisely the kind of insight I was hoping to get by working in a kitchen and an eyeopening one to, on some level, understand.

I'm lucky to be able to do this in addition to my first love. In a perfect world, there would be some way for me to do both without having to work all the time, and for a long period of time. Obviously I can't be a stagiere forever (although I'm sure my chef wouldn't mind!) I'm just taking what I can get for as long as I can get it. Nothing lasts forever.

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 -- Addendum to Week Six

I can't believe I forgot to add this to my last post. So I'm standing there, working away doing I can't remember what. I hear the sous chef yell out, "Joan!"

I turn around and there's a hotel pan full of live spot prawns. Beautiful, red with white spots, crawling around, jumping out of the pan. I burst out into a huge smile. They're the most gorgeous things ever.

"These are the first delivery of live spot prawns this season," I'm told.

"They're here for two weeks a year."

This is why I'm a stage.

Then they all get their heads pulled off during prep. The life cycle of the spot prawn.

Confessions of a Stagiere -- Week Five

From May 1

Business is slowing down quite a bit. After Daniel Boulud's hectic visit, weekdays have been slow. Very slow. One night only six people came in for dinner. Today there are only fifteen. They've now opened up a patio for people to dine outdoors. So far no one's actually done it but at least it's getting people's attention. Slowly.

I get an update on Daniel's visit. Apparently he gets filmed just about everywhere he goes, and this trip was no exception. At least one cook was startled when Daniel Boulud appeared out of nowhere and shook his hand in front of a camera. "It was really weird". Having been on both sides, I agree. It IS really weird. This is why I love radio. No lenses.

After the visit also comes an announcement: they're closing the restaurant on Tuesdays from now on -- in addition to the usual Mondays. The recession rears its ugly head yet again. No workplace I'm at seems to be immune.

On the upside, I'm getting to learn how different elements are put together every week. This week: potato lyonnaise. They are delicious coin sized rolls of thinly sliced potato. It's part of the sous vide char dish. I never knew just HOW much was involved in making them until now.

First, you use a hand-cranked machine to spin out very thin strips of potato. Spread them out on a counter. Season with salt and pepper. Layer very thinly with a garlic puree and then a shallot mixture. Then you roll them up nice and tight and wrap them in cling film. Then poke a bunch of holes in the rolls and gently cook them in duck fat for about twenty minutes. Then unroll and rewrap. Saute the ones you'll use for service, then rewrap AGAIN. If you ever wondered where the "fine dining" line lies, it's somewhere in the midst of all that rolling.

Some cooks are hesitant to give me tasks I've already learned, whereas I welcome it. As much as I love learning new things, I at least feel comfortable doing things repeatedly. Seeing as my skill set is very limited, it gives me a feeling of great accomplishment to be able to take something on without a lengthy explanation. I can prepare the micro radishes for the terrine dish. I feel satisfied being able to write that.

Especially because my biggest challenge -- which I have yet to overcome -- is learning where everything is. Here is the typical scenario:

Cook: Joan, get me a pot about *measures with hands* this big, fill it with water and bring it to the boil
Me: Ok. *Goes to where pots are, search frantically, realize there is no pot there of that kind or if it's there I can't see it* Uh...I can't find the one you're talking about.
Cook: Ok. *Goes off, finds the exact pot they need and do the really simple thing I could'nt manage to do*
Me: *feels stupid*

Here's another one

Cook 1: Go get a bowl of ice from the other kitchen (at db Bistro).
Me: Ok. *goes off with bowl* Uhh...where's the ice?
Cook 2: Over there.
Me: OK. *goes off to corner.* uhh...how do you get the ice out of this thing?
Cook 3: *opens lid*
Me: Oh. *feels stupid*

You get the picture. The next time I do something when I DON'T have to ask feels fantastic.

Because there are fifteen people for dinner, the chef asks several of the staff to take a night off once their prep is finished. He will work the garde manger station. And I'll be working next to him. Gulp. At this point I haven't spent any prolonged time working with the chef and frankly it's a bit daunting. It's like having to produce Peter Mansbridge. Intimidating.

In reality, I actually got to learn more because there was more time to teach me. Like how to plate the crab dish. You have to shape the circlet of crab with your hands so that it's just the same height as the pieces of mango you have to wrap around it. Then you have to oh-so-carefully insert two pieces of tuille in a sort of v-shape to give it some height. Then you take a triangular piece of pickled papaya and arrange it against the tuille. Then you add fingerfuls of herbs, a celery leaf and a parsley leaf. Then you squirt some mango puree onto the plate and smack the bottom a few times to even it out. I haven't mastered this yet, having visions of the plate flying through the air into the nearby induction burner. Then you place the crab on top of that. Arrange two ricepaper rolls (that were conveniently precut for me), each facing a different direction. Then take a squeeze bottle of piquillo pepper puree and randomly dot the plate. You can do this all fairly far in advance. Just before it gets taken out you dot the plate with a green herb oil.

And this is just one dish. There's a lot to remember.

I was also reminded of how it's all a matter of practice. Watching everyone doing stations they're not familiar with was revealing. It also gives me hope that I CAN eventually figure some of this out.

I can now identify which actual plate goes with which dish for the items that are the most popular, like the beef and the duck and the char. I can anticipate which garnishes the chef is going to need from the garde manger station so I have them ready when I see the plates come out. I know which elements are going to come off which station. I'm no longer shy about (politely) calling for what I need. I'm learning the system. So I'm going to push myself even more. Next Friday I'm going in a couple hours earlier to learn how to set up the amuse bouche station from start to finish. One tiny step in the culinary world...one giant leap for me.

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.

Confessions of a Stagiere -- Week Two

From April 10th 2009

After first day jitters, second days are always easier. I wasn't worried about explaining myself to anyone. I could focus on observing and learning and doing my tasks. After an unsure beginning, my mind was starting to pick up on things.

I noticed that I was starting to see things differently. My fingers for instance. During the week, my fingers are just appendages attached to my palms that are at the ends of my arms. I use them for typing. That's pretty much their main function.

In the kitchen, my fingers are the best tools I have. I use every one to manipulate, wipe, adjust, tear, pinch. Even the oft overlooked ring fingers have functions beyond the decorative. I've started to value them infinitely more. Suddenly they all matter because without them, I'm pretty useless.

The way I look at what I'm doing has changed too. I spent the better part of an hour peeling and dicing butternut squash for quiche that's part of the amuse bouche. After a while I started looking at the pieces in the bowl in front of me. Each piece started out a bright orange at the top and got progressively more yellow at the bottom. It was kind of like candy corn. They were just lovely, all piled up in a mound. It was delightful to look at.

I'm starting to see each different art form within the overall culinary picture. It has to be said that there are no unattractive or unappetizing looking dishes. But for some reason one particular dish took my breath away.

It was a beet salad. Doesn't sound like anything special when you put it that way.

Here's what it looks like though: dark purple, candy striped and yellow beets, quartered and artfully arranged on a long white plate that's been painted with concentrated beet juice, careful attention paid to the angles. Then quenelles of white horseradish cream placed on top with sprigs of microgreens. I couldn't stop staring at it. I remember not wanting to breath while I was watching this. This, I thought, really IS an art form.

My hands are starting to take on new characteristics. Cooks are known for their asbestos fingers. They can withstand temperatures most of us would cringe at. Scars and calluses illustrate a lifetime of labour. Mine are a blank slate in comparison. But they're starting to take a different shape. I can feel the tips of my fingers hardening from heat and more frequent use. I think I'm also on my way to developing a knife callus at the base of my index finger. However, calluses generally start as blisters and my soon-to-be callus is currently a painfully burst one. I discovered it in the middle of my butternut squash chopping. Luckily I wasn't asked to cut anything else for the rest of the day. I'm looking forward to when that part hardens up. I just hope it heals in a hurry because I have a feeling I'll need to use it come next Friday.

With any job comes getting to know your coworkers. I'm the new girl -- girl being the operative word -- and discovered that apparently everyone was under strict orders not to say anything remotely crude around me, possibly for fear I'd run off screaming or sue for harrassment. I learned of this the previous week when I was asked what I thought of the kitchen culture in respect to how, well, crude it can be. I said I hadn't noticed much of anything.

"Well, to be honest, it's really toned down."
"Is it because I'm here?"
"Yeah."

The funny thing is that anyone who knows me knows I'm usually the first one to say something profane or outrageous or generally something that has guaranteed me a spot in hell. They don't yet know this about me but they probably will soon. They seem to be getting over it. I won't reveal the general topics of conversation but if you imagine a room full of twenty-something men who are crammed in a small room for the better part of 16 hours a day, you can imagine what those would be.

Everyone has and continues to be very kind and helpful, remembering to call me over to show me things they're doing. The meat cook showed me how to make a hollandaise sauce. More or less it's like a cooked mayonnaise. It was a highlight of my day, because it was a valuable lesson and also because of another hollandaise story I remember.

Months ago I was talking to another chef about working with our head chef, Dale. They were coworkers years ago, before either of them had become the superstars they are now. He said that he had taught Dale how to make hollandaise all those years ago, but that he didn't remember this until Dale had reminded him of it.

Now it seems that I, too, will have a hollandaise memory of my own.

Confessions of a Stagiere -- Week One

From my first week at Lumiere...April 3/09.

There's nothing like the first day at a new job. You can practically taste the anxiety bubbling up like bile. It crawls up into your throat and chokes you just as you ask the question, "What would you like me to do?"

Once I get in the kitchen there is some surprise at my return but there's always something to do. I learn to start getting into a rhythm of every task: whether it's cutting up the tips of romaine lettuce into "fronds" or picking the tips of chervil.

I've always cooked and helped to prepare food since I was a kid. My mother was always big into making her own food. Whenever we would go out she would inevitably say, "I could make that myself". Money was always tight. But good food was always paramount.

I remember many days sitting in front of the television with a big bowl of snow peas to prepare. It was theraputic, snapping off the ends and taking off the fibrous edges. I always made sure to check them all over once I was finished because there's nothing more unpleasant than eating a snow pea that hasn't been cleaned properly.
There's also a lot of camaraderie while you're preparing food. You're working towards a common goal whose end result (if you did it properly) would only be a good one.

All these "mom" food moments came back as I was helping to make ravioli. Their ravioli consists of a butternut squash filling and shaping the pasta squares into pyramids with square bases...that are also slightly rounded out. I was told to take my time with them.

My mother and I never made ravioli. We made gyoza, a water and flour dough rolled out into circles and filled with a meat mixture. I was never given the responsibility of handling the dough because I was never able to do it to my mother's satisfaction. Whenever I would fill them it was never the right amount of mixture. I was also never able to successfully replicate one of my mother's gyoza. A proper gyoza should be folded in half and crimped by hand so it looks like an elaborately edged purse. Try as I might, I just couldn't get the hang of it and it would always look primitive next to hers. So my sister and I would turn them into barnyard animals and whatever else we wanted, defiantly deformed.

The restaurant had taken a hit since I'd been there last. The number of customers willing to pay top dollar for a world class meal had fallen dramatically due to the recession. It pained me to see the reservation numbers (about half of what the dining room could accomodate). But this also allowed more time for experimentation and invention.

We all got to try the latest invention -- foie gras ice cream. I could see how foie gras would lend itself to ice cream, being pretty much all fat anyway. You could just blend it in. But what would a meat flavoured ice cream taste like? We all found out. The taste was very creamy, and then the foie gras flavour hit you hard and pretty much stayed put. It was cold, sweet foie gras. I didn't really know what to make of it. It was a culinary noodle scratcher. Others seemed thrilled and thought it could've been more savoury. It was definetely one of the more unique food experiences I've ever had.

Another new item being tested was a pheasant and pear terrine. "This terrine is going to be off the hook", one cook commented. I'd never heard a terrine described this way.

I had to ask: what draws people into this very specialized, exhausting, exhilirating road to food?

One was a pre med student in Victoria before he realized he wanted to work in food. He quit school, travelled, then came back and got a job as a dishwasher. I asked him what his parents had thought. "They were horrified." He went off to culinary school and is three years into a promising career. But to this day his family isn't completely convinced. His stories about 16 hour work days has not helped.

Another was studying math and training to be a bioengineer. How does an engineer wannabe go into cooking? "I was always thinking about what I was going to have for dinner." His mother's horrified reaction did nothing to stop his plans. His response is: "I can be an engineer when I'm forty, but I can't cook when I'm forty".

I'm feeling particularly self-conscious because I'm very aware of my position as outsider/interloper. I'm a radio producer who's in the kitchen...performing small tasks...following and observing...for what? People whose curiosity has finally gotten the better of them will ask me, "what are you doing here?" Good question, I think to myself. I'll get back to you when I have an answer. For now, I just reply, "I'm here to learn". It's cryptic but most are not curious enough to inquire further.

Last time during service I stood against one corner of the kitchen trying desperately to stay out of the way and stop my hair from catching fire on the incredibly hot salamander oven above my head. This time the chef looked at me and said "you're going to take care of the amuse bouche so you'll be involved with the service". Great, I thought.

One of the garde manger cooks showed me how to plate the amuse bouche. It consisted of three parts: a crab roll cut into thick coins and placed on top a small pinch ("just what you can hold in your fingers") of spaghetti squash, a squash soup with parmesan foam and a squash quiche cut into a square with yogurt and toasted pumpkin seeds on top. It all had to be assembled at the right time. It was easy enough to organize: you could prepare the bed of spaghetti squash and arrange the quiche ahead of time because they could be served at room temperature. But you had to time the soup just right. The foam came off another station so you had to yell out, "parm foam down" so the person with the foam would know when to pass it to you. The first time I had to do this I couldn't bring myself to yell out the order. "I'll do it next time," I said. And I did. Preparing the foam is fun: you buzz it first and then scoop it off, then drop it vertically from your spoon.

It feels great to be part of this team. All of them work together seamlessly, anticipating, communicating, and watching this culinary ballet up close is a thing of beauty.

At the end of the night, I head over to the office to talk to Dale. I thank him for letting me come in and ask if I can make this a weekly arrangement for the foreseeable future. He has no problems with this, doesn't ask any questions. I leave feeling great, with more skills and revelations and promises of more to come.

Confessions of a Stagiere

It hasn't exactly been a secret -- but not something I've written about either. I think it's time.

You can tell by scanning through my blog that I love food. Well, a few months back, through a series of food related incidents, I figured I should put my love of food and my love of writing together and do food journalism. This after I would tell people about stories on food I was working on. Finally someone asked me, "why don't you do this for a living?" Good question. Because I'd never considered it as a career possibility? Plus there really isn't any training to be a food writer. Everybody eats. But that's not enough to make you an "expert".

So what does make you a food "expert"?

Some people go to culinary school and become chefs. Some just go straight to work in a kitchen. Some travel the world, eating their way through the timezones. Some grow up on farms. Sometimes you're just a loudmouth that gets picked up by the Food Network (you'd like me to name some names wouldn't you? Pick one). In other words, nothing and everything can qualify you as an authority on the edible.

Having expertise to draw on is important to me. So I set about finding ways to do that.

I had originally thought about going to culinary school. In fact, I had applied and been accepted at the Art Institute in downtown Vancouver. It's a long story, but turns out due to recession related money matters and other things, this wasn't going to be an option after all.

After my day long stint at Lumiere back in January, I talked to the chef about my failed culinary school plans. He suggested I work as a stagiere (working for free) in his kitchen and learn that way.

Well, I took him up on it. Every Friday for the past few weeks I've been heading over to Lumiere, putting on whites and spending anywhere between 10 and 12 hours in the kitchen. What am I doing there? I help with prep for the first part of the day and assist with service during dinner, mostly plating the amuse bouche.

I've been dying to blog about this but there are reasons why I haven't. I don't want to make the chef and the staff uncomfortable in any way by making them feel overly scrutinized, especially when I have to work with them every week. Initially I wasn't sure what to do with the whole experience, but I've come to take it for what it is: insight into one of Vancouver's top kitchens, working with some incredibly talented people and doing one of my favourite things: working with food.

I figure if I want to be a food writer, what better time to start? At the very least I'm an expert on my own journey.

My fridays as a stagiere have become the highlight of my week. Whether or not this will eventually put me into any kind of field of expertise is debatable. But for now, I'm thrilled to go along for the ride -- and blog about it all the way. Postings to follow.