Back In It

Awwwwww Yeah it feels good to be back at school!!!  Hollah!!

Say what you will about Culinary school.  I will probably agree with most of it.  But when all trash is done being said, I still feel revitalized to be back in CIA kitchens!

The best feeling is when I’m running through the halls on an errand to the storeroom, the dish room, or to the compost bin, and I find another student running along too. Most students walk.  They don’t have the adrenaline kicking in.  But every so often, I run into one…and then I run with that one.  The real hard-core students find each other quickly.  The whack ones are left behind in the dust.  But they don’t care anyway.  They think we’re crazy.  We think they’re slow.  And too chatty.  Shut up and work, yo.  We’ll chat at family meal.

I reconnected with a buddy I met in an elective called Food Jobs last February.  I saw him again a month later at Blue Hill, where he was externing, and I was trailing.  One time I saw him running down the hall even though he had a damaged hip.  He was hauling ass down the hall with a cane and a recycling bin.  Thats what I’m talking about!  Today I showed up for an interview at a campus restaurant, and dude was there making sauce with a giant smile on his face.  Now that’s the type of buddy I like.  Totally driven.  Totally busy.  Totally luvin it.  Totally on the same track as me.

The other day, my chef got on the kitchen microphone 45 minutes before lunch service and simply exclaimed:  “Push yourselves!”  I don’t know about some of the sleepy cats in my class, of which there are a scant few, thankfully, but that’s all he needed to say.  We kicked it into high gear and made magic happen.  And the food was bangin!

The standards are so high there.  I got busted for adding an extra 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda in my griddle cake batter yesterday morning (at 3am by the way).  Chef could tell by the way the cake rose on the flattop.  It rose an extra 1/8 cm, and chef noticed this.  An eighth of a centimeter!!  How do you notice something that subtle?!  I love that!

I could go on and on, but it’s homework time.  And I need to get to sleep by 5pm.  I have an hour commute to a class that starts at 2am.  YUP!