Week 4: A month already?

I cannot believe that it's been almost a month since I started school. I also cannot believe that my first class is almost over! I have finals this week, FINALS! And am seriously wondering when I'm going to find the time to study for them. If only I could read and drive up and down I-5, I'd be set.

Anyway, this last week was made up of cooking massive amounts of vegetables, practicing and having a mock test on our knife skills and starting on the ServeSafe training, which is the nationally mandated food service safety certification we'll need to have.

The vegetable cookery was interesting, starting out with a super hectic first day. I wasn't a huge fan of my braised fennel, which tasted like licoricy mush to me, but the chef seemed to think it was ok. SIDENOTE: I haven't really talked about the structure of the school day, other then the in-kitchen time. We start in the kitchen at 4 p.m., usually do some sort of quiz/discussion/tasting for the first half hour, then get to cooking our meals. Food is supposed to be plated by 6:15 p.m. so we can start tasting and then we have to have the kitchen cleaned up by 7 p.m. We then head into the classroom for a lecture, video, discussion, etc., but only after we spend about an hour talking about the food we cooked. The chef gives his opinions, we all give ours and that's that. Back to the cooking, the second day I got to make glazed carrots, which was actually really fun and simple. I got to use a spice that our chef had received from a friend from Dubai and I was really happy with the look and taste of my finished product. Everyone else seemed to think they were pretty tasty too. The third veggie day, a day when most students venture a little further outside the recipe's "suggestions," my partner and I requested some sausage for our veggie skewers.

Let me just say that sausage (and a little shrimp scavenged by our lab chef) tends to trump almost any other recipe tweaking, especially when we haven't gotten to cook (or eat) any meat yet. The skewers were delicious, and despite being pretty tired from the week, I left Friday night feeling pretty good.

I also had to give a presentation on a vegetable this week. My veg was a beet, which I personally do not care for. But, being the overachieving dork I am, I set out to illustrate BY HAND, a poster that I could hide behind while talking. Come to find out, there are lots of overachievers in my class who gave really nice presentations which made me feel totally silly for thinking I'd overdone it. Next up, Foodborne Illness presentations. YUM.

At this point in school, I'm feeling pretty comfortable. I like my classmates (some of us are even Facebook friends, hi guys!) and despite the impending tests this week, I feel a lot less anxiety about showing up everyday. The things that are starting to wear on me are the 90+ miles of driving I'm doing everyday, being gone from 9 a.m.-10 p.m. M-Th and not having a whole heck of a lot of time with my husband. But honestly, these are literally the only things I can think to complain about. Because the rest of the time, I pretty much can't keep a smile off my face. And I can't stop running through knife cuts when I lay in bed at night.

It's busy, it's a bit intense and overwhelming, but it's a good, good life.