Learning by making mistakes

The good news is that I'm still up and running. The not-so-good news is that I'm totally exhausted. What did I get myself into?


The past few days of class were intense to the tenth thousandth degree. At one point last night I had four pots going on four different burners, while rolling my puff pastry and watching the oven. I experienced one of those moments like in the movies where everything stops moving except for you and for a brief moment you look around and think to yourself - how did I get here and what the heck am I doing?


I don't even know where to begin by telling you about the past few days. It's been replete with veal stock reductions, chicken broth thickened with kneaded butter, leeks in white sauce, chopping up red peppers into such small cubes that it's hard to remember what the original thing looked like, rolling puff pastry time and time again and watch it poof in the oven (thank goodness), whisking Chantilly cream BY HAND (I've never had such a good workout in my life), piping the Chantilly cream and doing a crapola job at it, hardening caramel, quiche-making extravaganza, making fruit cakes, madeleines, and lions and tigers and bears - OH MY!


Here are some photos of this week's work:

quiche lorraine

madeleines

fruit cake

saint-honore. the chef said the piping was terrible. it was, but it was my first time ever piping anything!

It's human nature to want to survive. Well, at LCB Paris, we're all hanging on by a wee little thread. The chefs say things to us like "this is a catastrophe" and "if this had been a final exam - hmmm...not so good". However, they also say things like "you are here to learn - how are you going to learn if you don't make mistakes"?


I agree with that.