4.20.2010

Lesson 8: SMACKDOWN

Before I left for culinary school, anyone who watched Top Chef or Iron Chef tried to warn me with tales of boot camp and tears. But I thought that only applied to the wimps!

Last week, however, I got a taste of the intensity they were talking about...

At times, the kitchen was so chaotic that I couldn't pull out the camera. We made a variety of meat plus potatoes dishes and tomato sauce, "salsa española" (a roux-based tomato sauce, almost as amazing as this [I miss you, Eve]) and a béchamel-based pasta dish. My french fries were not uniform (time for a cutting review...the ellipse, the ellipse!), and my steak wasn't cooked fully through.

But don't worry- there was plenty of time for a little joshing.

In pasta class, we made a delicate pasta flower:

Red pepper tagliatelle (we made it by creating another flour corona, adding egg, puréed red bell pepper and salt!) plus parmesan cream sauce:

Spinach tagliatelle (with a "traditional American sauce" of chopped carrots and peas):

Next, we made a bunch of French veggie dishes. 
The lovely Rachel (double shoutout!) making some French potato dish (that was basically complicated latke):

Ratatouille!:

I made potato croquettes by making mashed potatoes...

, chilling, putting them into a pastry bag, squirting/rolling them into little balls, dousing in flour/egg/bread crumbs...


and frying! (some boys made these; ours were daintier and not squirting out the sides, aka better):

Potato gratin (baked potato slices, cream, butter, CHEESE) and the extremely complicated latke. Clearly, a big lesson of the day was that putting things into round silver ramekin-like vessels makes them look way more professional:

Guilherme with the finished products:

And a celebration of youth/Buenos Aires/culinary school on my roof:



More photos from our weekend excursion to Tigre (where the beautiful people summer) to come!


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