Week 3 was a success in my opinion in that I managed to organize notes according to the dishes that we were going to make. Usually, the chef would be all over the place because the way the class was organized was based on mise en place and demo. At a given time, we might have a demo, not for a single dish but multiple components of multiple dishes. It can be confusing at times but there is a good reason why they did what they did. Certain dishes need time to cook from scratch, for example, a stew or a brown stock. In addition, those multiple dishes have the same ingredient but might be cut in a different way. Why emince a garlic for the first dish now and then finely chop two garlic cloves for a later dish? It’s inefficient and the best way is to get our mise en place done for an ingredient in one shot. Had I organize the way I did two weeks ago, my notes too will be all over the place.

Another thing that we did was turning vegetables. Quelle horreur! My turned veg was not even but after deciding to turn 1 kg of carrots in the weekend, my skills had improved a bit. Practice makes perfect, right?  But my issue with turning vegetables is that it produces a ton of trims. On average, it’s about 60% trims! Some people think that would make a good stock but I was not in need of stock, so I stir fried it and ate them. Why waste perfectly good carrots that just happened to be in odd shapes? In a restaurant (even at home), even cuts facilitates even cooking. While that’s true, my trims are edible as well, despite having some crunchy bits on one end and overly soft bits on the other end. It’s OK, I can do that at home.  =)