i sure am enjoying this thread and suggest you save your posts as a journal... sometimes posts are lost here.

it's really fun to read.

quote:

Originally posted by apple*:
i sure am enjoying this thread and suggest you save your posts as a journal... sometimes posts are lost here.

it's really fun to read.

True, she could have a blog. I was required to keep a journal for my Europe MBA class so I wrote daily blog entries with photos. Now I can go back to that blog anytime, and it's full of details I have since forgotten.

quote:

Originally posted by apple*:
i sure am enjoying this thread and suggest you save your posts as a journal... sometimes posts are lost here.

it's really fun to read.

I might save them. When I'll have the time to copy/paste all of them...beats me! Maybe winter break. Hopefully I'll remember!

Our Chef was back today! Yay! Never thought I'd ever say that . He's a nice guy....just very intimidating during production.

We baked off our pies (apple and peach, apple has the old fashioned full crust and the peach as the lattice). My apple crust came out funny because I tried to cheat and stretch the dough after I trimmed too much off . I got a B on it, oh well it tasted great! I got an A on my peach! Even though I added a little too much of the juice from the filling into the pie and it bubbled up a lot discoloring the edge of the inside of the pie. Gotta practice to know not to do that right?

We made and piped eclairs and rosettes. No pictures yet since we're filling them tomorrow. Of course Chef makes it look sooo easy. Most of my rosettes puffed up too much and then fell over in the oven . Drat. Tomorrow we are trying them again and baking them for our practical exam. Thursday we will fill them (with pastry cream) and submit them with a pastry cream fruit tart (shortbread dough, pastry cream, cut fresh fruit) for our practical. I'm excited to make another fruit tart, that was fun! Terrified about screwing up the damn eclairs. No time to practice at home! Tomorrow I have a meeting before class and need to get some research done at the library for a paper and then Thursday before class I have to go take a Food Handler's test. Ugh.

Pictures:

Pear tart with almond filling and topped with a little cinnamon sugar:



Peach pie



Apple pie

Oh and dough-stealer's karma (i think anyway) came back and got 'em. We had to put our pie doughs in the freezer yesterday so it would stay fresh to fill and bake off today. Someone didn't wrap theirs well enough and the plastic wrap blew off the tray making their dough so dry it was unusable . I'm bad for thinking that's funny but hey, how hard is it to correctly cater-wrap a tray??

Last night we did "Iron Pastry". Which has nothing to do with Iron Chef so I don't know why our Chef was calling it that other than because we were doing a ton of things at once. We had to fill and top our eclairs from the day before, make more pastry cream and ganache for our practical tomorrow. Make Blitz Puff Pastry and bake it off. Make eclairs as part of our practical and bake them off. And make the shortbread dough for our fruit tart tomorrow.

Plus I had to prep Chef's station for his morning class, 4 more recipes to scale, bag, and tag.

All in 4 hours. The puff pastry took 3 hours itself. So my partner and I had to split up the tasks and I had to do my share in between roll-ins/while it was resting.

I came home and fell over.

I have nothing personal against smokers. But my partner smokes and takes a 10 minute smoke break every hour. In a 4 hour production session he is gone 40 minutes at least. Little ridiculous IMO. There are other smokers in the class and they only take one break if they take one at all. Since he doesn't tell me when he's going on a smoke break he left the milk/butter on the stove for our pastry cream and LEFT. Didn't tell me. So I'm back at our station rolling out the puff pastry and Chef starts yelling about someone's milk boiling over. Yup. That's me! UGH. So now our pastry cream isn't right and we don't have time to redo it before the practical.

So now my practical grade tonight is going to get screwed over because we had too much stuff to do so we couldn't double check our partner all the time. Little bitter about it. If we're supposed to double check our partner all the time how come we're scheduled to do a TON of things in a short period of time? We obviously have to split up tasks and hope for the best.

Off to study some more! Our written exam tonight is on ice creams, custards, puddings, pies, pastry creams, etc. That's a LOT of stuff to memorize! The whole freaking test is short answer. Not even fill in the blank! Ugh.

Smoker dude's karma is bad. I can smell it.

Oops. That was your mom talking on Muffin's computer. But I'm kinda liking that hip avatar over there to my left.

Who the heck is Adam?

Man, that apple pie looks amazing.

The atmosphere sounds competitive, and not in a good way. And I thought the pre-laws and pre-meds were bad when I was in school. Unbelievable.

Hang in there. Aren't you glad you aren't like some of these characters you're working with?

Also, what is it with chefs who smoke? Doesn't smoking destroy one's palette? EDIT: palate, I meant, of course--the food can still be pretty.

quote:

Originally posted by rustyfingers:
The atmosphere sounds competitive, and not in a good way. And I thought the pre-laws and pre-meds were bad when I was in school. Unbelievable.

Hang in there. Aren't you glad you aren't like some of these characters you're working with?

Also, what is it with chefs who smoke? Doesn't smoking destroy one's palette?

I'm so glad I'm not like "these people". My partner has flat out said he doesn't give a flip about this class. Ugh. There goes my grade on our shared assignments. I understand that he's culinary and this is the baking course he has to take but come on, you think your pastry chef is going to show up on time or even show up every day? Please. You have to know how to make puff pastry and simple pies and stuff to successfully run your own restaurant (or get hired in a great place).

Between the culinary students that just don't care/forget about half the stuff they're doing and the people like me that are trying their best to start out on the right foot in the program it's a chaotic kitchen.

I'd assume smoking destroys the palette but I'm not sure. It seems like over half of our class smokes.

no chance of swapping partners and getting paired w another baking oriented person?

quote:

Originally posted by piqaboo:
no chance of swapping partners and getting paired w another baking oriented person?

I wish! Everyone else is happy with their partners/no one likes my partner.