things i have been forgetting to tell you:

we had our first quiz last friday, and i got 99% :O
one of my instructors looks like count chocula :O :O
there is a girl in my class with the same name as me, and we were partners last week :O :O :O

* * * *

well, i did actually finish everything on the school side of my to-do list over the weekend! and we just finished eating the delicious chicken stew i made, along with some bread i made in class and froze.

Today was pork butchery day, and this is what we started out with:


(my classmates are ghosts)
I personally cut off the jowls, and the front leg (trotter and hock), cut cubes for grinding, and a bunch of other skin-fat-bone-meat activities. it was kind of fun! i forgot to put on my hat and didn't notice until around lunchtime :O and then right after i noticed THEN one of the instructors noticed too. booooo. not a big deal though.
doing the butchery took til around 1:00, when we made this :


I don't have my paper at home, so this is my best description: Pork Schnitzel with Grilled Eggplant and Belgian Endive in a Cream Corn Sauce. it was delicious minus the eggplant. i just don't like eggplant. i also do not particularly enjoy thyme, but i do like basil.

they have Moose Tracks ice cream here, point Vancouver.

Thursday:

(Ginger-Orange-Chili Stir Fry with Jasmine Rice)


(Grilled Flank Steak & Potato Dauphinois, Roasted Tomato Provencal, Bordelaise Sauce, Turned Rutabaga)

Friday:


Mini Burgers!


(Roulade of Beef (Involtini) with Fried Polenta-Cheese Cake and Caponate)

This weekend i have made stew, cream of carrot soup, practiced turning vegetables, bought some kitchen stuff, hemmed my chef pants and my sweatpants, made chocolate chip muffins and homemade lemonade, done a wackload of laundry, and sharpened my paring knife. And i still have to watch some Rouxbe videos (online cooking school partnering with my school - check it out, it's awesome. www.rouxbe.com), read a chapter in my textbook, iron my chef clothes, sharpen my chef's knife, and do a review sheet to hand in on Monday. and i should probably do the dishes. :P

Yesterday was chicken day. I successfully deboned a whole chicken by myself! 2 legs, 2 thighs, 2 breasts, 2 wings, 2 chicken tenders :) we took one breast and turned it into this:


(Chicken Breast en Papillote - which means it was cooked in a pouch, in this case, parchment paper:)

two thighs got turned into this:


(Braised Chicken Thighs)

and then today another breast got turned into this:


(Chicken Saltimboca) This is one of my favorites so far!! chicken breast cut into 4 pieces, each topped with blue cheese, a sage leaf, and a slice of proscuitto, then pounded between parchment paper and pan fried. we made a sauce out of the stuff left in the pan and butter and probably white wine, cuz that's in pretty much everything :P anyways, it was delicious. and those are turned carrots on the side. YOU try to make that shape. i think it's stupid.

next we baked the pot pies that we prepared yesterday, with drumstick meat:


(Chicken Pot Pie) which did not hold a candle to my mom's, and i barely ate any of it. well, i did eat the flaky pastry on top :D

AS IF that's not enough food, we made stir fry out of the chicken tenders:


(Chicken Stir Fry)

We also made fried chicken, using a wok and canola oil, and i did take a picture, but it looks disgusting and didn't taste that good either, nevermind that i don't really like fried chicken to begin with, SO you don't get to see it. We had to julienne a bunch of vegies for the stir fry earlier in the day, and one of my instructors said he would give mine a 7 out of 10! woo! i feel good about that :) i'm having an ok time taking it day by day, and i am learning a lot. the amount of homework some nights is still a little difficult to cope with, but they said the other day that after the 4th week it all gets a bit easier. looking forward to that :P

this is gonna be quick. on friday i took this:


and turned it into this:


and then this:


(Pan Seared Sole with Beurre Blanc)

and also this:


(Steamed Sole Paupiette with Saffron Veloute Sauce)

then, that evening, i flew on the red-eye to London, Ontario for my college roommate's wedding Saturday afternoon!


the next day i had a pretty late flight scheduled, but i managed to get on an earlier one that had a 2 hour layover on wpg! so i got to see my brother and sister-in-law and my parents, which was nice :) i also got to lay on my couches :D then it was back to the west coast, where we descended into this :


i mean wow.

needless to say, i was incredibly tired, but i even did homework when i got home :P then today at school, we made this:


(Mac and Cheese with Bechamel Sauce)


(Eggs Benedict with Hollandaise Sauce )


(Steak with Sauce Poivrade and Sauce Chasseur (demi-glace derivatives))

to the textbook! tomorrow we are boning chickens.

today we made canapes (fancy name for appetizers):



from left:
Smoked Salmon with Fried Capers and Beurre Maitre D'Hotel
(capers are buds from the caper bush - i always thought they were fish-related lol. and the last part means butter with herbs and other flavorings. which is strange because we actually used cream cheese...curious)

Roast Beef with Remoulade and Fried Shallots
(remoulade is a spread, this one is made with mayo, mustard, gherkin, capers, lemon, parsley, salt & pepper)

Shrimp Waldorf (waldorf has celery, apple, walnut, mayo and herbs/spices)

Gravlax with Cucumber, Radish and Ginger Threads
(gravlax is Norwegian, something about how they used to bury the salmon to cure it)

next we made a cream soup (from random ingredients distributed by our instructors - we got mushrooms. yuck.) and tea sandwiches.



from left:

Roast Beef Roll-up things (they don't have a name cuz they got made up from leftover meat and spread)
Cucumber Tea Sandwiches (cream cheese, cucumber, bread! pretty simple)
Parmesan Crisp (frico) with Herbed Goat Cheese Quenelle and Honey. i have no idea what quenelle means. but that is a walnut on top :)

this weekend i am flying to Ontario for my college roommate's wedding! no time for homework :D

today wasn't such a great day, my knife cuts aren't coming along nicely (partly because it's hard to be motivated to put effort into practicing something you reeeeeally don't care about. (come on! 2mm x 2mm x 2mm??? you can't even taste it at that point!) i also get really flustered when it's time to gather ingredients and do prep which frustrates me cuz i'm usually pretty organized. and of course it seems as though everyone has no problems. We also made and ate a lot of salads today, which i did not like. tomorrow is bread and we get to eat sandwiches, so that sounds really good.

Sometime between the last post and this one i made cream of broccoli soup, which looked like this:


phil said it was delicious, so lets go with that :) those are biscuits in the background (grandma's recipe). schnetje i think is how it's spelled.

one thing i AM enjoying, is biking to and from school! phil and i went to mountain equipment co-op to get rain covers for backpacks and a rack and a helmet for me. i got a kid's helmet!! lol, it's pretty. i'll try to remember to take a pic soon. anyways, total transit time is less to bike than to bus, and i get to leave 20 minutes later! and i get exercise! it's a really nice way to unwind too after my day.

today we got out a little early, and i made a mayonnaise, crepes, and chicken vegetable soup before 5:30! unfortunately, i'd cut up some of the vegies a few days ago, and the rutabaga had turned sour already, which pretty much ruined the soup. that'll teach me to a) use older vegies and b) not taste stuff before i put it in. but the crepes were yummy! then we went grocery shopping, which includes a bunch of carrots for me to practice my knife cuts. i then spent the entire evening reading my textbook, making flashcards, and practicing knife cuts. i don't like not having a lot of free time :( tomorrow we are getting wet stones with which to actually sharpen our knives, like create new edges once the knife is dull. a steel just hones a knife, it doesn't sharpen it.

alright, it's definitely past my bedtime. tomorrow half the week is over!

here it is, folks

what a week. and where to begin? i did manage to finish one more sewing project before i started school on Tuesday, which was this duvet cover:



it's made from thrifted sheets (salvation army is my new favorite thrift shop) and buttons, and took me almost three whole days cuz i kept reading instructions wrong and with this size of project, re-doing things takes a l.o.t. of t.i.m.e. But when i was finally finished, i was/am really proud of it. It's covering the fuzzy blue and tan blanket we have.

and then i had to break up with sewing to date cooking.

Tuesday: orientation day at my school, which meant a LOT of sitting and listening, getting to know each other, etc. we did wear our uniforms all day, which look like this:


but not with sandals, i have kitchen clogs that are cooler than they sound. also, have i mentioned i hate our camera? my face is all tomato-ey. Anyways, we got quite a bit of reading homework, upwards of 50 pages in the heaviest textbook i've ever owned (over 1000 pages), and i didn't really think about it and phil and I went out and bought me a better bike to ride to school (we ended up selling the one we brought for me (that we scored on free day last year) for a whopping $140!! We may start making anual trips here to sell cheap bikes for more :) anyways, i left the reading til 8:45pm and i was already dead tired (and i even had a nap after school) so it was SO hard to read cuz my eyes just wanted to close. So i only got to bed around 11pm, and then i had to get up already at 6:30am for school the next day.

Wednesday: arguably one of the worst days of my life. i almost quit. nothing in particular happened, everyone is really nice, and the teachers are great and encouraging, but all the talk about the industry and becoming a chef really got to me cuz all i want to do first and foremost is learn how to cook. that's it. i'm not necessarily interested in perfecting my knife skills and such (these are all things i was thinking on Wednesday, to clarify), cuz i probably don't want to be a chef. i had manymany reasons that i wanted to quit and just come home and go back to regular safe life. I called phil in tears at lunch (he had the day off) and we agreed to talk about it after i got home. I made it through the afternoon and started walking to my bus stop when phil pulled up beside me and i just lost it. i cried all the way home and just felt absolutely terrible. i had no idea how i would make this decision, because neither (at the time) outcome would be a good one (either i'd have to go back to school, or undo everything we did to get here, which were both bad ideas to me). that was the worst i have felt since...when i tried to do the cga course for a month a few years ago and i had a similar meltdown. Excpet i'm never sorry i quit that lol. OH yeah and the night before i had an anxiety attack in the middle of the night where i woke up SOAKED in sweat which has NEVER EVER happened to me before in my life! i tried to use that as a sign i should quit lol.

Anyways, in hindsight, the combination of little (and very bad) sleep, complete change my schedule as i know it, and something new (i'm not a fan of change) was a pretty terrible combination and i got inside my head and freaked out. but i have decided to stick with it and do my best (even if that means practicing knife skills everyevery night) and see what happens in the end.

Thursday was a better day, but still not a good day. We started making stock i think. the week has been a bit of a blur.

Friday: we made a chicken/vegetable soup with the stock we made the day before, and a cream of broccoli soup. I and my teammate (she's from SK, we're the only prairie girls) undersalted the chicken soup and oversalted the broccoli soup. booooo. after school i went out with about half my class to a pub. i didn't really want to, but i felt i should. and besides, everyone is really nice. i had a good time, spent most of it talking with my teammate. we get along really well, and i'm sad that this was our only week working together (we get different partners every week). My homework for the weekend was:
- a week 1 review for memory
- a recipe conversion two ways for memory (us to metric)
- pick a presentation topic
- read through monday's lesson
- read a chapter in my textbook
- make chicken stock
- make a cream soup
- 3 hrs of knife cuts, bring back 1/2 cup julienne (2mm x 2mm x 5-6cm)

i banged out most of it yesterday, i saved the soup for today cuz it's raining and cold. And i have to do more knife cuts. but luckily i have had some time to just relax as well. i hope i can sew a little today. i did manage a little bit this week, like i hemmed my chefs pants myself (and i did a really good job!!), and i cut some pj pants into shorts.

yesterday i drove my new bike by myself to pick phil up from work (which includes crossing a major bridge and some major roads and takes about 40 minutes) which has given me the confidence to bike to school myself :) we stopped at sunset beach afterwards for a bbq our church put on. it started raining right when we got there, and most of them had already eaten, but they made us some burgers anyways and we had a good time talking with everyone. It's a really small group, there were only about 20 people there. but they're all super nice and we're really glad we've made efforts to get to know them. then we biked home in the rain, which wasn't that bad. biking is way less frustrating than driving in a car or on the bus i think. i'm looking forward to biking tomorrow.

i feel like i left some things out, but the small details kinda get lost if i don't update more often. i'll try to if i have more time. oh yeah i was going to say how i made stock. i even took pics.

start with fresh bones (these are chicken), rinse in cold water and then put in a pot with cold water to cover them about 3" above. the meat guy at our grocery store was really helpful and said i should come ask him about culinary stuff anytime!


then you let it come to a simmer and skim off the impurites and fat as they rise to the surface. but you have to be careful not to let it boil or the stock will be cloudy.


once most of the skimming is done, add the mirepoix (meer-eh-pwah) which is a 3:1 ratio to the bones by weight and consists of 50% onions, 25% carrots, and 25% celery, all cut in 3/4" to 1" pcs.

you also add the bouquet garni (boo-kay gar-nee) which is (traditionally) parsley, peppercorns, bayleaves, and thyme, wrapped in a cheesecloth sachet. then you let that simmer for at least an hour, or a couple of hours.




then you strain it and let it cool completely (in cold water in the sink - make sure none gets in the stock!) before putting it in the fridge.


you don't usually season stock cuz you'll be using it for other stuff and you can season it then. like how i'm going to make cream of broccoli soup now. off i go!

Yesterday was a full day! First we got up reeeeally early (7:15) to practice taking the bus to school (i got a bus pass!). i know, i'm dorky. anyways, it took an hour total, and then we lazed around for a bit before deciding to go back to bed :) after we got back up we had lunch and then...biked to my school and back! we have done that before, when we went for an observation, but this time i used a bike that we borrowed from phil's work (i bussed there and we biked home) and it was MUCH more enjoyable than with my MCC bike :S AND. i wore a pair of phil's bike shorts! with the bum padding! it felt reeeaally weird until we started biking and it was actually pretty comfortable, especially since my bum was still sore from the day before. (who bikes without getting a sore bum?) the suspenders were a little too big though heehee. after that, phil went for a job interview at...lululemon!!!! are you thinking of all the cheap clothes i will get? cuz i am. phil thought it would be funny to tease me this morning that maybe families don't get the discount but i reeeeally hope so!

anyways, then we brought the bike i used back to his work and then went to stanley park to see if we could see the whale that swam into the harbour a few days ago. we didn't see it :( THEn when we got home phil did dishes while i made supper. this is what i made:


it's Halibut with Morrocan Sauce and Couscous. Look good? It wasn't. The fish was done well i thought, but we don't like couscous (we've finally decided) and i definitely didn't like the seasoning. Plus the sauce had clam juice in it which Phil couldn't really get past :S SO. we threw it away (yes i know, the children in africa; i support them in other ways) and pulled out an emergency frozen pizza! we decided that we will always keep frozen pizzas in the freezer for when supper goes bad.

After supper (we're talking like 9pm), i started the sewing project for the day, which was a leather purse. i finished it this morning and it looks pretty good! i think the shape is a little strange for a bag, and i had a bunch of hiccups (broken needle, leather rips, (if it indeed is leather, i ripped apart a thrifted jacket and the tag was gone) AND my phil had to explain one of the steps to me :O BUT. the sense of accomplishment is pretty awesome :D also i LOVE the color (dark purple). and doesn't the one pic where it's closed make it look like Dory from Finding Nemo?? i think so :)



a few days ago i also made a fabric cubby, but i didn't use strong enough interfacing (i think?) so it doesn't really hold anything without collapsing. it's pretty though :)


today i am going to try to bake bread again. yes i am. yesiamyesiamyesiam. (comment if you know where that's from!) or maybe tomorrow :)

ps. i sent out an email update yesterday, but i'm having trouble with the mts.net addresses, so if you didn't get the email, that's why. i'm periodically trying again, but i just did and it came back to me again.

happy birthday phil!

sewing update:

i made a plushie toy out of children's t-shirts



a pillow cover out of a pillow case and piping


and i hemmed a thrift store skirt so it's awesome


on the rest of our holidays we:

mini-golfed


lawn bowled


went down to the dock


boated/fished



and much more but it takes too long to upload the photos :P

i'll leave you with a couple pics of what we came upon on our drive back to BC: