Sixth Week

My assignment is in the scatter area, which includes the serving line and the accoutrements for food service. We provide the hot and cold drinking cups, the napkins and plastic wrapped "silverware", bread rolls and butter, bottled and machine drinks, and condiments for the burgers. Keeping the area clean by wiping up the spills is part of the job as well.
The food service area is shared by a separate short order cooking area.
As with any public institution, we have our share of sticky fingered individuals and those who want more food for less money.
A young blind woman complains to me that the students are ignoring her as she stands in front of the short order station and is unable to fill out the usual paper order form.
The class practices making six sauces that were demonstrated to us last week. I am happy to learn more about these sauces and have the recipes to make them at home. Needless to say, the ingredients we use at home are of much better quality. For instance, I use real milk to make a cream sauce, while the school uses powdered milk.
We are carving pumpkins in class to take home for Halloween. Now all our knives need to be sharpened!

End of the Fifth Week

Peeling and decorating mushrooms, making crepes, and flipping fried eggs in the pan, are the techniques we practice during the last day of skills development. I must say, I'm glad we don't normally start at 6:30 am. That little bit of extra sleep makes a big difference. Some of my classmates have jobs outside of school that keep them up until late, and they walk around with half lidded eyes.
In theory exercises, George demonstrates the main and small sauces. The main brown, (or mother sauce), is called Espagnole. The cook uses this as a base, and adds to it to make various smaller sauces.
Another of the mother sauces is called cream, white, or Bechamel sauce. The cook can perk up the flavor of a white sauce by adding a half of a peeled onion with attached bay leaves, skewered by cloves. From this base come the cheese and sour cream sauces.
The third mother sauce is Chicken Veloute. From this base come the poullet and curry sauces.
This is probably more than you wanted to know. :>)

Etc.

This morning, the skills development class consists of peeling grapefruit and oranges with our knives, and sectioning them, both the fancy way and the utilitarian way. We also discuss the technique for hard boiling eggs, with a bath of ice water for cooling.
In class, we make 3 different soups with a base we cooked yesterday. It is a thickened mixture of onions, carrots, and celery, called mire poix. Two of the soups go in a pot to be served for lunch, and we share the third soup called "black box". The name comes from a test given to cooks, where they are required to use all the ingredients in a black box to make a soup. We are able to use any ingredients available to us in the kitchen.
There is an interesting thing happening through the student union of Clark
College. Several times a month they give away free pizza or free hamburgers to the students. This food is apparently ordered and served from an outside source. Because the event is held in the auditorium next to the dining room, it slows the food purchases in the cafeteria, of everything but desserts. We scramble to keep desserts on the line. Today they go through three trays of carrot cake, three trays of banana cake, three trays of zuccini cake, one tray of cheese cake with strawberry sauce, and a tray of hastily prepared vanilla pudding.

Fifth Week

Each week, some of us "newbys" are given a class on skills development. We are in the department at 6:30 am, before the day begins in the kitchen. A management student demonstrates various skills. So far we are practicing using a sharpening stone, a steel to hone the knife blade, cutting the various vegetables and piping techniques. Today we are piping mashed potatoes into pretty rosettes. All of these things are very interesting to me, and will be useful in my home kitchen. Stay tuned for more skills I will be practicing as the week of these classes progresses.
In the kitchen, I am helping the dessert station, which is a dangerous place for a sugar addict. Gingerbread, cheesecake with raspberry sauce, chocolate chip cookies, pineapple upside down cake, oh my!

Fourth Week

The pantry is my work station this week. We provide the lettuce, cut vegetables, fruit, and dressings for the salads on the cafeteria line. All of the salad ingredients are placed in metal pans, resting on ice, to keep the contents cool enough so bacteria doesn't grow. We refill the pans during lunch, which starts at 10am.
I am working with several men who have lost their jobs at the Camas paper mill, due to downsizing, and are being retrained. They are all interested in learning a new skill, and participate with enthusiasm. Then there are several young people who are on a free ride from the government, and they do as little as possible. Many days they only show up for the free lunch. This is my first exposure to people getting away with that type of behavior. Guess I have been cloistered away from reality for 48 years of working in the medical profession.
Today, the culinary students at my lunch table are a young Hispanic man, a young Black man, and a woman in her 50's from Hong Kong. We are an ethnically diverse group as well.

Thickeners

Today we are learning methods of thickening liquid. George demonstrates in the class room, with a propane burner, how to make a roux, which consists of flour and butter. He goes on to teach us other thickening agents such as cornstarch and arrowroot.

Woo Hoo! I get a chance to cook carmelized onions for the first time. It should be easy to make French Onion soup at home, now that I have mastered that part. The soups I am helping to make are very popular in the cafeteria. We make four gallons at a time in two huge steam pots in the kitchen. Most days they sell about 8 gallons, and what is left over is quick cooled and served another time.

Third week

I am learning to chop vegetables the chef's way, (safe and fast), on the soup station this week. I'm lucky that the many onions I peel and chop don't make my eyes water.
In class George tells us about measures, such as three teaspoons equal 1 tablespoon, and a pint is a pound the world around. We must also practice converting quantities of recipes.

There is a 3 term baking class running simultaneously with the cooking program. The students learn to bake all the things found in a retail bakery, including bread, cakes, pies, cookies, and Danish pastries. I think it would be interesting to take that class after I finish the 3 terms of cooking. However, I don't believe I could resist the temtation to buy and eat everything I made. I don't need to make my knees carry any more weight for my hour a day walk. As it is, a couple times a week I buy the $1.25 loaf of artisan bread for Alex, and avoid looking at the 50 cent pastry display.

Equipment and tools

In class, George is showing us the various small equipment and hand tools used in the commercial kitchen. Working on the chef's station, spoons, spatulas, whisks, ladles and oil skimmers are the tools I am most familiar with this week. I have not done much knife work so far. Apparently the vegetable station is where most of the chopping is done. We have seen a demonstration of a whetstone for sharpening knives, and it surprises me to learn that a steel does not sharpen a knife, it only hones or straightens the blade after or between sharpening. I plan to do some research on electric knife sharpeners for my Wusthof knives that I will use in my home kitchen when I'm finished with them in school. I have an electric sharpener now, but am afraid it is not the quality stone I need.