Characters of all sorts

Another week of culinary school has begun, and it is much of the same. Learning to cut things into weird shapes and impossibly small sizes. Even something as easy as dicing a tomato has to be complicated by boiling, ice shocking, peeling, deseeding and DRYING the tomato before you start cutting (called a concasse, because "diced tomato" just ain't good enough) . We are getting used to tourned vegetables in our dinners around here as I try to use the product of my practicing. This is alternated with mixed vegetable latkes and lots of mashed potatoes to use the scraps. For those who don't know, a tourned vegetable is a seven sided football cut. (Why seven and not six or eight? Well, it was thought of by the French and as I am sure I have mentioned before, it is probably just to fuck with your head.)

Culinary school is a bit of a trip for me. I am, more often than not, the person in the room with the strongest opinions about food. Not so much at culinary school. Listening to some of the Chef's talk about food is both amazing and highly amusing. Listening to some of my 18-22 year old classmates talk about just about anything is both amazing and amusing.

My first class is taught by a foriegn (french? I am sure he told us and I was too tired to remember on the first day.) teacher who is sometimes hard to understand but runs his class like a boot camp. The first week was a little lax, but now we are beginning to see the irritation when someone does not remember to put on a part of their uniform, or comes in late. The cuts must be perfect and everything must remain SPOTLESS while you are working. No dirtying up your cutting board by leaving scraps on it lest you be called a "Porky Pig".

My second class is safety and sanitation. Which, while being important, is a bit boring to both attend and (I would guess) to teach. So the Chef instructor (who reminds me of Pavarotti) ends up repeating himself a lot. But, he is a wealth of comments that I find hysterical some times......

- When asked if veal is mistreated his response was "well it's not a pet you know."

- When discussing meats, "Well SOME people believe that sodium nitrate is carcinogenic"

Then there are my fellow students. I haven't had a chance to talk to them much, beyond evesdropping on a lot of conversations that start with the phrases, "Well, we were at the bar..." and "Man, I was so trashed". But there are some stand outs. There is the 39 year old who has spent the last 6 years on a crabbing boat and is mysteriously silent about the time before that. He totally reminds me of the character Drew on the new Scrubs season, so I keep wondering if he was in jail too. Or the 22 year old with a 6 year old son in his hometown who just moved here with his boyfriend who has a blond mohawk and reminds me of Billy Idol. He cracked me up yesterday by getting all bent out of shape that he was rude to someone on public transportation and they had the NERVE to be rude back! There are the three 20 year olds who all know each other and spent yesterday talking about hooking up with their various boyfriends/girlfriends in the back rooms of their jobs. One of the students was a lawyer in Venezuela and decided to leave to come to culinary school. I haven't had a chance to talk to her, but I bet she will be interesting. In fact, this school could just be amusing as hell because the people are all just a little bit crazy.