My first REAL day of culinary school was yesterday. We were given our knife sets, our aprons and some other sundries, and learned that we would be fed dinner every school night.
Our main instructor (whose name I will not mention) started out with a ......jagged, crumbling...thud. He
told us about the business he used to own ( an expensive meats shop), and announced that he would be serving a whole, stuffed pig for dinner. A pig stuffed with more pig.
"Well, I used to sell these for five or six hundred dollars..." he told us in his nasal, bored voice.
"People would buy the whole pig?" a student asked him.
"Oh yea. They'd order it and I'd stuff it with whatever - sausage and maybe pork loin, like this one..People loved it..." he said sounding like a man disappointed and bitterly resigned.
In my head I was asking him why his beloved business was closed. But I already knew the answer. People that ate a lot of pig-stuffed pig probably died off, and/or then the recession hit, and they couldn't afford to pay six hundred dollars to give themselves high cholesterol and all of the things that go with it, and THEN pay their bloody doctors to fix the problems that they had gone to so much trouble and expense to inflict upon their own bodies.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm not a vegetarian.
And I love French food - lots of it.
But I NEVER want to look like that man, or sound like him, or be in ANY way like him.
Food makes me happy. I derive GREAT JOY out of cooking and eating really good food. I derive even greater joy out of cooking great tasting food that is GOOD for a human's body and a little better for the planet than pig-stuffed pigs. It's a stone cold fact that if China ate meat (any kind of meat) like we do in the USA - that alone would destroy our planet. We are the greediest and most ignorant consumers of food on this planet by FAR. We ingest poison chemicals and bio-engineered foods and defend our right to do so passionately, while many big American food companies are NOT LEGALLY ALLOWED to sell their same formulas/recipes in other parts of the world.
I am working - WE are working - on our knife skills this week. And that is one of the reasons that I wanted to go to culinary school. I have a big fancy bag of fancy, sharp, shiny knives now. Super fun. But, as my BORING and UNINSPIRING instructor rattles on about how he uses so many of the different knives to get into "small animal parts", I am day dreaming about making salads look like flowers and all of the scrumptious salad dressings I am going to hone and invent to make more people LOVE their veggies!
PS - this uninspired "Chef" had the audacity to claim that we would be using canned tomatoes in our red sauce tomorrow because they are "better than fresh". Oh my GOODNESS. Have you ever TASTED the difference? It's pretty intense - how great red sauce is when you make it from fresh tomatoes. I wouldn't fault him for saying - "You will probably be cooking for a giant hotel, and fresh tomato sauce is not practical" - but to say canned is BETTER.....!!!!!!!????????
I am tempted to wake up at 6 am tomorrow and make FRESH red sauce for 80 people so that I can bring it in for comparison. (and, no - there are not 80 people in my class - just in the whole school at one time)....signing off for now. Almost 3 am, haven't been sleeping. If I'm lucky, I will sleep a little tonight, and have sweet dreams of feeding fresh, organic red sauce with home made pasta and flower-like salads to the whole wide world.
Our main instructor (whose name I will not mention) started out with a ......jagged, crumbling...thud. He
told us about the business he used to own ( an expensive meats shop), and announced that he would be serving a whole, stuffed pig for dinner. A pig stuffed with more pig.
"Well, I used to sell these for five or six hundred dollars..." he told us in his nasal, bored voice.
"People would buy the whole pig?" a student asked him.
"Oh yea. They'd order it and I'd stuff it with whatever - sausage and maybe pork loin, like this one..People loved it..." he said sounding like a man disappointed and bitterly resigned.
In my head I was asking him why his beloved business was closed. But I already knew the answer. People that ate a lot of pig-stuffed pig probably died off, and/or then the recession hit, and they couldn't afford to pay six hundred dollars to give themselves high cholesterol and all of the things that go with it, and THEN pay their bloody doctors to fix the problems that they had gone to so much trouble and expense to inflict upon their own bodies.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm not a vegetarian.
And I love French food - lots of it.
But I NEVER want to look like that man, or sound like him, or be in ANY way like him.
Food makes me happy. I derive GREAT JOY out of cooking and eating really good food. I derive even greater joy out of cooking great tasting food that is GOOD for a human's body and a little better for the planet than pig-stuffed pigs. It's a stone cold fact that if China ate meat (any kind of meat) like we do in the USA - that alone would destroy our planet. We are the greediest and most ignorant consumers of food on this planet by FAR. We ingest poison chemicals and bio-engineered foods and defend our right to do so passionately, while many big American food companies are NOT LEGALLY ALLOWED to sell their same formulas/recipes in other parts of the world.
I am working - WE are working - on our knife skills this week. And that is one of the reasons that I wanted to go to culinary school. I have a big fancy bag of fancy, sharp, shiny knives now. Super fun. But, as my BORING and UNINSPIRING instructor rattles on about how he uses so many of the different knives to get into "small animal parts", I am day dreaming about making salads look like flowers and all of the scrumptious salad dressings I am going to hone and invent to make more people LOVE their veggies!
PS - this uninspired "Chef" had the audacity to claim that we would be using canned tomatoes in our red sauce tomorrow because they are "better than fresh". Oh my GOODNESS. Have you ever TASTED the difference? It's pretty intense - how great red sauce is when you make it from fresh tomatoes. I wouldn't fault him for saying - "You will probably be cooking for a giant hotel, and fresh tomato sauce is not practical" - but to say canned is BETTER.....!!!!!!!????????
I am tempted to wake up at 6 am tomorrow and make FRESH red sauce for 80 people so that I can bring it in for comparison. (and, no - there are not 80 people in my class - just in the whole school at one time)....signing off for now. Almost 3 am, haven't been sleeping. If I'm lucky, I will sleep a little tonight, and have sweet dreams of feeding fresh, organic red sauce with home made pasta and flower-like salads to the whole wide world.
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