Culinary School

Tonight’s meal was just scraps of items left from the recreation at Cincinnati State of the last meal aboard the Titanic. I was the sous chef for this party, and it went pretty well. Dinner was leftover chicken, fish, beef, and vegetables.

On Sunday, November 12, 2006, a few days of involvement on my part (and many, many additional days involvement on the part of Chef Neace and other employees of Cincinnati State) came to fruition with the serving of a recreation of the last dinner served to first class passengers on the Titanic.

I participated with preparations on Friday, Saturday morning, and Sunday through service of this complex meal. 100 guests, all decked out in tuxedos and fine dresses, enjoyed the event. Our menu was slightly modified from the original, and is below the fold. Read the rest of this entry »

This evening, I participated in the ONE NIGHT, TWELVE KITCHENS event at the Midwest Culinary Institute at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College. This is the second annual occurance of this fundraising event. The monies raised benefit the students in the Culinary program. Read more about the event at AroundCinci.COM by clicking this link.

I arrived at school at 3:00 and reported to the kitchen. I was assigned to work with the gang from Jean-Robert at Pigall’s, Chef Meg Galvin, and a few other students. The dishes we were serving were a red wine risotto with provincal vegetables and basil cream sauce; and a vichyssoise (made with watercress and cauliflower) with jasmine rice and spring vegetables. We got started making vegetable stock, prepping vegetables and other ingredients for those dishes. A couple hours later, a few of the guys from Pigall’s arrived and we kicked it into high gear and finished our preparation in time for the ‘beauty shots’ of the prepared dishes and the meet-and-greet with guests who filed through our kitchen to watch us working.

Finally, we moved up to the serving floor (the savory dishes were set up on the first floor, pastries and other sweets were on the second floor) and got set up for the onslaught of the 400+ guests. Seeing that the crew had our station well-staffed, I was re-assigned to help the chef from Brown Dog Cafe who was working alone serving Flank Steak with Roasted Red & Golden Beets, Goat Cheese, and Red & Gold Beet Vinaigrette. Once I got him out of the weeds, I was able to wander around and sample some of the other dishes before we wrapped up, broke down our station, and moved back to the prep kitchen to clean up and call it a night. I arrived home around 11:00, tired, sore, but happy to have participated in this event.

One Night, Eleven Kitchens
April 24, 6-9 pm
Midwest Culinary Institute at Cincinnati State College

On Sunday, April 24 2005, I participated as a worker in the first-ever One Night, Eleven Kitchens scholarship fundraiser at the Midwest Culinary Institute at Cincinnati State College. The event highlighted prominent chefs from Cincinnati restaurants. Students were permitted to work with these chefs.

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Today was the first Saturday practical class. Getting up early and donning my uniform (minus my still-missing clogs), I drove down to the kitchen at CSTCC for our Saturday class. The class is scheduled from 8:00am-1:00pm.

I was rather surprised that everyone in our Theory of Cooking class was not in this class. Several members of the Theory class had already completed this class. There are 10-11 people in this class, which is a nice size.

Executive Chef Todd gave us an in-depth tour of the kitchen and laid out our daily requirements:

• Sharpen/steel our knives
• Wash hands properly
• Set up our workstations
• Slice half and dice half of an onion
• Julienne half and medium dice half of a carrot
• Fine dice half and Batonnette half of a potato

All of this to be done early in class to be evaluated by Chef during class. We walked through these cuts. It was amuzing to see how long it took to get these rather simple cuts done, but I know that we’ll all get faster after doing it each class!

We discussed stocks and made a beef stock & a chicken stock before being released, but not before receiving assignments for next week!

Wednesday, September 3 2003 was my first evening of culinary class. Tonight’s class was Theory of Cooking from 5:00-7:50pm followed by practical work in the kitchen from 8:00-10:30pm.

After leaving my office at 4:30, I made my way to CSTCC for my 5:00 class. I parked in the parking garage and started the hunt for my classroom. It took a while — the classroom was at the far end of the building relative to the parking garage, so I was hiking.

But I made it. There were several people in the classroom when I arrived (about 15 minutes early for class), and more continued to arrive as the start time drew nearer. All told, there were probably 20-25 people in this class. Many of the students seemed to know each other, which was a bit of a surprise since this is an entry-level course.

The instructor came in and said that our first order of business was to walk down to one of the dining rooms to pick up our uniforms and knife kits. We hiked down to the dining room to meet Chef Jeff Sheldon who was managing the distribution of materials. The first words out of Jeff’s mouth were, “This is a mess. ALL of you are missing something. Some of you are missing a lot”. Not very inspiring, but it was true… Most kits (mine included) were missing 2 of the 3 neckerchiefs we’re required to wear. Mine was also missing my kitchen clogs. After inventorying our packs, we signed a sheet indicating what was missing and made our way back to the classroom.

Once back in the classroom, Instructor Pat Hueller introduced herself and distributed the syllabus. Students participated in an exercise to gauge their expierence level (we’re all over the place, experience-wise — there are several students who hold important jobs within the field, and there are others who’ve never picked up a knife, and everywhere in-between). We discussed the first few chapters of our textbook, PROFESSIONAL COOKING by Wayne Gisslen. She also assigned us a few more chapters to read, a paper, and instructed us to bring in a meaningful cooking book that we own and to be prepared to discuss it with the class with the idea of building a reference list for ourselves.

After class, we went down to the main kitchen for an orientation and ‘tour’ of the facility. After the tour, we were released to go home a bit early.