After our week in the bakery my partner and I moved on to our next station, starch/veg. While looking forward to getting back into the frying pan I was apprehensive about cooking up veg side dishes. Having been a vegetarian for many years, this would appear easy, but for so long all I’ve ever done is make one pot side dishes: protein, carbs, greens, badda boom badda bing. But here I was expected to come up with vegetables that shined on their own. Easy in the middle of summer yes, when farmers markets are bursting with golden beets, fresh squash, tomatoes, or fall even with the plethora of squash, but early spring! What do I have to work with here? Tasteless bell peppers, tomatoes, some onions, and my saving grace, asparagus.

Day two and three into the week my partner fell ill and I found myself with four dishes, of 72 servings each to put out in two hours. It is the kind of stress that starts in your stomach but finds its way curling through out your fingers and toes to the point why you wonder why these extiremdies ache at 10 pm, hours after school has ended. Wednesday demanded stir fried veggies, a noodle dish, more stir-fired veggies, that all came out tasteless.

Quantity veg cooking is ALL about the timing. How do you make what you put out at 11am taste as good at 12:30? Is it possible? With the help of a first and fifth quarter my dishes were out on time, but the stress knot was still there. I knew what I made wasn’t top quality. I didn’t have control over the quality of the recipe, but my inexperience in a production kitchen had me in a pool of self-doubt. Rather than pace my cooking through the day I rushed out all the dishes at once, not observing the differenced in cooking times I dumped all my vegetables to be stirfired into the wok at once.

Most people go to culinary school because they love cooking, and because from time to time people have complimented their cooking, “hey, you are a good cook,” and, “ohmigod! This is so amazing. You should be a chef!” These affirmations are all but non-existent in culinary school. It is expected that your food should taste good. With so many chefs in training, nothing is ever good enough, rarely are everyone’s tastes satisfied. “Needs more salt, needs more pepper, what about some lemon juice, too salty, too sweet.”

The next day, faced with 20 pounds of asparagus, I and the resident queen of the school, went into a production mode of asparagus spears and goat cheese medallions wrapped in sorrano ham. Content to simply roast the spears the queen cut me short. “Do you know why people don’t like asparagus,” he challenged me. “Because when you roast, broil or grill it, it turns to shit. And were forced to eat this crap? No.” He shot at me, my mind still forming an answer to his original question. Now we would peel them, par cook them, shock them, place them on a parchment covered sheet pan in two neat columns, spears pointed the same direction, to the center, drizzle with olive oil, a hit of salt and pepper, and into the over to par-roast. Picking up a sear he snapped it into two with a clean break: the dark green ring encircling a pale creamy green center is worthy of the title food porn. “Here,” he shoved it at me. “Now isn’t this so much better?”

He was right, the asparagus tasted the way so many magazines and newspapers gush over the spring savior. After wrapping our bungles in ham the queen showed me how to drizzle a reduced balsamic syrup a la Jackson Pollock over our 2-inch half hotel pans filled with neat green, white and pink bundles. It was the loveliest thing I had put out this quarter so far and my residual feelings of insecurity from t he previous day dissipated. Classmates ohhh and awwwed. Yes it looked like something you’d find on a Wedding Menu, but it did earn me a steadfast stream of compliments

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