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

Each quarter culinary students rotate through a set of stations around the kitchen. In a ten week quarter we spend one week each washing dishes, preparing the entrée, preparing student lunch, creating salads, then soups, then starch and veg, a week in the dining room, and finally the very scary baking rotation. It is a perfect cycle. You pay $1,100.00 to prep your lunch, cook your lunch, then wash your dishes.

Bakery vs. Culinary is a very real rivalry. Only a few cross over into each other’s “dark side.” From culinary, it is the boys. Like roosters in a freekin hen house. From Bakery, it is the girls who bring the culinary boys treats. You are beginning to get the picture, no?

Personally, I blame it on our respective chefs. Their sigh when the other is mentioned doesn’t go unnoticed.

Last week I spend 12 hours in the bakery, and am beginning to think my desire to enroll in the program after completing culinary. In trying to explain it to Kevin I said that the bakery is a bit like a men’s tennis final. Everyone works individually, focused, on a particular project. Students break off individually to research, plan, prep or execute the most complicated of pastries. While my kitchen is a bit like the US Women’s World Cup soccer team of 1999- sans taking off ones shirt and running around the kitchen.

My partner J and I (I’ve told you that we are partnered up for the whole quarter right?) Spent our week baking cookies and bunt cakes. Me, getting yelled at for using a bain marie on the stove to create a double boiler to melt my chocolate (FYI. In the bakery a bain marie simply means a double boiler. Like a pot, filled part way with water and a bowl set on top. In the kitchen a bain marie is a bit like a soup insert. A tall cylinder used to hold sauces. So if you find yourself in a bakeshop and are told to grab a bain marie, grab a pot. Not an actual bain marie.)

Daily we work together to produce student lunch and a public buffet, sharing ingredients, working space, styling ideas and flavoring suggestions. This comradery is inspiring, however I am guessing that will all change next quarter when we step put to the line, literally. Next quarter we prepare all the meals, from scratch (currently the first quarter students take care of most of the prep for student lunch and we put it all together and cook it), for our Square One restaurant. I can’t wait. As for the pastry program, those jets have cooled.

So, did you think I’d quit school? Run off to the big city to make my fortune and end up on the Food Network with my own show? No, silly, it was just spring break. 10 glorious days of waking up at 10 am, lounging around watching Food Network and Bravo’s Top Design to my heart’s content. (I was pulling for Goil)

The last couple weeks of first quarter went a little like this: zoom, blam, crash, pow, whomp, zallawazoo. Hard and fast. I scored a 93 on my knife test. It was nerve racking. I completely botched my batonnet (far too big, steak fries anyone?) and brunoise (screw brunoise, seriously. I’m over it), but managed 40 minutes. I scored a crackin’ 100% on my final, and even managed to pass the servsafe exam with a 92. Not too shabby. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t finish the quarter with a bit of an ego (Come on , a 4.0, how could you not think you’re the queen of the world- that and forcing kevin to greet me every morning saying “hey queen of the world”).

The change from first quarter and second quarter could not be more dramatic, physically and emotionally. This quarter my classmates and I are responsible for crafting up lunch service for the entire culinary and baking programs as well as the lunch buffet SCCC students and faculty frequent. It is quantity cookin’ baby. Yee haw.

Quantity cooking has it’s purpose, hospitals, weddings, my lunch Tuesday-Friday, but dang is it hectic. For one I am preoccupied with maintaining quality and integrity of the food I produce, on the other hand, I have a time deadline along with a heavy workload. As eaters/consumers we can’t help but be skeptical, a little suspicious even of large vats of food sitting out on the buffet line. And I find that same feeling creeping up on me when I am fixing up 75 servings of salad dressings. “How can this possibly taste good?” I’ll ask myself, assuming that larger = worse. Maybe that is why fine dining servings are so tiny. Tiny = better.

I think I have explained before a bit about my first quarter classroom, it was at the opposite end of the school, a quiet, serene, Zen rock garden of a lab compared with the steam whistles, oven hums, and range fan droning of the main kitchen where the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th quarter students go about their work. I feel a bit out of sorts, if my life experience and obsessive home cooking aided me last quarter, then my lack of kitchen experience has me doubting my performance now. Time management is a huge issue, as is learning when to finish a dish, even if it means not rearranging the shrimp to look like the NYC Rockettes doing the can-can. I hope this is only beginning of the quarter jitters.

My knife skills test is appromaxiately 12 hours away and I am freekin freaked out. The physical symptoms of stress have appeared, and I feel sick.

I have 30 minutes to complete the following cuts.

Batonnet 1 potato
Medium dice 1 potato
Brunoise 1 Carrot
Peel and segment one orange
Concassee one tomato
Fine chop parsley
Small dice one onion
Mince 1 shallot
Mince 6-8 cloves garlic

Because I am not at the CIA, if I cut myself, we call time out, am bandaged up, squirted with water, given a quick shoulder massage to stay loose, then sent back into the ring. I’ve heard rumors that some schools fail you if you cut yourself or go over the time limit.

I’ve been practicing, and am confident in my orange segmenting (that is down to 2 minutes), my batonneting (also two minutes, faster if I could peel that damn potato with out it popping out of my hands every 10 seconds). I have got concassee down pat, just needing to mind the cooking time (they only need a few seconds), my mincing skills are posh, but parsley is a time whore, at least 5 minutes. My biggest fear is the bourniose. Half of a carrot 1/8th by 1/8th by 1/8th. Not only is my sizing off, but I cannot square off a carrot to save a life. Somehow (I blame the knife!) I always end up a little slanted to the outside. My planks are sloppy, and I’d be lucky to get those little suckers into their proper dimensions.

I do curse these cuts, always muttering under my breath when I am to fine dice 10 pounds of celery, or brunoise 5 pounds mushrooms, but heaven strike me now If I don’t nit pick when where I’m eating doesn’t do it right.
“You are not a small dice,” I challenge the cubes of carrot in my stew.
“You call that a julienne, ha!” I sneer at a pair of criss-crossed peppers garnishing a side of rice.
“Chiffonade basil? Please, you’re nothing more than disregarded Christmas ribbon.” I yell at my pizza. This all happens in my head of course. Sometimes aloud if I’m at home, alone.

“Remember, if people are paying $40 for a plate of food, then they deserve perfect cuts,” has become my pep talk when I start to purposely cut an extra 1/32nd of an inch, or leave that seed in the concasse, just to rebel, just to put my stamp on it. But this quickly comes to an end as not only will my finish product be picked through for precision, but my rubbish as well, to ensure that I have not wasted too much. So say a little somethin’ somethin’ to the kitchen gods this week for me, I need it.

“Is this your first time in Cabo?” The lady in the seat next to me asked.
“Yes.” I replied in a tone that neither expressed excitement nor intrest.
“Oh,” she said, her eyebrows raised in excitement. “You’re going to just love it.”

Mexico and I have never been friends.

Though thousands of Americans are drawn to beaches and underage drinking, and thousands of Mexicans are drawn to higher wages, Mexico and I are like oil and vinegar (me being extra virgin olive oil imported from Tuscany and Mexico being two bit hintz white vinegar). That is until my mother-in-law flew me down to join her and Kevin for a week in Cabo (something she is no doubt regretting as she has twice desperately lost to me at scrabble).

After nine weeks of cramming the most arcane of culinary information into that little 12% of my brain that actually gets used, I have hit the wall (didn’t take long, did it?). I don’t know what is going on, really, I never got good grades before (but let me tell you I, though lucky to be harboring somewhere around a 3.0, considered myself right along up there with my friends who got accepted to ivy league schools and scored 1400 on their SATs. It isn’t that I didn’t get accepted to Stanford, I just didn’t want to go there). My misunderstood genius was redirected into making out with my boyfriend or memorizing lines from Samuel Becket plays for upcoming debate tournaments).

I can understand that it is confusing for my family and friends to see me so determined, so intent on a 4.0, so focused on my studies. One friend, in particular, I won’t name names, but we’ll see if she even recognizes I’m talking about her, reminds me, on an almost daily basis that I never used to be like this. “Mary? What happened? You were never like this in high school, organized, and all doing your homework.” But I’ll wear her compliment, “you’re the cutest perfectionist I know,” with pride. The point is this. I want to enjoy my good grades, my success in class, not be made to feel embarrassed for it. And then there is the counter point. Maybe I’m taking this all to seriously. This is school afterall, and not, as my chef reminded me after confessing my bleeding heat, “the CIA.”

I don’t claim to be Jerri Blank, but I am confident that my resolute sense of responsibility stems from hitting the glass ceiling in the world of coffee, glass bottom of the coffee cup so to speak? I have been 23, thinking I was the cat’s meow, but only making 7.25 an hour. Not exactly the place I imagined my BA in the Arts would find me. I guess that is why my classmates like to poke fun and snicker when I get frustrated at their complete lack of responsibility, or try to contest a missed question on a midterm.

Finally getting in a verbal spat with one after one too many of his “I’m just teasing,” got me on the first day of my period. I really hate that our menstrual cycle so often takes the blame, or truly is the cause, of outbursts, emotions, or rage induced flurries. But sometimes it can’t be helped, ( I have a 28 day long fuse) and last Tuesday was one of those days (I’m blaming my 93 on the quiz on it).

So here I am in Mexico, sipping on margaritas Kevin has spent the week perfecting, trying to “do nothing,” to relax. Cabo is a funny place. Too many American tourists, clad in novelty t-shirts, baseball caps, and sport sandals to allow me my usual combing of alleyways and markets (haven’t found a market yet, come to think of it), so I’ve sequestered myself to our junior suite kitchen, fixing up tortilla soup, chicken and greens in tomitallo salsa, and grilled tiger shrimp. Sometimes cooking is stressful to the point of wanting to flip the sauté pan across the room while yelling obcenities then pull out a package of frozen kimchi mondu in defeat, but other times like this week, cooking quietly puts things back in order, allowing one little successes, a round of compliments from snackers, slowly rebuilding what before came crashing down.

Kev demonstrates how to infuse lime into a beer cabo style.

Does this mean I will return to class fresh faced passing out smiles to those that perturb me beyond belief? No. But at least sinister thoughts of how I can sabotage their Chef Of The Day final will have subsided.

Week four has been a week of firsts, my first math test, my first time as sous chef, and my first culinary test. If it’s a reflection for what’s to come, I’d say I’m in a good spot. Most of my classmates are too. I’m so impressed by their dedication and how seriously they take their tasks. Personally, I think we have the bravo TV show Top Chef to thank for this. Strangely, each one acts as though we feel like we might be told to “pack our knives and go,” if we slip up. The competition right now is at a good pace. Mostly everyone is trying to compete against themselves, rather than each other. Without a Marcel in the class it’s hard to hate anyone just yet.

Now that the pace has picked up we are starting to get heftier assignments. Our first is a spice assignment, where we have to describe the look, aroma, and taste of 36 different spices. Not wanting to taste the contaminated samples in class (I thank my sanitation teacher for that. She’s big on pointing out diseases spread by lack of hand washing and barehanded contact with ready to eat foods), I stopped by PCC to buy a small amount each in bulk, and now with 30 odd little baggies spread across my coffee table I feel a little like a coke dealer, or that could be the potent aroma of all the spices going to my head. As long as I just remember to simply smell them, not cut them into lines and snort them…

My knife skills are still shaky and slow. We were taught to tuck our fingers under so that the knife falls against our knuckles. And while this instrument of sharpened steel glides down my bare flesh, I’m to keep my middle three fingers on top of the item I’m cutting while my thumb and pinky precariously hold the sides. HA!. Honestly, I really do start off trying, but it just isn’t comfortable, my hand starts to cramp up in this unfamiliar position, so I eventually resort back to my old ways until I hear or spot Chef G. Then, faster that you can say chopped off finger tip, I have my knuckles back up there by my knife, and my cuts go from consistent to uniformly challenged

Student lunch, on the other hand, has gotten increasingly better. Every day that Kevin picks me up from school (yes, I have a personal chauffer) I take delight in watching his facial expression turn to jealously when I describe the eight or ten gourmet choices put on the hot line.
“Mmm. Today I had Wiener Schnitzel.”
“Really? Is that actually a food, I thought it was a joke. What is it?”
“Oh, its delicious. It’s pounded veal cutlet, breaded, then baked and topped with anchovies, lemon, and minced hard boiled eggs. Oh, and I had a slice of apple cake too, and some braised red cabbage, and the best part was the Mexican hot chocolate. Mmmm. It was amazing, rich and chocolately with hints of cinnamon and spices. Dang it was good. So…whatd’ch have for lunch?”
“Nothing.”

It is 2007, readers, and I have a confession. I am no longer in Korea.

Our holiday in South Africa kicked off our return to Seattle, and at this very moment I am sitting in a fuzzy white robe, toes covered by fuzzy white slippers, watching the Today show, drinking Starbucks’ Christmas blend with raw turbanado sugar and a luxurious splash of organic half and half in an oversized novelty coffee mug.

It feels good to be back.

My first few days weren’t so smooth. Seattle’s infamous rainy weather combined the loneliness of the suburbs had me crying for my cozy Itaewon apartment, colorful friends, and the crowded Seoul subways. Kev pleaded with me, “Please, just give it a week.”

When I first started this blog, back in April of this year, I mentioned that I would be attending culinary school. And now I am. With my first week under my belt and hundreds spent on knives, uniforms, and books I feel confident that it was the right choice. Though the reality is I won’t be returning to Korea anytime soon.

I never imagined that this little blog would serve as the resource it has. I get emails from folks asking about restaurants in Seoul, Korean foods, ingredients, and general questions about living in the land of the morning clam. As much as I like to believe it is my gripping prose, dazzling creativity, and stunning photographs that keep you all coming back, I am happy and flattered to help answer these basic questions. And frankly, glad that all this information I have collected over the years has value.

The hardest part of leaving Korea was worrying what would become of Mary Eats. Would I just let it die? Should I continue to write about Korean food in America? Should I focus on restaurants in Seattle?

These questions have been plaguing me like a credit collectors’ call. Paralyzing me from posting anything new, revealing my status, or even reading other food blogs I usually browse over Saturday mornings. After one too many glasses of red wine I poured over Zen Kimchi’s page, tears welling up in my eyes (thankfully the daily kimchi and Seoul life were on holiday), convinced I had made the wrong choice.

But, after pulling it together here’s the plan. Mary Eats will continue to blog about Korean foods, Korean ingredients and Korean restaurants in America. I’ll start posting more Korean recipes and culinary finds once a week. I am lucky that the suburb I live in is quite international; including a run down QFC (supermarket) recently turned into Worl-du Mar-tu full of Hangeul signage and Korean ingredients.

Life as a culinary student will also find its way on the blog, as this is now my full time job. No joke. I spend about three hours on my homework every night. My students in Korea will no doubt feel justified by this karma.

I also resolve to wear SPF 15 everyday and to start skiing.

And that’s it friends. If I lose some of you to geographical location, or waning interest in stateside life, I’ll understand, but for those of you who stick around, I promise it won’t get boring.

Best wishes for an amazing new year.

Mary