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.

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!