Chef Pro III: Week 1

This is it--the final semester of culinary school. It's been one year since I wrote the first blog entry and I will continue posting until graduation. Week 1 was time for testing skills we learned in previous classes. We had knife skills--5 minutes to julienne a potato, brunoise a carrot, and small dice an onion. We had to make an omelet with no utensils and French onion soup within 40 minutes. Then we had the rest of the class to make eggs benedict (with Hollandaise sauce), chantilly cream (whipped cream by hand), pork with a pan sauce, and 1/2 cup of roux. My omelet was very good--but I have spent many messy times in my kitchen making Julia Child style omelets by shaking the eggs and turning them in the pan with no utensils. I also made good chantilly cream. The eggs benedict were OK and I felt good about making decent Hollandaise sauce (something I had practiced at home yesterday!) My French onion soup was fair--onions were not quite carmelized, and my pork was a little overdone and the sauce a little too thick. Overall, not bad but not great either. As usual, I was happy just to have finished everything and not too worried about the performance. I know I can make all these things well and need to fine tune my skills.
We are moving on to some interesting topics now including our future endeavors. We had a few minutes to meet with the chef instructors, Chef Kurima, Chef Waier, and Chef Ray about our plans. For now I have decided to do my "capstone project" on a business involving teaching cooking classes focused on healthy eating. I will need to really develop this idea and come up with 2 classes and the menu for each class.
I have also volunteered to be involved with the recipe development for a contest at the Zest Fest this week. We have to create a recipe using Pace Salsa Verde--more on that later.