Our midterm: blood and sweat, but no tears this time

Today was really, really crappy. We had what was essentially our midterm for the Ritz Escoffier course, and the results were not good. Not good at all.

Like our previous exam, we were given a list of four dishes that we had to know by heart. We would all be assigned one of these dishes to cook in two hours and present it to our chefs and the director of the cooking school for judging. We'd all be cooking the same thing. This exam was ungraded; the purpose of it was to assess our skill levels for the final five weeks of the course.

And honestly, I stunk.

It's not that hard for me to admit this. I am trying to develop a thick skin about my cooking; I want people to be honest with me and tell me what needs work and what I need to practice. I am also hard on myself because this is something I really care about, and I want to improve.

And wow, judging from the way I cooked today, I have limitless room for improvement. Lucky me.

We were clued in to the fact that we would be tested on the Rack of Lamb with Winter Vegetables dish when a giant box of lamb arrived from the butcher during yesterday's class. Since today is a national holiday in France, it was safe to assume that these were intended for our exam. Whoops! Silly butcher!

Some of the girls and I even met at my place over the weekend to practice the lamb and the vegetables, and made a fine dinner that became increasingly blurry and giggly at the end thanks to two bottles of wine (plus a third to cook with, of course).


Nina trimming the lamb.

Our home version of the lamb dish.

Finishing up with a cheese plate, bien sur.

I just love cheese. And figs.
The hardest part of this dish for me is the vegetables. Many of them have to be served in "turned" shapes, which basically means paring them down into tidy, compact little cylinders that look nice but require a hell of a lot of work and skill. I suspect that you could turn vegetables for a decade before really mastering them. I have probably turned them about ten different times, so they usually wind up in vaguely cubeoid shapes marred by nicks and divots. They're not even used very often in restaurants anymore because they're so time-consuming and wasteful. They are, however, pretty AND pretty classic, so learn them we must.


I was quite concerned about time management, because on our last exam I was not well-organized and ended up being really crunched at the end. Yesterday I penned a quick list of the order of steps in which I would work on my dish; unfortunately for me, turning just a small pile of vegetables can easily consume half an hour or more. And my tendency to tremble when nervous really doesn't help when one is trying to shave off milimeter-thick slices from a tiny carrot cylinder.

The good news is that time-wise, I was better. Still not great, still not quite on time, but also not quite so blind with panic when it came to plating as I was on the first exam. But here are some of the mistakes I made:

1) I cut my pinkie finger while turning vegetables.

2) I cut my index finger while trimming the lamb. This one was pretty bloody.

3) I burned my other index finger doing something else, but I don't know what.

4) I prepared my carrots and onions incorrectly. We were supposed to white-glaze them, and I blond-glazed them. In the first technique, you don't brown your vegetables at all; in the second version you give them a light color. I began coloring them and by the time my teacher reminded me they were supposed to be cooked blanc, it was too late. I don't think I even did the blond-glazing correctly, because my butter eventually burned and covered my vegetables with little black flecks. Clarified butter would have been better.

5) It ended up not mattering one bit that I over-colored my vegetables, because shortly thereafter I gave them what I like to think of as a black-glaze. In short, I burned the bejesus out of them and had to throw the entire pot of carefully turned carrots and pain-in-the-butt-to-peel-thin-skinned tiny onions in the trash.

6) Then I had to start them over. If I was going to cry, it would have been at this point. But I didn't.

7) I broke a plate by super-heating it for presentation and then slamming it down on the table.

8) My lamb was under-cooked by about four minutes.

9) My final presentation platter looked like it had been assembled by a mentally-compromised chimp. I don't know what I was thinking. Somehow I decided it would be a good idea to pile everything on one side of the plate and drizzle sauce over the remaining bare portion. This might have worked if the sauce was really thick and rich, but it was a thin jus. It looked awful. Easily the worst of the six of us.

I'm sure I made hundreds of other errors, but our final critique was group-oriented so we didn't get into the nitty-gritty of our individual mistakes. Basically the staff reached the consensus that we all presented fairly inept renderings of the dish, and that we would have to start the lesson over again tomorrow.


This is what our plates were supposed to look like. Mine wasn't even close!

Afterwards we all felt pretty blue. As we shuffled down Rue Cambon, Nina had a brilliant idea:

"Hey! Why don't we go to Starbucks?"

Until today, I hadn't crossed its threshold, even though there is one right near school. But yeah, I admit to dreaming of a big foamy latte. In a paper cup. That you can walk down the street with. That doesn't cost $8.

I clapped my hands and chortled like a toddler.
"Please, please, can we? Can we??"

And so we did. And lo, the lattes did taste good. Balm for the souls of some burned, bleeding culinary students.

And tomorrow, we shall revisit the rack of lamb. For the fourth time. And maybe eventually I'll get it right.