Julia Child describes her experience when she first fell in love with cooking: “The whole experience was an opening up of the soul and spirit for me… I was hooked, and for life, as it has turned out.” This week was Heritage Week which is always a highlight of the training. Heritage Week started a few classes ago during Black History month when the staff wanted to give the students a sense of the richness of African American cuisine. That first Black History event was the beginning of the Heritage Day tradition that happens each training session. February is still reserved for Black History , but the other classes are mixed bag of cultures. Here’s how it works: four chefs representing different cuisines set up stations in the kitchen, the students are divided into teams and go from station to station for instruction on each cuisine. After all the teams have visited all the stations, everyone meets in the lunchroom for a feast. The chefs all share the ups and downs of their careers, mistakes made and things done right. The cuisines Class 73 learned about were French, African, Moroccan and German Pastry. It is hard to know who gets more out of Heritage Day, the students or the visiting chefs. My advice to any visiting chef: “Don’t come unless you are prepared to fall in love!”
The big lesson for the week was sauteing and flipping vegetables. The students learn the trick to flipping vegetables in the saute pan and actually having the vegetables land back in the pan is all in the wrist. We learn this by sauteing and flipping onions and usually end up with more onions on the stove top than in the pans. Class 73, true to their quick learning, actually had fewer onions on the stove top than previous classes, with some other classes the stove top looks like a snowy field of white when the class is over!
Chef Linda Vogler
