I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas break! We did. It was a very busy time with visiting family, but it was lovely. I had a whopping three weeks off - I'm very spoiled I know. My first few days of break you could find me in my jammies, on the couch with movies and my iPad. It was glorious! Then I got bored and made cookies!
They were fun to sit down and pipe and try to get the creative juices flowing. Some turned out better than others, but an ugly cookie still tastes yummy!
I was also set with the challenge of making a tourtiere (a meat pie, usually make with ground beef and pork). I didn't even know what it was. Turns out its actually a Canadian tradition..oops. Makes me feel like a bad Canadian! haha. I talked to Chef and he said they make it every christmas eve so he gave me his recipe for it. I was crapping myself I was so nervous.
Let me explain why I was so nervous. If you knew my history with pies you would fully understand. I once made a pecan pie that I literally had to saw through. You couldn't cut it. I used a serrated knife and sawed through it. When you tried to break a piece off with your fork the piece usually left your plate at 100 miles in hour and could take out someones eye during its flight path. bad.
Then a friend of mine came over and showed me how to make one and with her help we made an apple pie that was quite yummy! success!
Now that I'm in school we are not allowed to use crisco shortening - only butter...no "cheating" and believe it or not we haven't made actual pie crust - only sweet dough for our pies. So when I had to push out a pie dough for this tourtiere I was convinced it was going to be a disaster.
I made individual turnovers and you know what? THEY WERE FREEKIN DELICIOUS! The crust was so light and flakey and buttery and the meat was so good. Pat on the back for Chef Ashley! The curse of the pie dough might be over! muahahaha!
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| Turnovers ready for the oven |
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| Ready to be eaten! mmm |
So that's christmas in a very small nut shell.
Now today was the first day back! exciting and nervous. New courses, new groups, new expectations.
Now I must say that after sleeping in for 3 weeks and napping when ever I wanted and staying up late was wonderful. When my alarm went off at 530 this morning I...well I had no thoughts because it was 530am! That was a painful experience. I had to blink one eye at a time to make sure I stayed awake until after my shower. After my shower I was good..
I also packed all my stuff I needed to take in to school the night before..Lots.of.stuff. So walking to the car I had two backpacks (one for my classroom books and one with all my kitchen tools) A big huge bag of clean whites, another shoulder bag with my two 3" blinders of recipes, my lunch bag and my travel mug of tea. "DAVIN!! COME OPEN THE DOOR FOR ME! I CAN'T MOVE MY ARMS!" haha. Two trips is for suckers. But I made it! success! without spilling my tea, double success!
As I'm walking down the hall towards the classroom Chef jumps out and starts doing a jig and is dancing around and waving, hilarious. Just what you need on a monday morning at 7am. :)
Our first class this morning was with Chef. I guess its a theory class but instead of learning more about ingredients we are going to focus on the methods and getting those down pat. Luckily he took it easy on us and we watched a movie. The movie was really interesting. It was about the MOF, its essentially a competition to become the best in pastry chef in france. When you do become an MOF you get a coloured collar on your chef whites. Very very high honour. The stress these men went through was amazing. They train for years for this and you always have a judge watching over you, checking your garbage, checking your ingredients. I don't know if I could handle the stress. The sugar pieces they made were absolutely unbelievable. Part of the competition involves moving their piece to the right spot and this one guys piece just collapsed and smashed. The gasps and yelling that came from my classmates was hilarious! "*gasp!* NOOOO!!" "OH MY GOD!!" and a "OH SHIT!" from me. haha. This grown man, just burst out crying, even the judges had tears in their eyes for him. I couldn't imagine! I would be a huge mess. All that work, all those hours..gone. It was a great film.
Next we had our first class in human relations. I'm going to like this class. I have covered quite a bit of the material in college round one. Thank you Early Childhood! We talked about Maslows hierarchy of needs and learning styles. I like the teacher as well. Its going to be fun.
Then we had two long hours to wait until our computer class. Spread sheets and stuff. I haven't worked on excel in years so I knew this was going to be a challenge. We had the opportunity to challenge out of the course by taking an exam. Everyone wanted to try the exam. I got it, read the paper, opened excel, looked around the room, looked at my paper again..Yeah this isn't going to happen. lol.
Just the math and the formulas you had to figure out were over my head. I figured out how to open up a pie chart and put my name on my paper haha. A few people had already gotten up and left (which meant you were taking the course) and i would be following them. I got up and went over to the teacher and said "yeah, I'll go buy the book and see you next Monday, this isn't happening." In the end I believe there were two people out of all of us who stayed to try the exam. Even the teacher said it is very hard, so don't feel bad. It's not a bad course to have to take, learning this stuff can only help me in the long run.
Then I came home and had a nap. Every Monday I get headaches. I can only handle so much talking before I get over whelmed and tired. Back to the kitchen tomorrow, thank goodness.
I'm going to go get organized for tomorrow.
Have a wonderful evening!
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