Mid-terms...

are rough. This is mostly just for my memory book, but if you actually read the whole thing then kudos to you.

I just finished one of the most stressful tests of my life. The disappointing thing is, its not going to matter a year from now. Or even 2 months. It wasn't the bar exam or anything of the sort. It was a mid term test for a cooking class. We had to be prepared for anything everything we learned in the class so far and ANYTHING from the pre-requisite class. You had to prepare a vegetable with a type of cut (small dice, medium dice large dice and believe it or not there are actual dimensions all the different dices and there are a lot more cuts than just the dices), a starch, a cooking method for meat and a type of sauce to prepare in 1 hour and a 1/2. Sounds easy right? Wrong. We didn't know what kind of meat or vegetables or sauce we'd be making before hand, so we had to study EVERYTHING. We also weren't allowed to talk to anyone except for safety reasons.

I just kept praying please no fish, please let this not be so bad, please no fish, please let this not be so bad, please no Asian sauces, please no fish. So when I got my assignment, I didn't have any fish or Asian sauces and it wasn't so bad. I had to make pan fried chicken, roasted potatoes, parsnips with a batonnet cut (1/4 x 1/4 x 2 inches see the picture of the carrots) spinach and a puree. I definitely wasn't expecting a puree. So I found the easiest one that would go with a potato. Two ingredients, garlic and olive oil. Didn't really turn out. The garlic was burned and it needed more olive oil. But its okay, some people didn't even present their sauce because it just didn't turn out right at all.

I sauteed the chicken instead of pan frying it. Sautee... pan fry? Who can really tell the difference? Well, the teacher did. I didn't even know that I had sauteed it until afterwards when he told me I did it wrong. Whoops.

The potatoes on the other hand were perfect. 10 out of 10. I had to roast them. So I did it like my mom does! (THANKS MOM! The best thing I made wasn't even learned in class!) I put some olive oil in a pan, cut red potatoes into fourths and sprinkled them with salt and pepper and cooked them in the oven for 45 minutes. They were delicious and people even stayed after class to try some. Extra virgin olive oil can make such a nice flavor on the skins of the red potatoes.

I steamed the parsnips and spinach. I wasn't sure how to go about cutting the parsnips and the teacher is really picky about cutting. He'll pick up the vegetable and look and the ends to make sure they're exactly square. There was definitely some divine guidance because I kind of just kept cutting and all of sudden I caught the vision and before I knew it I was cutting batonnet parsnips. They turned out okay. I've never even eaten parsnips before so I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do with them. I figured steaming was my best bet for any vegetable.

So we had to have two matching plates with all of the assigned food on it and they had to look pretty. No three point landing type of presentations. (You know the plates that kids eat off of with the little dividers in them?)If you were missing one thing, you'd loose a lot of points. I was so grateful to be done early because a couple of people who had taken the test before had not even finished. They had nothing on their plates when the teacher called times up. Everyone had something wrong with their plate so I don't feel too bad about my very dry, extremely strong, burned garlic puree.

AND! This is the best part. Guess who was there to grade with the teacher. The cooking teachers new best friend, the French pastry chef. He gave me a nod of a approval on the roasted potatoes.