Day Five.... HAZE

It has been a rainy, dreary week, but the sun is shining over the East River today.

Because of Labor Day, I had no class Monday evening. The rain started Tuesday morning. This Tuesday, like every second Tuesday for the past several months, I rolled out of bed at 4:10 AM, showered, and headed to Penn Station for the 5:30 Amtrak train to Washington, DC. Between 5:30 and 6:30 I get myself ready for the day (I swear that trains – and planes – have the best bathroom lighting) and then prepare for meetings or finish up any work I need to do. At around 6:30 we pick up my colleague in Trenton and we spend the next couple hours catching up on the past two weeks. I had a nice, if long, day in Washington, finishing out the workday and then meeting some girlfriends for happy hour, before boarding the 8:45 PM Amtrak back to New York. Recently I have become one of those people who can sleep just about anywhere, so the Amtrak rides home are pretty painless. I bring a scarf, roll up across two seats, and set an alarm for the ETA in New York. Overall I really enjoy my Tuesday’s in Washington. I arrived home around 1 AM Wednesday morning.

I woke up a bit fuzzy Wednesday morning and by 10 AM had a full-blown migraine. I continued to work and study as much as ineffective writing and re-writing of the same sentence can be called that, and made the decision to attend class. Culinary Arts Level One Day Five focused on stocks, and as stocks are the “base” of all cooking, and I have never before made a stock, it was pretty important that I attend (forget the fact I am paying a pretty penny every evening I go or don’t go). I quickly realized how important that “mental” mis-en-place is in the kitchen, because on Wednesday I was absolutely mentally absent. NOTHING was in place.

Chef told us not to come to class if we hadn’t written our recipe cards. There are no books allowed in class, so for each lesson you need to read and then transfer the recipes onto note cards. I had written my recipe cards when my migraine was so bad I couldn’t read a complete sentence, so I entered the kitchen with fifteen note cards of chicken scratch. Luckily for the first stock, the brown stock, the class was split into two teams. My only job was to …. Well, that is how absent I was, that I don’t even remember what I cut. I did everything at a snail’s pace on Wednesday. Even though I started feeling better as we moved onto the white (chicken), fish, and vegetable stocks, I feel like I didn’t grasp the art of stock making – I was struggling to keep my head above water and remember what had to go into my bouquet garni. I need to spend some significant time this weekend reviewing Day Five and hoping that it comes back to me before our first exam on Wednesday!