Week 2--Complete

I made it through week 2 of school! It may not sound like much of an accomplishment, but after being out of school for 3 years, it's been hard to get back in the swing of things. However, week 2 was definitely an improvement over week 1--I even fit in a ballet class! Huzzah! 


This week was pretty much all about fruits. We worked on the proper way to cut up fruit using both our paring knife and chef knife, we did quite a few tastings identifying all sorts of fruits and herbs and we made quite a few things.


We started out the week making Apricot Pate de Fruit (pronounced like "pat de fwah"...we all were saying it wrong until chef corrected us haha) which basically is apricot gelatin. Honestly it was way too sweet for my taste, but we were eating it by itself and usually it's served either in very small amounts or with other desserts. 

Next class was one of my favorites so far! We partnered up and got to work on 5 different recipes at the same time. It was the first class we had to figure out time management and how to focus on lots of different things at the same time--and I loved it! I got to make dried pears, candied grapefruit rind, plain poached pears, strawberry salad and poached pineapple. They were all great, but my favorite was definitely the poached pineapple--it was sweet with a hint of vanilla. Plus I just love pineapple even by itself! 


The last class of the week was "egg day". We learned about why eggs are so important in the baking world and worked on making meringue out of egg whites and sugar. I was so thankful that we have amazing Kitchenaid mixers in the classroom because for one exercise we had to whisk the eggs by hand and my wrist was sore after that. At the end of class we got to make Sabayon which is just sugar, sweet Marsala wine and egg yolks whipped together. Chef Jeff let us eat our sabayon over fresh berries and it was quite amazing! 


So there you have it--a brief overview of my second week in baking school. Of course other things were thrown in there like food safety videos and working on memorizing weights and measurements, but I expanded on the highlights of the week. The picture is poached pears, poached pineapple and vanilla on top in one glass, and raspberries and sabayon in the other. Oh, I was asked to give a shout out, so here it is--I got a lovely call from John Mark Griggs and Hannah Farlett that made my week about 200x better! (see, yall made it in my blog!)


I'm seriously loving school more and more each day and I am so grateful to be there!