Level one officially ended today and yes this email is late because I did go celebrate afterwards. It’s not like I had 1 theory comprehensive final, 1 practical skills (knife skills etc), and a servsafe sanitation food safety certification exam or anything. By 2 pm, my brain was fried. I got to school relatively early because I was pretty jittery over all three exams. Carlos and Sagot almost fell out of their chairs when they saw me walking through the culinary doors early and not showing up 5 minutes before class started. No boys, don’t worry… I’m not trying to steal your “chefs pet” role. We weren’t in the usual kitchen classroom setting, but instead went upstairs to the buffet section where level 4 meets. We had two proctors- Chef Will and Chef Karen. At first, Chef Karen seemed to have a stick up her butt and yelled at me for having my review sheets out on my table while Chef Will was talking. She was all up in my face with one of those “you can’t have those out now” end of the world tones. Gesh, lady pump the breaks! We have five minutes till we are starting and besides Chef Will didn’t make the “put everything away” announcement yet.
We first took the written theory test. No big deal only got a 97% on it, but it was a review of everything we’ve learned. Who’s paying attention now, Cheff Jeff? After our written exam, we had to showoff our knife skills. I am happy to say I received a 93% in that department! How? I have no idea to tell you the truth. We were given 15 minutes to julienne a whole carrot, jardinière a turnip, ciseler both an onion and shallot, and emincer an onion. Fifteen minutes is nothing and flew by faster than any food gets eaten at the Wittels’ family table (which is pretty fast). We were placed in alphabetical order, so I ended up next to Carlos (lucky me). He was slicing and dicing so fast that it forced me to keep up with the time. Side note: we also were evaluated on the amount of vegetable trimmings we wasted. Well, when I was at the 30 second mark- I had half of a turnip leftover and was screaming at myself for grabbing one of the largest turnips. Darn you! Well, I decided to make a split executive decision, grabbed the ½ turnip I had left, and put it in my pocket. I hid it hahahha oops- definitely illegal, but I didn’t know what else to do (probably only would have lost 1 point).
After our vegetables, we had to tournage 8 potatoes and prepare an artichoke bottom. While preparing the artichoke, you have to rub it with lemon all over. In the process of rubbing it with lemon, my lemon slips out of my hands and hits Carlos straight in the face in the middle of our final (I’m hysterically laughing while typing this. Carlos was in shock and couldn’t believe it while I was giggling like crazy- that would only happen to me). After the artichoke and potatoes, we had to make a tomato fondue. I’m not even going to go into the stove situation (cough cough: they made us use a stove with 6 fires pushed against the wall- we were all working on top of each other- it was the definition of a HOT MESS). I was glad when the practical exam was over.
We ate lunch and then took our servsafe sanitation exam. Hopefully I passed because I do not want to have to make that one up. We don’t find out our score for another couple of weeks, but will obviously keep you posted.
Level 2 begins tomorrow and we are working with deer! Oh What a day!
Love,
E