A Different Sort of Monday
In the Before Times, Monday mornings were my main conference call day (every day was a conference call day, of course, but Monday’s conference calls were Conference Calls if you know what I mean. I’d show up at work early and spend the day constantly on - getting reports, making plans, arguing about important things, arguing about dumb things, triple checking things, staring at spreadsheets. They were useful days, and sometimes important days, but they were never fun days.
Today I spent 2 hours making marzipan roses:
Now, you would think that a Monday morning making marzipan roses would be a lot less stressful than managing multi-million dollars budgets, but I’m pretty sure my blood pressure was higher this Monday morning than any campaign Monday morning. That’s partially the butter (after one week of eating everything I’ve made, my shirts all shrank by the same amount in the wash! Very odd coincidence.) but being stressed out is also very much the Cordon Bleu experience.
Everything here is fast. It’s early, and it’s fast, and there’s a French chef who will be disappointed in you if you do it wrong. I had to leave my house at 6:15 AM to make it to marzipan rose class on time, because it’s my week to set up the kitchens before class. I ran around like a crazy person, trying to set up a kitchen I’d never been in for a class I didn’t know much about. Once class starts, the chefs have a clear sense of when they want things done by, but they rarely share it with the rest of us. At some point, you’re just too late, and then they stand at your station and yell at you while you’re egg-washing or whatnot.
This is all clearly by design, and I’m sure I’ll be grateful for it soon. They’re trying to prepare us for the pace of a professional kitchen, where things need to be done at whatever time they need to be done, and where no one has any problems yelling at you. But man, it’s a change! It’s been a lot of years since I was the new guy, and a lot of years since I was in a classroom. For most of the last twenty years, if someone yelled at me I would yell back at them. Now I mumble “oui chef” and try not to mess up a leaf. As I said, it’s a different kind of Monday morning.
The Gallery:
In addition to the marzipan roses, we made lemon madeleines, a glazed fruit cake, and gateau basque (a cake filled with cherry jam and pastry cream) at the end of last week. My madeleines were fine - 3 out of 5. My butter was too hot when I mixed it, inhibiting the hump. My fruit cake was shockingly good - 5 out of 5 - and the gateau basque got a 4. A chef was yelling at me while I egg-washed it, that’s why there was a little pool where it burnt.