My Pastry Cream is better than yours

    Yesterday we learned just a little bit about knife skills and made a sweet dough.  Today we made our sweet dough into cookies and made pastry cream.  The pastry cream is amazing!  Every time Chef  Jon said something that could go wrong I knew what he was talking about because it described my old pastry cream.  And people liked my old pastry cream; I guess they just didn't know any better.  Chef Pierre showed us how to pipe chocolate and we get to try that out tomorrow.  His demonstration was super impressive, especially when I had a hard time just making the piping tip.
     I think my partner and I work really well together and I'm having fun.  I'm excited for the first time I get to really wow someone.  People like the things I make now but I've always known it could be better, I just didn't know how.  One thing I do know is that no matter what happens, pastry school is the best decision I ever made.  I am still ridiculously quiet but it's starting to feel like home.

The Beginning

uniform

     The first week of class is now kind of a blur.  We started on Monday with introductions to all of the staff and our classmates.  They served us fresh croissants and chocolate croissants, they were awesome and I'm super pumped to learn to make them myself.  The second and third day we did a sanitation class that felt like a week.  The teacher was pretty entertaining and the test didn't seem too hard after all the videos and such.  Thursday we learned some in depth things about milk and butter which may sound boring but was very interesting.  Friday they went over some info about bread and eggs.  Everyone in the class had to say something interesting or weird about themselves.  I hate doing things like that because I never know what to say.  I said how I make up words sometimes; I heard Tony say jeezies once and it made my day.  We were also given our amazing tool kits!  I feel cool carrying it around the city =)
    There are 72 people in the program and they are split into a morning class and an afternoon class.  Morning and afternoon are each split into two groups of 18.  That means there is a total of 4 groups that they call streams.  I'm in stream 1.
     Making contacts in the food industry is super important so they strongly encourage us to do stages.  A stage is basically cold calling a business (restaurant, bakery, etc) and persuading them to let you volunteer there.  While we're there we'll be doing whatever they ask us to.  From taking out the garbage to I don't know what (because I've never worked in a restaurant, bakery, etc).  I should do as many as I can while I'm in school but I'm definitely nervous about it.  I think I'm more nervous about the phone call than the going and working there part.
     Next week we start in the kitchen with basic skills.  We start at 6:45 on Monday morning.  I'm giving myself an hour to get downtown so my alarm'll be going off at about 4:45.  This may seem really early (and it is) but it's not as early as I use to get up when I opened at Starbucks.  Regardless of the early hours I'm uber excited about school.  And yes I know, everyone is willing to be a taste tester.

Brett's 1st Visit

     Brett drove out here yesterday and I was very excited for him to see where I live and what my life will be like.  I made him tortellini for lunch and then we went out.  I took him to an el stop that Derek showed me and we wandered around in the cold.  We explored a giant used bookstore and tried to go to a record store.  It's not my fault it was closed for New Year's, I did take him there.  Then to try and take the edge off the chilly weather we stopped in a nerdy little coffee shop.  Bretty was jealous of the baristas ability to make pretty pictures in our foam.  It was also Brett's first time taking the el.  He made me feel knowledgeable and I liked it.  After that we made "whatever we can find in the cupboard" tacos and watched some LOST.  I made him start watching it a month or two ago and now he's hooked.  We watched a total of 8(!) episodes yesterday.  It was a fun day and a nice way to start the new year =)