When 5 am finally arrived, I was up, got a shower, got dressed and went down to my rental car, which was covered in frost. The car didn't have an ice scraper in it, so I had to improvise with a credit card. Luckily I had my gloves so my hands didn't freeze. The frost did not come off easily at all, but I scraped it as best as I could.
I drove up to the campus, and parked in the parking garage that we were told to park in. It was dark, quiet, and cold as I walked to the Continuing Education building, which also houses the Pastry and Baking classes. There were some students walking around outside, so apparently they start really early at the CIA.
I went to the East Dining Room in the building, and was one of the first Boot Campers there. Eventually the others came in, and we got a really nice duffel bag which had our uniforms in it, as well as some other goodies like a pencil, pen, and a travel mug. I was nervous about the uniform when I saw it -- how would I look? How would it fit? I was worried.
We were shown our lecture room, and dropped off our stuff, and then we were taken to breakfast. All the food at the CIA is made by students, and they have a breakfast service from 6 am - 9 am in their main building. The dining room where you eat was once the chapel in this building before the CIA was here. Before the CIA, the campus was a Jesuit Seminary. The main dining room had a high ceiling, with beautiful paintings, stained glass, and rich woodwork. It was like a smaller version of the dining hall at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books.
Across from the dining room was Kitchen 16 (or K16). They have a dry erase board with what is being offered that morning. You place your order, then wait for it while the students prepare it. And let me tell you, the offereings were very impressive: Eggs Benedict, Pancakes, Chorizo Sausage Breakfast burrito, egg white omelet, western omelet... the selections were great. You could also get several side dishes like home fries, bacon, yogurt, fruit... So many selections. I decided to get pancakes, and they were HUGE, and they gave me three of them! The pancakes were the size of a dinner plate, and probably 3/4 inch thick! I barely ate half of them.
After eating, you must bus your own table, and you take the dishes to the dish-washing center. This is a standard operationg procedure that we had to do throughout the day.
At 7 am we started the lecture part of the day, and we met our Chef Instructor, Dave Bruno. Everyone introduced themselves, and shared why they were here. I would say most of us are here for the same reasons: We love to cook, and we've wanted to do this for a long time. For me, I wanted to get some formal education/training, and see if it is something I could do. There are 15 boot campers in this program, 2/3 are men, 1/3 are women.
The Chef gave a lecture about Mise En Place, Basic Culinary Preparations, Knife Skills, and Stocks. The lecture was interactive and luckily I knew a lot of the answers to the questions he was asking us. After we finished up the lecture, we had some time to put on our uniforms which consisted of checkered pants, a chef's coat, a toque (chef's hat), and an apron. My uniform fit me fine, and I was so relieved! I don't think I looked too nerdy in it, either! :-)
We made our way to our kitchen, and we picked out a station. We got a tour of the kitchen to learn where everything was. The Chef did a demonstration of what we were going to be doing for the morning, which was knife skills. First we worked on fruit. We had to supreme an orange and a grapefruit, wedge a kiwi fruit, and slice up an apple. This wasn't too difficult, but the thing with this, though, was working on neatness and precision. After we were done, the fruit was made into a fruit salad that we ate for lunch.
After the fruit, we moved on to vegetables. We had to slice onions (1/8 inch pole to pole), dice onions, dice carrots, batonnet carrots, oblique-cut carrots, dice celery, batonnet potatoes, mince garlic, chop parsley. That was a lot of knife skill work, and it took up most of the morning. While we were doing this work, there were other students in the kitchen who made our lunch. They used our oblique-cut carrots for the lunch, and they made french fries out of the batonnet potatoes.
We cleaned up our stations, and then it was time for lunch. I was glad too because I was starting to get a headache -- from the sleep last night, and also just from the "first day jitters". You know how when you start a new job, the first day is always the hardest and makes you get a headache? Well, I was getting one of those. They put the food on platters for a buffet, and we all went through for some lunch. We had a mesclun salad with balsamic vinagrette, roast chicken, glazed carrots, french fries, and mashed potatoes. I took a little bit of everything.
We ate in our lecture room, and they also set up some desserts from the pastry students. Oh, that reminds me, when we were doing our knife skills, the bakery students had made Stollen, which is a sweet roll type of pastry. They passed around some Stollen for all of us to try. It was very good, of course! Anyway, back to the lunch. It was a huge lunch, and I sampled a dessert which was like a variation of Tiramisu. It was very light and airy and delicious of course.
In the afternoon, we took a behind the scenes tour of the store room areas, where they have all the dry goods, produce, and other ingredients used in the cooking throughout the school. It was fun to see all the variety of things that they had, and all the unusual foods too. It is quite an operation here, and everything seemed to be running like clockwork.
We next went on a thorough tour of the school with the Director of the Food Enthusiast Programs. She was a great tour guide, and was an alum of the CIA herself. We toured the Baking and Pastry school, the main building which is called Roth Hall, and we were able to see the rooms where they "fabricate" (butcher) the fish and meat for the entire school. A student gave us a fantastic tour of the meat locker where all the meat is. He was a great speaker, and you could tell that he was "in his element". He has a lot of passion for meat and butchering! He said that beef tenderloin, which is the most expensive cut of meat, is also CRAP! He said there are much better cuts of meat for your money, and don't buy into the myth that it is the best cut of beef.
After the tour, the day started to really hit me, and I was TIRED, and had a pounding headache, but the day was over around 4 pm. Now I would call this a FULL DAY. They do not call it a Boot Camp for nothing, I will tell you that.
We were dismissed, and dinner was on our own. I wasn't hungry for something really big, so I went to a cafe on the campus called the Apple Pie Bakery and Cafe. I got a turkey sandwich (on brioche) with a chipotle mayonnaise, and I couldn't resist getting 2 cookies: chocolate chip and a huge cookie called a "Not an Oreo Oreo". I also perused their bookstore, which was filled with cookbooks, cooking supplies, utensils -- it was AWESOME! I looked at their t-shirts and sweatshirts, but did not not purchase anything... yet. I still have a few days to mull it over if I will get anything. All the shirts were very expensive, not unlike any college bookstore. So I have to think about this purchase decision. I could easily have bought everything in that store though.
I drove back to the hotel, and immediately took a long hot shower to soothe my headache, and wash off the smell of onions that I could sense. I guess smelling like a kitchen is part of the bargain when you do something like this. I ate the sandwich and the cookies, which were outstanding, of course.
The rest of this evening is going to be spent decompressing and re-energizing for tomorrow. Before I end this for now, here is a list of some of the new things I learned today:
- Use a spoon to peel a kiwi fruit. It works better than a knife!
- You can puree garlic by chopping it fine, then put salt on it. Use the end of your knife to mince/crush the garlic into a paste. It worked like a charm! I was amazed I was able to do this!
- If you cut onions "pole to pole", the onions will not disintegrate during cooking since you are cutting them "with the grain".
- When prepping celery, if you will be eating the celery in the finished product, peel the outside of the celery with a vegetable peeler. It just makes it a little bit more refined. If you won't be eating the celery or straining it out, you don't have to bother with the peeling.
- To square off vegetables, just cut off 3 sides to start out, then do your cuts. When you get to the end that isn't squared off, you will have less waste.
- Pick parsley off the stems first before you chop it.
- Remove the wishbone from a raw chicken before you roast it. It makes carving the breast easier.
- To remove skins from a lot of garlic cloves, put the garlic in a bowl, and then put a matching sized bowl on top to make a sphere. Shake the bowls vigorously and this loosens the skins!
- The on-campus restaurants here are staffed by students, and it is one of their classes. Students rotate out of these restaurants every 14 days. So, every 14 days, the restaurants have brand new staffs!
- A new class of students starts up every 3 weeks.
- The CIA has approximately 2,500 students.
