Veal

Okay, wow, finally. I'm still having internet issues, but let's see if I can get a couple posts out.

Monday we worked on veal. In case you didn't know, veal is a biproduct of the dairy industry - male calves that obviously can't be used for milking. Veal is very pink and has very little fat - they are fed a formula diet.

We worked with the right hind leg, in teams - just because it's a 'baby' doesn't mean it's actually small... we had to clean the silverskin and fat, and then cut scaloppini to be cooked later in the week. Scaloppini are butterfly-shaped pieces of the leg. Lovely Chef B. brought me to tears when he came over and 'kindly' told me my pieces were too big. Then, when I did it over and showed it to him, he only chooses then to mention that 'oh, you could have just cut your pieces in half, you didn't have to do it over.' Gee, Chef, maybe if you actually instructed instead of just telling someone they did it wrong... it's just a thought.

Then he did a cooking demo - in complete silence. And when students tried to ask questions, he wouldn't even answer, he just glared and put his finger to his lips. Later, he calimed to Irish this is because people in our class have trouble listening and following directions. That might have been aimed at me, but there may have been others - I didn't put my tenderloin on ice when he did a cutting demo on Rico's cutting board right next to me.

So, other than that fun stuff with cutting up veal, there was a tornado warning in the city. Except, we didn't actually know about it since we're in the basement already until Chef started getting annoyed at the noise in the hallway - someone ducked in and informed him that everyone was in the basement due to the sirens. Chef allowed us five minutes to check in with family, and then while everyone else got out of class, we went right back to listening to him lecture. I love storms, so I was sorry I missed this one - from what I could tell on my drive home, lots of trees were knocked down. It was pouring buckets when we got out at 11:40 - in addition to getting soaked while walking to my car, I couldn't actually see the road in front of me. But luckily that didn't last the whole way home. But, I did see a biker hit by a car (run into a car?). As far as I could tell while I was at the stoplight, the biker was fine and got up. Which was good.

Lessons learned:

Deep breaths stop tears. This was five days ago, so I'm having trouble remembering what I learned.