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I am a student currently attending the California School of Culinary Arts Le Cordon Bleu Program in Pasadena, CA. I love to cook and I love to eat and I love to entertain... Next step is to graduate and open a place I can call my own... to entertain and serve YOU!

View of Fire from Pasadena

View of Fire from Pasadena
My thoughts go out to the families and firemen affected by the fire!

Tony in Uniform

Tony in Uniform
Fat and Happy Chef to be

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Day 1 of Intro to Culinary - CSCA Le Cordon Bleu

HOLY COW! HOW AMAZING! There are not enough clean expletives to explain how unbelievable class was tonight! Let me apologize for the wordy notes to follow but I am very eager to share my excitement with you all.

Chef Whitmore is a complete hard ass and I love it! He is demanding, very rule oriented and above all, a great teacher! This is going to be an incredible three weeks. He has it packed full. Tonight was the absolute earliest we will be out of class and that was 11:00pm. He said to plan on being in class until 11:30 or 12am each night depending on the cleanup time. I am completely exhausted but I feel high as a kite! The excitement and the rush from the running around the kitchen and learning is really neat!

Chef is a very hard grader and our attendance and work habits are 70% of our grade in this class. Each day will consist of a lecture, a demo and then our individual work of the recipes done in the demo. We get to eat or take home what we make in class each day. We will have three tests in this class. We will have knife cuts due once a week and we are strongly encouraged to get a bag of potatoes and a bag of large carrots and practice practice practice... The knife cuts are a large portion of the test grade.

Tonight we jumped in and started with a chicken stock. We are going to be learning a lot about stocks over the three weeks. We will be learning a lot of other recipes as well.

Chef said that those that practice a sense of urgency in the kitchen and take initiative will surely do well. His average students are C students so he says you must work hard and excel in order to receive higher grades. He is not quick to give out A’s. I am going to jump in and work very hard at this and enjoy every minute of working in the kitchen with a great Chef instructor. He also teaches our business law class and he has a law degree from UCLA, he is a cancer survivor and he was an Executive Chef for several years for the Marriott Corporation. He has been with the school for 7 years and he even traveled to Europe to help design the Intro to Culinary program for the school. He seems to know what he is doing inside and out and has taught our class over 100 times.

I am going to be staying very busy with this class but it is going to be quite a chance to learn some amazing things about this business. One small fact about kitchens the Chef shared with us tonight is that Cornell University did a study and figured that it costs an establishment 2 to 3 cents on average per step that the executive chef takes in the kitchen. That adds up pretty quick so it is imperitive to have a Chef that understands EVERYTHING that needs to be done and how quickly it needs to get done and done correctly...

If only you guys could take this class with me! What a blast!

2 comments:

  1. tony - I wanna take this class with you. So much fun reading the blog. I guess you will be hosting the Rasmussen Christmas this year because I'm hoping by then you'll be able to make something more than soup stock :)
    I'm drooling already!
    aunt patti

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wow, I am so jealous of you I wish I was there
    I'm coming down to visit and you get to make me
    some food!

    ReplyDelete

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