I'll Have My Meltdown With a Side of Creme Brulee Please

Hi Friends!

For the last couple of days I have been partner-less at school.  Well, without my original partner anyway.  Julie and her family flew to Vancouver to participate in the last few days of the Olympics (Jealous?  Why yes, I believe I am), and so Thursday I found myself working on my own for the first time.

I was pretty nervous, but a little psyched as I very stupidly convinced myself that not only could I accomplish the days tasks alone, but that if I could, it would prove just how awesome I am.  Let me tell you this: I am not awesome.  I handled the first recipe pretty well - creme brulee.  I even made a "cinnamon" variety that I think came out fairly well.  Any excuse to use a blowtorch in every day life, right?  But then came the creme anglaise *shaking fist at sky* Damn you creme anglaise!  I completely screwed it up.  I cooked it too long and basically wound up with sweet scrambled eggs and had to make it over again.  I tried to console myself with the fact that other people had to remake other things that day (like the pastry cream that we made next), but it all comes down to the fact that I got cocky and made a mistake.  I started to have that feeling when I know that a breakdown is coming on but I was determined to not be that girl, so I took a deep breath and finished out the day.  Amusingly enough, we were pooling all of our creme anglaise together so that Chef Katie could make us ice cream for breakfast the next day, but guess what?  School was canceled on Friday!  People down here really can't handle the snow!  Granted, I certainly didn't want to be out driving in the snow on Friday, but that has to do partly with the fact that they don't know how to plow or salt the roads - it's dangerous times downstate.  In the end, I don't know what happened with the creme anglaise, but we had to throw out all of the pastry cream we'd made because it had all gone bad over the weekend before we could use it for anything.

That brings us to today.  My partner Julie was out again today (and will be tomorrow as well) because she got strep throat on the trip back from Vancouver (dumb planes), so I wound up working with another girl whose partner was also absent today.  Chef Katie asked if anyone wanted to "adopt" her  as their partner for the day (poor choice of words...) and I said that I would, which led to her calling me "Mom" or "Mommy" for most of the morning.  Other than the weird parental connotations, we worked fairly well together, so if her partner is out again tomorrow then I will have no problem being paired up with her again.  We almost screwed up our pastry cream (forgot to add the butter & vanilla at the end) but caught ourselves in time before it was ruined.  We also made pate a choux, which I made before in the 3 week course I took at ICE last summer and chocolate ganache which of course led to chocolate topped eclairs and cream puffs!  Luckily there aren't too many, but our kitchen and refrigerator our incredibly overrun at the moment and it isn't doing my waistline any favors.  I hate to throw things out, but I'm having trouble getting through everything!  I'd love to be mailing out carepackages, but unfortunately the things we've been making lately can't be shipped/need to be refrigerated, etc. and I have like, 2 co-workers now as opposed to 80+.  I'm sure I'll figure something out though.

I'm really looking forward to having some of my local friends over in a couple of weeks for a taste testing so that I can practice what I've been learning.  I already find myself making mental checklists for things to make, and which ones have parts that can be made in advance.  Hooray for feeding people!

I hope that you enjoy reading this blog as much as I enjoy writing it, and I promise to try making things that can be mailed out soon :)