Internships and Spanglish

Internship hours completed: 52

Spanish words successfully learned: 3

Nervous Breakdowns: 1

Hi everyone!  It's hard to believe that I'm already a quarter of the way through with my internship.  For the most part I am having a good time, but I'm sure it goes without saying (though since I have this lovely blog here, I'll say it anyway) that it's never exactly what you expect it to be.

When I started (about two weeks ago), there was another intern who had already been working there for a couple of weeks, let's call her...Majorca (What - you have a better pretend name?  Just go with it...).  So Majorca had finished her class about a month before I did, which meant that she had a different teacher - the same one who I had a couple of times as a sub when Chef Katie was out.  I'd already heard (don't ask me how) that she was not doing that great and that she could be hard to deal with - sound like anyone we know?  However, I wanted to keep an open mind, plus since she'd already been there for awhile, I figured she'd be way ahead of me.  Boy was I ever wrong about that one!  She WAS awful!  She seemed a lot more concerned with asking me questions about my life plan than she was about doing anything at the bakery, so it came as no big surprise when she was let go from the placement before the end of my first week.  She couldn't even make streusel!  For those of you who don't know, streusel is a crumb topping that, in my experience, is usually made with butter, brown sugar, flour and cinnamon (sometimes with nuts, etc. added in) - it's also not particularly difficult to make.  So one of my first days at the bakery, the Chef is having me top a bunch of pies with streusel and we were running low on the batch I'd been using.  He tells me, "You're going to have to use Majorca's crappy streusel, it's in the fridge."  I say, "Okay (looking), where is it?"  He chuckles and says, "Oh you know, it's the one that looks like dough."  So I pull out a sheet pan that, lo and behold, looks like a sheet of very thick, light dough.  I try to break it apart to crumble it and it just comes apart in giant chunks - I could've beaten someone over the head with it.  So then the Chef has to leave to go on a delivery and he looks at me and says, "Okay, you make some streusel while I'm gone."  He leaves and I panic.  What if this is the one time I screw it up and he thinks we're all just a bunch of idiots?  Luckily that didn't happen.  He came back and cried out, "She can make streusel!  Thank God!"  What a relief!  I'm still in the program.

Since then my new chef and I have gotten along pretty well (don't worry CK - there's no one like you!), he even told me that he was already considering hiring me in September because he likes the way that I work (yay!).  Though, I don't want to leave you with the misconception that I'm doing everything perfectly, because that couldn't be further from the truth; I have definitely made my fair share of mistakes already.  I totally over baked some mini-cheesecakes today and was also told that my knife skills were "atrocious" and was then made to sit through a lesson on the proper way to hold a knife while the Chef pulled on it from various angles.  I'm trying to take all of these mess-ups and corrections in stride, and I'm definitely glad to still be learning, but it's really hard to sit there, listen to someone criticize you and then essentially thank them for telling you just how badly you suck.

One thing that doing this internship has made me realize (and don't laugh) is how many things I still need to get!  Now don't get me wrong, I'm not about to run out and buy anything crazy like a corn stick pan (love you Mark!), but there are other things that have started making their way onto my wish list:

#1: A real woman's chef jacket - Sorry CK, as much as you may tell me not to be jealous of your hip vents, I can't help it!  I desperately want a jacket that doesn't come down to my knees, and that I can button all the way without having to buy one 2 sizes bigger because it doesn't make allowances for, shall we say, curves?  Also, when I have to roll-up my sleeves 50 times on either arm, at the end of the day I look like one of those inflatable clowns with the slinky arms, and that is not a look I pull off well.

#2: Crocs - I know they're ugly, but I'd like to see if they make my feet feel like they want to kill me a little bit less.  After all, those are the simple things in life that we're all looking for, right?

#3: More books!!  I really want to get "About Professional Baking" by Gail Sokol, also the Chef at the bakery seemed shocked that I wasn't already subscribing to any "industry" magazines, so I should probably sign-up for "Dessert Professional" and "American Cake Decorating" (because those are the only ones I know about so far)

Other than that, things are going well, but I'm always being kept on my toes.  The Chef's "right-hand man", let's call him...Santiago, well he speaks very limited English and since I don't know any Spanish, things have gotten off to an interesting start.  For the most part we get along really well, but then again, 75% of the time we have no idea what the other one is saying which is really frustrating when he's the only one there telling me what to do b/c the Chef hasn't arrived yet.  For example, for about an hour today he was convinced that I'd called him a cow because I'd asked him if his back hurt.  Apparently cow in Spanish is "vaca" and when I said back, he thought that's what I said.  Also, on one of my first days, the Chef asked me to slice a box of peaches (I'm pretty sure the first time I'd ever sliced a peach in my life), and Santiago kept pulling the cores out of the trash and biting off the bottoms, joke-yelling at me for throwing away good food!  So, since I didn't want him to keep pulling things out of the trash, I started handing him the cores so he could eat and dispose of them as he wished, but when the Chef saw this he started laughing and yelled at me for "buying into his bullshit" and "feeding him like he's an Adonis."  Believe me when I say this, not wanting to be grossed out by someone eating out of the trash does not equal treating them like an adonis - it equals me not throwing up on the kitchen floor, and that's something none of us want.

peaches!

My forearms are now, also, covered in jump-burns, which is a word I just made-up for the mini burns you get from accidentally grazing the side of a hot pan, pot, oven, etc.  They look like bug bites and are just as annoying.  Look at me, I'm just like Stephen Colbert - inventing words and everything...maybe I'll get in the dictionary too :)

I also have some new nemesis', and two of them aren't human.  Two of them are mixers in the bakery and one is a person in the bakery, let's call him Tarrel (It's like Darrel, just with a T.  Shut up, I think it's a good name!).  So the mixers are just frustrating.  The one is much larger than any I've used before and is hard to maneuver/adjust, etc. 

Giant Mixer

Also, when I have to use it to make the sponge cake, the mixture fills it up so completely, that you have to wrap tinfoil around the top like a turtleneck so that it doesn't go spilling/flying every which way.  However, the other day when I was making it for the first time, we didn't have any tinfoil...let it never be said that I'm not resourceful:

That would be a mixer with a cone made out of parchment paper and scotch tape.  I suggested that I try knitting it a turtleneck, but something tells me that wool won't mix well with eggs and sugar.

Also, the only way to properly fold in the flour is to stick your entire hand in with a bowl scraper and fold it while someone else sprinkles the flour on top.  This is me, elbow deep in the mixing bowl - delicious!

This is my deceptive nemesis.  Sure, he looks tiny and harmless, but I'm still convinced that this mixer runs on diesel.  You can't turn it on stir (the lowest setting) without the ingredients flying everywhere b/c it's going so fast.  Eventually I asked the Chef what was going on with it, and he told me that at some point, someone had dropped it on the floor and that it hasn't worked right since.  Awesome.

Now for my human nemesis, Tarrel.  First of all, he likes to take every opportunity to make fun of Buffalo and me for being from Buffalo.  In my opinion, he's already asking for it.  In general, he's just obnoxious.  Now mind you, I don't really react to him on an overt level to begin with (eye rolling, just looking at him or ignoring him), but he keeps feeling the need to tell me to just wait till I work in a kitchen with "a bunch of Spanish guys" because then he'll seem like nothing compared to them.  Really?  I keep suggesting ways to take him down a peg, and the Chef has already approved every one (and even given me suggestions), so I'll keep you posted on which ones I wind up going with.  

And for a bit of fun, if you're one of the first people to guess which of the following names I've called Tarrel, you could win a container of homemade peanut brittle!  So send those guesses in, either through the comment section or through e-mail:

1. Son of a cracker basket

2. Ass hat

3. Jerk face

4. Schlemiel

5. Putz

I'll leave you now with one final picture of my mise en place for 2 giant batches of brownies...

Salt on the rim isn't exactly the same as a sugar-crusted pitcher containing 24 eggs...