Day 13

So finally I got to work on something that felt like intense knife skills. Even if that was only just deboning chicken. I am greedy, though, and now I want a turkey. I am so deboning a turkey. Just look at these chicken pieces. Okay they are not mine. If you thought those were my hands I'd be seriously upset.

So after taking apart le chicken and deboning his wittle leggies we went on to butterfly the breast and stuff it with sauteed spinach and goat cheese. This was fun. Okay we are moving, using ingredients, different forms of heat, however, chef says he's not telling us any specifics so he can see what else we need to learn. I can't stand teaching method bullshit like this. Let's let everyone flounder and flail and then have them learn from their massive disasters. Great. I want to eat shitty chicken for lunch, don't you? So everything was going fine for me. I made the sauce robert which is a brown sauce with lots of dijon mustard in it. Its just a wine reduction with demi glace and salt and pepper then seasoned heavily with dijon. This was tasty. I butterflied, stuffed, seared, and sauteed my chicken breast. It was cooked to the right temp and I gave it a good long rest. So I dutifully slice and fan as vaguely instructed and look how it turned out.

So NO I haven't figured out the rotation shit yet. Turn you head. Mine is the one on the left with the great cheese ooze disaster of '08. Yes, I let it rest for 14 minutes! Believe it or not these two plates were the best of them. Did I mention I despise not knowing what I'm doing? Luckily I ate mine and did not die. We then moved on the fillet with "mushrooms" which are actually tourneed potatoes (potatoes cut into annoyingly tricky little barrels) that you balance a sauteed mushroom cap on top of. And, of course, we made sauce. A Chateaubriand sauce is a wine reduction/demi glace situation that you add chopped parsley and tarragon to at the end. It was goooood. So my beef situation was much better in my opinion because we had a little more direction. The meat turned out fine (I do pretty well so far with cooking times and sauces) and I took it home to let my family devour it directly from to go containers. No cute fake-out mushrooms for them.

Doesn't my parsley look cut on the side? Like a little carnivore's forest.

Tomorrow: more meat and plates. I will be vegan by saturday, I am sure.