02 Cooking: My Class, Assorted Nuts and Vegetables
My class—it’s mostly people roughly in their 20s-30s. I say roughly because I’ve already seen a few edges. The class, consisting of about 18 people, is a real microcosm of the City: Caucasian girls and guys of various ethnic backgrounds, a lone Hispanic, Black men, and Asian women. Several students struggle with English. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to get along in a country where you barely speak the language while attempting to learn a complicated set of skills; this would be me at the Cordon Bleu in Paris. They’re doing better than I would. My grandmother spoke Ukrainian and Polish—when she came to America, she decided that two languages were enough, and never learned English, preferring to let her daughters do the talking.
Mirapoix--the base of bases
It’s hard to tell who the ex-cons are. I’m not going to ask. Everyone is broke, which is comforting.
Thus far I’ve learned that pretty nearly every type of food can make you very, very sick and many kitchen machines are out to get you. Those really big machines are scary–the steam kettle (which is jacketed with a steam chamber to raise the temperature around the entire kettle) is the size of a hot tub. Remember to wash your hands 15 seconds with soap (sing “Happy Birthday” to yourself twice).
We’re going to start cooking soon. Look for the perfect fond (French for “foundation”) in the near future. It’s stock, of course, made from scratch. I don’t have to tell you that most commercial stock (those little cubes, jars etc.) are almost entirely made of salt. The real stuff always starts with mirapoix, a fancy name for the vegetables in the picture above…