Day two at the Culinary Institute of America started out innocent enough.  The night before we went to the hotel bar in our uniforms and enjoyed a glass of wine while we kibitzed with the bartender. Our assignment today was to learn sauté and pan frying.  Oh, also pasta making, spatzle, more vegetable cuts, French onion soup, and pounding meat.  Our chef instructor threw in the French onion soup recipe for fun.  The idea was to make all of these foods among the four teams in 2-hours time.  Seems like plenty of time you’d think but perfect cuts combined with perfect technique slowed us all down to a crawl.  Added to that, there is no drinking of “adult beverages” during class. (I informally polled my fellow classmates to learn that indeed all imbibe during their home meal preparation.)

Caramelizing onions takes a bit of skill to get it right; the pan size, type of onion, amount of oil or fat, and cooking temperature all have to be considered before embarking on this venture.  There were no perfect caramelized onions on our cooking day.

I was stationed to the pasta making.  This is fun if you remembered liking Playdo as a kid.  I did.  I will share the secret with you now:  the consistency of the dough before you roll it flat needs to be like Playdo (if you forget stop by Toys R Us tonight).  The dough needs to rest for 10-30 minutes before you roll it and then another 10-20 minutes before you run it through the “spaghettifier”.  Before long, I had tons of pasta ready for the boiled water.  My other team members pounded veal cutlets and covered them with sage and prosciutto.  “Did you put your onion soup in yet?” Asked our chef instructor.  Oops!

For the continuation of my story on my experience at the CIA, read here!