Welcome to my blog...

am using it to document my Culinary School internship adventure. Today, was my first day on the job at Perche' No Pasta and Vino. Perche'No documentary.

After being at the Kitchen Academy for about 5 months, I get to work inside a real kitchen. Chef Mullins was right, we have it good at school.

The first thing, I noticed was that they had a washing machine and dryer right in the rear kitchen. So, there is no need to go far to get clean towels.

For my first day, I learned how to prep for their dinner. I sliced a big bucket of tomatoes for making oven dried tomatoes. Being an Italian restaurant, they use lots of tomatoes. I sliced tomatoes and balls of fresh mozzarella for their salad. I sliced squid for their deep fried Calamari rings. I small diced 1/2 quart of tomatoes, Chef David said next time, he will teach me to diced tomatoes in 2 minutes. I learned from Chef Abdul to quickly fabricate prawns, he told me I could be fabricating up to 200 prawns at one time. One bit of advice for those still in culinary school, work on your knife skills, they are a pain to learn but learn them well so you can be fast and effective at cutting and dicing.

I learned how they get the marinara sauce to the right texture and consistency, they use the meat grinder attachment on their Hobart mixer. I got to feed a giant hot stock pot full of tomatoes, basil leaves, garlic, 15 carrots, 2 bunches of celery, and 20 onions simmered sauce mixture through the grinder. It made it a much more consistent texture than the method we learn at school by using a stick blender.

The last half hour of my day, I spent dicing old bread and made croutons for their salad and cleaned arugula. Other than that, everyone was very helpful and helped me to feel at ease at working in their kitchen. I was nervous, not knowing what to expect. And the 3 years of Spanish in high school was finally paying off. Even a little helps, in being able to communicate with my new co-workers. Many of my co-workers are Latinos and speak very little English. It is also an eye opener, that Chef Herman was right, kitchen work is a "man's" world, not very many women opt to do this kind of work.

All in all, it was a good start for my first day at internship. And no dishes to wash! Jose and Manuel takes care of all the dirty dishes.