Pig's Ears

Today was a very frustrating day and I need to vent a little.  I had two practicals today - another puff pastry and introduction to bread.  We had a new chef today and it was his first time doing practicals.  I really liked this chef because he spent a lot of time walking around teaching us.  He made sure we were comfortable with what we were doing.  Some of the other chefs have just kind of watched from a distance and helped when we ask.

We started with our breads in the morning (which I enjoyed eating for lunch).  We made white bread rolls and soda bread.  It was quite fun to make the white bread from scratch.  We threw it on the counter over and over as part of the kneading process.  We were free to shape, fill, and/or top our rolls however we wanted.  Since I love cheese, I filled quite a few with fresh parmesan cheese and olives or dried onions.  The loaf in the corner of the picture below is the soda bread.  Soda bread is made with baking soda and buttermilk instead of yeast.  In our bread demo last week the chef also made focaccia that was amazing. Unfortunately we didn't get to make it in our practical. After our bread demo on Friday the chef put out olive oil, butter, and cheese for us to eat with the bread.  I was a very happy lady!

In the afternoon we used our puff pastry from last week to make palmiers and a "Bande" puff pastry with pastry creme and fruit.  Palmiers are also known as pig's ears.  I was very happy with my first tray of Palmiers, not too many holes.  Mom and Kathleen, I will have a fresh batch waiting for you in June.

This is where I get to the frustrating part of the day. Each group is given a certain amount of fruit to use for a class. Some people in our class took it upon themselves to take more than their share of fruit and left the rest of us with barely enough to cover our pastry. I ended up with a rotten orange, no kiwi, an excess of blueberries and red currents (that is why there are so many lines of these two), and not enough strawberries to make a line. I had to get strawberry scraps from other people who had cut theirs differently. I am not happy with the way the fruit looked on mine.  There should be more color and I hate the two rows of blueberries next to each other.  But that is not the part that mattered today anyways. The chef understood and learned later that we are supposed to divide the fruit equally at the beginning.  It definitely won't happen again.

Besides the fruit problem there were other incidents with students today that frustrated me (and a few other girls in our group), but I won't go into much detail.  I really thought I was going to school with other adults that want to be here.  It seems that some people have different motivations for being here and don't really care about other people and are downright rude.  OK, I'm done complaining.  I know I will have to deal with challenging personalities wherever I go.  Besides the frustrations with some classmates, I was very happy with my breads and puff pastries.