It is already only a few weeks away, the end of the school year! We hope to make this landing page more user friendly, easier to read and easier to feel like you are in the room with us.
We have many people and organizations to thank for the amazing help they have given our students!
In the meantime, please enjoy some of our past photo entries and thank you for stopping by!
Having fun with egg whites and sugar and loving the results – we learned about the magics of meringue (the dessert not the dance moves, although some students briefly practiced that too). Now on to more specific efforts toward our Long Table Dinner on March 7th – please join us!!
The closest we’ve been to carrots this week: Curtido for our enchiladas.
We’ve been visiting restaurants this last week, it is something I always put aside as a special perk, until I realize how much value even the briefest time is to our students. Both chefs, Laurence Jossell of NOPA and Alexander Ong of Betelnut, reminded us again of that word: source. Getting the flavor right demands having a connection to the original ingredient, the source. Even to know what a good carrot tastes like, as Laurence puts it, becomes important. And the pairing of flavors at Alex’s restaurant obviously share that sentiment.
The flavor of an ingredient may sound trivial to some, but what we heard was the connection to that flavor. Which made me think even more about the actual process of connecting to what we do.
So much of what we deal with in daily life is surface oriented. Getting to this text, getting to that email (or if you are an educator, there are a host of acronym-filled tasks to choose from) — real connection to our lives, drifts off. We see this in our students when we ask them about planning for their future. In the race to get that diploma, what happens afterwards can become a thought that easily drifts away.
What I love about our class is that our students make a connection to what it feels like to work under pressure, to accomplish a delicious achievement, to connect to a variety of new experiences using all of their senses, from their hands to their tastebuds. They are starting to know what that kind of carrot “tastes like”, and better yet, they can actually begin to describe it in real, working terms. When students get to that source, that connection and value to their potential, then amazing things can happen.
Thank you Laurence and Alex for your generosity! Time to start planning our next Long Table Dinner.
Counting ourselves lucky as we get to cook in our first week back, thanks to our students being ready to try completely new things to them, and keep an open mind. Frittata over tomato sauce, salad and biscotti in the first week. With all the dishes clean and put away before that ringing bell.
And this time, no full class spent on measuring, no new module on the ins and outs on what it means to be a chef – BAM. You walk in, put on a workshirt, keep your pride of work (each step of the way) and your professionalism going and it is all a piece of cake. Together we can do a lot.
And, by the way, there will be no slacking this quarter. We will appreciate the good moments and keep our sense of kindness through our mishaps but we mean business. We are already talking about our next Long Table Dinner, about job shadows and creating some delicious food.
Look out people! And save the date to come and enjoy our accomplishments: Thursday March 7th. Long Table Dinner. 6-8pm. More Soon! It is a New Year.
Still practicing and experimenting this past week and we are having a great time! We didn’t realize the impact of adjusting recipes to suit our event and that what we are doing is actually a kind of recipe creation. The sense of ownership in the room jumped as we started plating and they could see and taste the results. We realized also that while we liked our dessert experiments, we want something a little different – and we have some great ideas planned as we get ready for next weeks event.
Buy a ticket to the Long Table Dinner and taste what we are creating! Tickets are right here. We hope to see you Thursday!
We spent much of this week experimenting with various fillings for banana leaf in preparation for our Long Table Dinner. It was great to get a chance to try a few different techniques and wrappers. We don’t really want an solely Asian focus, so it was helpful to work things out and to work on the dessert as well. The Analon cookware donated to us by the Golden Gate Restaurant Association really came in handy – my students have a new love for plums!
Please join us on October 11th! Tickets are here.
Well well, it is shopping time. Our Long Table Dinner is coming up soon – October 11th! Our students are very excited & I’m very excited to get to do some shopping down at Farmer’s markets throughout the city. Please join us! Tickets right here .
Some quick pictures from our first month of cooking at school. We are with a great bunch of students who have come together pretty quickly for being the beginning of the year. We are very proud of them!
The school year is starting in just a few days… so much to do and so little time! But vocabulary is always in the forefront of an educator’s mind when they are getting ready to teach.
As a chef, one doesn’t think so much about vocabulary. It is more important that you know how to warn someone you are behind them (“Behind”) or that you are about to make a loud noise (in which case you say clearly “Loud Noise,” before you bang that rolling pin on the pastry dough). There are many times where saying less means much more.
So while “mise en place”, “blanche” and “saute” are important cooking terms & techniques, our classroom focuses more on working world vocabulary and working attributes make for a great hunting ground. When you work with a person who is just seeing their own potential – and its resulting accomplishment, then you watch them as they put it into words like this , it is magical. Reason#59a why people enjoy teaching.
Then there are a few words we’ve adapted to better suit our team spirit:
Positivity: our style of staying positive, more of a constant strength that keeps you going rather than something to rise up to or turn on or off. It is more fun that way.
Respectual: this version of respect seems to demand less and share more. It’s respect and mutual blended together. And we are in this together.
Here’s to the new school year, ready,set, go! Please join us for our next Long Table Dinner, we are setting our sights on October 11th, and more news on that soon!
Chicken Tagine and Vegetable dashing upstairs on May 3rd
Wow. Am I proud of my students. They made and served dinner to a very long table of guests on May 3rd in our central hallway. The experience was absolutely full-on professional.
Many of our students heard how proud everyone was of them too. Some students were even a little concerned, as if the accolades were based on how they behaved, not what they achieved.
But our success was not based on behavior or manners, it was based on something much stronger. There is a lot of strength in putting all of your combined efforts together to create true hospitality. Perhaps schools don’t experience this enough.
Together we can create more than the sum of our parts. We create that “magic” in the room, the reason why many restaurant owners take those huge financial leaps to provide a place where people can go and get fed in so many ways. When your guests have truly enjoyed their experience, it gives you this wonderful feeling, much more than satisfaction. There is a great deal of value to being a part of that kind of group effort and accomplishment. Thank you everyone involved with our first Long Table Dinner. More pictures soon, as we look forward to our next one in October!