I don't care! I love it!

I crashed my car into the bridge. I watched, I let it burn.

(Iconapop- I love it)

Intermediate Lesson 29- Flanders

Today is our last practical class for the intermediate cuisine class. We made a pan-fried cod steak with flemmish style red cabbage and a beer jus vinigrette. Wait what? YES we are cooking with beer! No more of that sissy wine stuff. We are cooking with BEER! Too bad we didn't even have enough beer for everyone to use according to the ingredients, so none were left for us to "dispense" after class.

Boom!

The atmosphere in the classroom was definitely very relaxed. This was the last class of the term. We've all taken our written exam earlier this week. Most importantly, this dish is not on the list of dishes to prepare for the exam, which meant we didn't really need to learn it. I think House said it perfectly:

 

(Hint: No)

Normally we would all be rushing to take out our knives in the beginning of the class, but today we just took it slow and took some photos of each other. Even the chef came late to the class.

Sitting on the table... big nono!

We wiped it when we got back back down. Don't worry.

After checking in with us, Chef Caals stepped out again and disappeared for another 15 minutes. We of course started playing with our red cabbages, which is really tough balls of really hard purple leaves. I really shouldn't tell you what we did in a public blog, but I can assure you that it was hygienic. Plus we washed them afterwards. But we did get a bit rowdy with the cabbages. It was very clear that none of us cared to start cooking until 10 minutes into the class. I love this group.

I was a bit bummed since I didn't do a good job on it and it was my last practical dish at the school. Though I didn't care about my grade, I wanted to do a good job because this was my last practical class in cooking school ever. I have no intention of taking the superior cuisine class because I don't want to be a professional chef, and I'm not interested in pastry. So I was hoping of whipping up something good to celebrate my last class. Chef Caals instructed us to cut the cod steak straight before cooking them, but I decided to be fancy and cut them escalopé, IE at an angle, because I wanted to make them look fancy for my last day. When I seared the pieces of cod, the pieces just collapsed and broke into pieces as I turned them around. And I know for a fact that it wasn't because I held them too hard because after the first piece I flipped the other pieces gently and they all broke regardless. Really a pity.

Quotes from this class:

"This is a recipe of the North, so I don't want to see any of you using olive oil! Only use peanut oil. People from the North have no sense of flavor. They don't know how to enjoy life. They also never smile. "

-Demo Chef Caals,

Who is from Northern France

Student: Will there be worms in the fish?
Demo Chef Caals: What?
Student: Will we find worms in our fish like we did in the Monkfish?
Chef: Ouai (Yeah)..... maybe.... *evil grin*... they would just add to the flavor anyways...
Student's face turns pale...