The Big Finale

After 9 months of school, 3 months of working in the kitchen of L'Ecole, and countless cuts and burns, it was finally our time to face the big final exam.

About 2 weeks before the final, I felt pretty confident. I kept thinking to myself that it could not be any worse than the midterm, and I had made it through that. When I took the midterm, I had no idea what to expect. I had also never worked in a "real" kitchen before, so my experience was next to nothing. But, after 3 months at my internship and another 3 in the restaurant at school, I was more than prepared to face this challenge, right?

Maybe.

When you think about it, although we have been cooking the 8 possible dishes for the final in the restaurant kitchen for the past 6 weeks, each person only spends 2 classes on one dish before rotating on. And you do that with a partner, so not only do you have help, but you only really prepare half the dish one night and then switch and prepare the other half the next night. On the final, you are responsible for 2 dishes in their entirety, with no help from anyone. In the kitchen, you have 2 hours to prep the one dish with your partner before orders come in. On the final, you have about three and a half hours to prep 2 dishes all by your lonesome.

Then you have your Chefs. Sometimes it just feels like their sole purpose is to take away any confidence you may have and replace it with the feeling of, "Crap, I am so unprepared for this thing". My Chefs did a good job with this. Especially when they told us how during our final we would be joined by the students in the day program that ended just a few days before ours, who failed their final and had to take it over. They were cooking the same dishes as us, and we had been hearing all along how good their class was.

I tried to practice as many of these dishes at home, but at the end of the day you just don't have the same equipment and ingredients to really do it correctly. So, I would practice bits and pieces. This really left me only with one thing to do to prepare and that was just to memorize all the procedures and come up with a game plan for each possible dish paring as to what to prep first.

Our parings were going to be appetizer/meat or fish/dessert. With fish/dessert, even though the dessert goes out 45 minutes later, you have to do it all first because it takes the longest to cook, cool, make the ice cream, etc. With app/meat, depending on which pairing you got there were separate game plans.

So, on the evening of the final, we all assembled in the the private dining room on the 4th floor close to our level 1 and 2 kitchens. We first had to take a written exam, and then picked our pairings randomly. While we were waiting, Jacques Pepin came in and joked around with us a little to maybe calm our nerves. If you ask me, though, it just made me more nervous. No matter how many times you see him at school, you still can't help but think about how famous he is. Would he still be joking around if he knew how much we sucked??? Ha,ha....

Then if was off to business. I chose my random piece of paper which revealed the salmon dish and the gingerbread cake. I had a neutral feeling for this pairing. I was happy it was not the consomme/steak pairing (the most time consuming with all the sides and garnishes that went with it), but it was the harder of the the 2 fish/dessert pairings.

The next 3 plus hours went pretty smoothly, but without a second to stop and think. They split us up into 2 separate kitchens. In my kitchen was the half of the class that had fish/dessert. I took a sigh of relief when I walked into the kitchen (the same one I had my level 2 class) and saw we each had a whole station to ourselves. This meant I got an entire oven to myself, 2 burners and the whole flat top to myself. This was in contrast to the midterm where in that same amount of space, we had to share with another classmate. I quickly set up my station, sani solution, cutting board, bowls, six pans, pots, pans, tasting spoons, etc.

And then it was off to work......