a rant

Ever wonder what those silly culinary students had to do for finals? Seriously I don't know how many times since I've made the switch over to culinary school have I heard that my classes,exams, and finals would be so easy because you're just cooking or baking and you enjoy it so it's easy get over it. Well it's not. I think last spring when I started telling people from my hometown/high school I'd be leaving Rutgers to attend culinary school I got laughed at a total of 25 times. Like it was a joke what I was doing, what I was going to learning would be so simple, stress-free blah blah blah.

For my foundations of baking final tomorrow I have to prepare a fresh fruit tart. think something like this:


And while yes it is pretty easy, just pastry cream which at this point I could make in my sleep and a shortbread tart shell, it is pretty hard. For the final we had a shortage of KitchenAid mixers and someone "borrowed" my bowl and didnt return it to me clean. (keep in mind this is a timed final) So I had to clean a bowl and waste unnecesary time. Also during then midterm my chef didn't eat any of our finished products so basically it didn't matter how it tasted as long as it looked like what it was supposed to and we did the method correctly we would get a good grade.

For my intro to culinary arts final, we have to produce a salad with 3 garnishes and a vinaigrette dressing, a bread of our choice and a full entree complete with protein, starch and vegetable. All of this has to be completed within a 2 1/2 hour time period. A few months ago when we took the midterm, I had a serious panic attack, complete with my recipe notes falling into my soup pot (I kid you not). The guy who was sharing the work bench with had to continually tell me to relax and breathe and gave me pep talks through out the exam.

As much as I plan I know things could wrong and it really really annoys me when people think I can just wing it and I don't have it that bad. Now I know others have much worse things to complete for finals, like 20 page papers and open ended finals but that doesn't mean "I have it so much easier then people who go to real colleges" like for real thats a direct quote.

Lets all take a collective deep breath before our finals, say a little prayer, cross our fingers and think of others. We can all do this, we are capable of kicking our finals butts and kicking a** and taking names this semester. Good luck to everyone this lovely finals season and just remember in a little bit we can all fully focus and appreciate the holiday season.



** sorry for the rant/vent session I needed to get it off my chest