My First Day at TAFE

Hey Guys,

   Well today was AWESOME!!! I had so much fun and learnt soooo many things today. To start with I will tell you a bit about it. I arrived at TAFE and it was raining and cold, when I arrived into the classroom there were only 3 other students!! My classes will all be small, we started straight away by prepping onions, carrots and celery to do precision cuts, we learnt to do Julienne,  Brunoise, Paysanne, Jardiniere, Macedoine, Battons and cubes, it was so much fun after those 3 veg we through in a few leeks and potatoes then vacum packed them to use in our soups when the time comes to make them it was so exciting, we also made a Tomato Concasse and Mushroom Duxelle, After that we went on a 15 minute break.

When we came back we learnt about cutting meats, before learning to cut different sized sirloin we had to weigh up the yield (lost fat, grissle) to see how much our 4kg sirloin really was (this is more an exercise focusing on portion control and why restaurants by the steaks already cut) after cutting away the Shane (overflap) and cutting away all the fat and grissle, we lost just on 1.5kg so if as a restaurant we purchased a whole cut at $20 a kg we would be throwing away $30 worth of unusable stock, it was such an eye opening experience to see that.

After that we deboned a whole chicken, one of the girls in the class was so squeamish i asked her is she was a vegetarian, she informed me she wasn't but like the idea of not knowing too much about what she eats (clearly she is in the wrong career), after we had finished all that it was time for our 45minute lunch break, by this stage we were already 2/3 of the way through the class.

When we all returned we had set up a table for the 4 of us to use together, due to the fact the teacher was only supposed to have 3 students in the class but another student showed up, so this practical meant the teacher needed to show us all what to do with our meat because he didnt have one to show us with. We filleted and skinned fish next, we started with some flatfish (sole) i have to tell you, i have never in my life filleted or skinned a fish! but i aced it, then we filleted some snapper.

We made some bechamel sauce, mayonaisse from scratch then turned it into Tartare.

It was extremely fun with heaps more to do tomorrow...