A Five Minute Window and A Flood

Today was our first practical or baking test and it was sort of an oh my land couple of hours. Seriously intense. My name, of course, was picked out of the bowl to be the first one to "present" my souffle to chef and I had a five minute window to present in. FIVE MINUTES! That means that I had to time the making of my souffle, like the whipping of the whites, the folding of the whites into the chocolate mixture and the actual filling and fixing of the cups perfectly so as to be able to have a perfectly risen souffle within that five minute window. It was actually a lot tougher than it reads now because you had seven other people all making souffles at the same time as you, asking questions to you about their egg whites and trying to sneak your burner away from you and chit-chatting (oh the chit-chatting -- it drives me insane!) and when you top that off with the stress of having to have a perfect souffle within a five minutes window...it's not fun and it makes me tired just thinking about it but when it was all said and done, chef would have liked to see my souffle a little taller but she said that it was a beauty, that the texture was great and that I did well.

Onto the next one: we also had to make creme anglaise. I had a smozzle of things happen with my creme anglaise, my burner went out twice and I had to move, I had another student's crap all over my station, I had blonde moments...but the thing is, none of this stuff would matter in the real world. I would still need to make a good creme anglaise and so I did. It wasn't perfect, it was a little too thin but I knew that and I told chef what I had done, what I would do differently and she said that was what really mattered, that I recognized the process and how to make it better. Then she told me that I was going to do fabulous (presumably in the real world), just fabulous. I heart her.


This is my practice souffle from around 2am yesterday morning...it needed a little height too but it still tasted delicious.


See?

Now, the other thing that was going on while I was making souffles was that our apartment was having a minor flood. It's actually not that minor, the walls in the bathroom are seriously bubbled and they are not coming to fix them till Friday -- which might be bad because the bubbles sort of look like they are still holding in water and what happens if they burst?!. I guess what happened was that the person who lives above us left his sink on and it wasn't draining right? How you can leave you sink on I have no idea but he did and our super had to bust into his apartment to turn off his water. Thank goodness Collin was home getting ready for work and so he was able to mop up all the water -- he said that at one point he could have splashed in the puddles -- had I come home to a flood I may have just gone to a hotel.