What an exciting day! (9 Days!)

Finals.

Today was the first day of my first culinary final. A lot of you are probably wondering...how does a culinary final work? Lucky for me it does not involve sitting in a silent classroom, holding a pencil and staring at a page of empty bubbles. Today was active, I was sweatin' and it was hard. 

Our final consists of 34 cooking tasks in the kitchen, two of which are mystery competencies. So we did have time to prepare a "plan" for our two-day (9 hours to cook total & 3 hours to clean) final. If you know me, I'm not very organized. I like to make things look visually appealing! I like pretty colors and things looking organized! But when it comes down to it, I am a loopy scatter brain. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, it's just that I created this fat elaborate "practical exam" packet to use as a guide for my final and I didn't use it...what a waste! But look at it, you know it's pretty :)

As soon as Chef Leake said "BEGIN!" it was onnnnnn. I waddled as fast as I could to the walk-in refrigerator to grab my two chickens. Off I went. Rollin' along...the whoooole time. Since we have so many tasks we need to complete I had to remind myself finish as much as you can--one more day! and that really helped. I just gotta do what I do and hope for the best. It's crazy though, there's really no way to study for this kind of final. It's all skill. You have to remember what you did when you did it in class, the ingredients, the method of cooking...but seriously, you just have to do.
(Huge bummer though: no talking allowed!)

First day down! I finished 19 of the 34 tasks. I graciously accepted that Chef gave me three 0's and a couple half credits.

1. Baked Potato. Thank you stupid oven for not cooking my potato! (And my station partner had the same problem, so we blame the oven).
2. Perfect onion cut, medium dice.  They were consistent! But not perfect. The only way to do that is to cut each piece of onion sleeve by sleeve. Seriously, who has the time for that? All of my classmates got a 0 on that one. Not one person got it!
3. Grilled chicken breast. Okay this one was totally my bad. I grill chicken all the time, I should've gotten this one. But I got distracted. My breast was a lil' charred and sad...so...0! It looked so bad even I had to laugh at it. 

Tomorrow will be the real challenge, though. I left all of the reaaaal cooking for tomorrow. Today was a chicken & vegetable prep day basically.

Oh oh but some highlights of the final!

• I heard people whispering about a trail of blood on the floor and heard Chef say that it must be chicken blood. Then later, I heard that my classmate was crying. Why? My classmate cut her finger down to the bone. She had to leave the final to go to the ER where she got three stitches. Ouch! The funny thing is she strapped on a go-pro camera to her chest before the final began to capture the experience. I thought she got some good bloody footage but it turns out she took it off right before she cut her finger. 
• The mystery competencies are easy! Soft poached egg and orange supremes! Hallelujah! Thank you Chef. He said that he usually chooses the two things that we're worst at...but I don't think he did that. Thank goodness. Poaching an egg takes 5 minutes and it's the easiest thing in the world! I'll show you how in my next post :)  

So I don't know who is reading this, but wish me luck for tomorrow! Keep yo fingers crossed!