Today's special is braised lamb ...

[yagol]

Well, today we did a braised lamb with black mission figs, and an apple-barley soup. And potatoes, just so they could have us practice our tourne knife cuts. The tourne knife is also called a birdsbeak, it's like a paring knife that curves down instead of up at the tip. Anyway, we use these to carve things into a particular 7-sided oblong shape, or at least try. Nobody in my group is any good at it, really, and it always takes us way too long for fairly mediocre results. Definitely one of those practice things, which is why they had us do them today, of course. Anyway, the lamb came out basically like a stew, but ours was a little off. While I was getting the dishware set, apparently my teammates over-thickened the liquid so it turned to a gel, and then thinned it with a mix of wine and stock. Without any time left to cook out the wine, so our stew was kind of... purple. And tasted rather strongly of wine. Other than that it was good. ;) Actually, it tasted pretty good anyway and the lamb was cooked just exactly right. The apple-barley soup came out really great, honestly I think better than the one the chef-instructors demoed for us. It was basically onions and barley simmered in a chicken stock and then apples added at the last minute, just cooked long enough to get tender.

Tomorrow we start frying... more precision cuts this time for french fries. And fried haddock, which we'll have to see about. Hm. And a Manhattan Clam Chowder. Well, we'll see.