Day negative 2?

I want to give a little intro into this blog. The story: I am going to culinary school. This is obvious. I am going to the Western Culinary Institute in Portland, Oregon. The program is a 60 week associates degree in the culinary arts. The program here is in the Cordon Bleu tradition, which is a French style of teaching people how to be a chef that was started in 1895.

The point of this blog: I want to give people a little taste of what culinary school is all about. This is an entirely new endeavor for me; I have no experience in restaurants, so everything is fresh. I want to talk about the ins and outs of what this whole process involves. I will also give a lot of opinion. If you know me at all, you know I have a lot of strong opinions, and there is no way around that. I am going to try to not be too ridiculous, but I do not think you would be reading this if there wasn’t a little bit of ridiculousness. I will not pull any punches here. I will tell you all exactly what I think about everything I go through.

That is the background. I also think it might be nice to throw in a little bit of info as to why I am doing this. The last year and a half I spent in Wyoming was spent cooking. I would get very frustrated with graduate school, very often not really seeing why I was doing it, so I would cook to take my mind off it. For me, cooking moved from something I had to do to something that I enjoyed more than my job and schoolwork. A lot of people go home and watch TV, I go home and cook. I realized that I had a lot of passion for cooking (I will come back to passion a lot in this blog). There were a lot of times where I had to cook for my family or friends, and before I started, I wasn’t really into it, but as soon as I started prepping, it all just flowed out, like there was nothing I would rather be doing. Something inside me turns on when I start cooking, and when the stress of managing four different pots on the stove and something in the oven is on, I really feel like I am in ‘the zone’. It is a feeling that I am doing what I am supposed to be doing with my life.

That is why I am doing this.

I will try my best to update this blog with at least an entry a day. Whether or not I will post one every day is kind of questionable, since I do not have an internet connection at home, but maybe I will find a way.