Soup! Glorious Soup!

I've got that erratic kind of laryngitis, the kind where you don't know what, if anything, will come out when you try to talk. It's (hopefully) the last symptom of a cold that started with a scratchy throat last Wednesday. I felt a little nervous walking through the crowded kitchen carrying a hot pan full of 25# of roasted veal bones — my "BEHIND YOU" was not particularly reliable.

And by the way, that little thingy after the "25" means "pounds". That's why it's called the "pound sign", even on your phone! People are learning new factoids by the minute. We had a (non-graded) pop quiz this morning on weights and measures, and 128 ounces STILL equal a gallon, but apparently this knowledge is not yet common among my classmates. "If you go home and watch the Simpsons all frickin' night, YOU WILL FAIL." And Chef actually said "frickin'". "In my world," (ooh!! not "our" world!) "this is like two plus two," he told the class. Sixteen cups to a gallon. Two tablespoons to an ounce.

We're talking about sugars in food science, and the Chef showed an extremely detailed slide about high fructose corn syrup. He alluded briefly to a current school of thought (highlighted in Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma): HFCS is the devil's sugar, wreaking agricultural and dietary havoc on a scale as serious as global warming. Good thing I couldn't talk, or I would have raised my hand and chimed in. After I read that book, about six months ago, I talked about it to everyone I met. "Do you know that 45 of the 60-some ingredients used by McDonalds are made of CORN?" "Do you know that the corn lobby is possibly stronger and more dangerous than Halliburton?"

First thing in the kitchen was the knife test. I scored 90, and that's fine. I'm not OC enough to make those tiny cubes. I'll probably never work in a Thomas Keller kitchen, but I have a balanced life.

We made french onion soup, and potato leek, as well. When we took our crock of french onion to the Chef for tasting, he said, "Your croutons are floating too low! Not enough soup in the bowl! The customer will feel gypped!" You gotta think like a customer. When he tasted our potato leek soup, he asked me to take a bowl of it to Chef Duffy, in Garde Manger across the hall. "He's a Brit. He loves potato leek soup." I carried the bowl and a plastic spoon into the next kitchen and the Chef clapped his hands together. "OH! Is it that time?" It was a veritable chortle. Soup makes people happy.

At the grocery store on my way home, the checkout clerk scanned the Nyquil, and then the Johnny Walker Red Label, and said "The liquor's probably better for what ails ya." She slid over the onions and thyme. "I'm making french onion soup as well," I said. "We're pulling out all the stops." "There you go."