10 knife cuts, 30 minutes; that's 3 minutes each! Yikes!

Chef Tony gave his students a full hour today to practice the 10 knife cuts he taught us last week, in preparation for a practical exam on Friday. For the practical, we will have to make the 10 cuts in half the time.

That could be an issue for me. Today, in the one-hour practice, I finished nine of the cuts, and my own critique is that five of them were pretty fair, while the other four need work. Not to mention the 10th, which I didn't even get to before Chef called for cleanup.

Tuesday is another day. We will not have an hour. Each day, Chef Tony said, he will shorten the time to move us closer to the reality of 10 cuts in 30 minutes, the expectation for Friday.

A couple of pieces of good news in all of this:

* In the fury of practice for the practical, I have not drawn blood.

* In that same fury, two classmate have, but only small cuts on fingers.