Redemption comes on the wings of a ... turkey

Another cooking skills challenge is in the offing on Wednesday at culinary school, and I will seek redemption for my mediocre performance of Monday.

Two plated meals are on the menu, and we prepared the mise en place for them today.

First will be turkey scaloppine, dredged in egg and coated with bread crumbs before a quick sauté. Accompanying it will be a basic pan sauce of oil and butter, white wine, shallot, shitake mushroom caps and, as needed, chicken stock. The starch is potato croquettes, which essentially are balls of breaded mashed potatoes which then are deep fried. A mixed green salad will be garnished with a hand-made mustard vinaigrette. i already made the vinairette, and it is pretty tasty.

Second plate will be duck confit, with a sweet bigarade sauce. That is a sauce of caramelized sugar, lemon and orange juices and a little demi-glace, which is reduced veal stock. The starch will be rice pilaf confetti, with the confetti for color being celery. Root vegetables -- rutabaga, carrots, turnip -- will be blanched and then put in a sauté of butter. I plan to garnish with a parsley and thyme compound butter, made by classmate Richard Johnson.

I will spend the morning putting together my production plan and timeline and the afternoon cooking to fulfill this ambitious assignment.

Sauciér in the making? Or magician?

Ever see on Top Chef or Iron Chef when something goes awry? The key ingredient burns, a sauce breaks or something simply doesn't work the way it was planned. Yet the chef manages to put together a decent-looking plate and often gets good marks for it. A different kind of magic in the culinary world -- the equivalent of pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

Twice today in culinary school, I successfully rescued sauces that went awry, to put it mildly. This is another sign to me that my skills are on a steady improving track.

(But, you might rightfully say, if I'm getting better, why did I have to redo two sauces? That's a question for another day's blog. For now, please let me revel in my meager success.)

In the first case, my pork roast pan scorched badly on the bottom -- I'm talking burned black to carbon -- including burning the mirepoix and the roast drippings for use in making the pan sauce called for in the exercise. Why the roast itself didn't suffer that fate, I don't know. I started a new sauté, tossed in some diced pieces of pork to render the remaining fat and some brown -- or glaze -- into the pan, then deglazed with veal stock, added flour for thickening and butter to finish. Apple slices as called for in the original pan sauce recipe went in for a minute to soften. I strained out the pork bits. Presto! -- a nicely flavored brown sauce for which the chef gave me full credit.

In the second case, making a sauce vin blanc for poached bass and salmon mousseline, I did the opposite of what I should have, introducing egg yolk to the hot poaching liquid rather than the other way around. Result: cooked egg yolk in the sauce, not a good thing. I strained out the cooked egg and went the way I should with a second yolk, introducing a little of the liquid to it. It caught, I added cream and stirred the sauce to such a successful finish that the chef took two or three spoons of it and commented on its full flavor.

Before that, at home on Wednesday evening, I used a sauté to heat some leftover beef short rib meat with sliced onion, letting the pan brown a bit and then deglazing with a little chicken stock (I keep some home-made in the fridge now) and adding in flour and butter to make a quick pan sauce that was, if I may say so, delicious.

Combine those three sauce rescues, and -- presto -- we have the culinary equivalent of pulling a hat out of a rabbit!

Cramming for exams? No, for everything else

Learning the culinary arts will last a lifetime, say the chefs who are our teachers at the California Culinary Academy. If so, why does it seem that they are trying to cram it in all into this one week?

Culinary Foundations II class is in its waning days; the written final exam will be today; cooking competency exams will be Thursday and Friday.

Yet on Monday and Tuesday, Chef Dan Fluharty was still pushing new dishes and techniques. On Monday he demonstrated, and put us to work practicing, two stuffed poultry dishes. On Tuesday, he demonstrated and again put us to work making a braised duck leg and fillet of sole. Both were appropriately challenging, the fillet especially so, because each of us started with a whole fish from which to exract the fillets.

Neither duck leg nor fillet of sole will be on the competency final exams. But several of the side dishes that we made will be, so we got to practice making rich, creamy risotto, rice pilaf, sauté of broccoli, turned zucchini, beurre blanc for the fish and a rich pan sauce for the duck.

Any and all cooking practice serves to improve our knife skills, our attenton to the details of the stove top and the oven -- temperature control, that is. It also improves our organizational skills and efficiencies, all headed toward the plating and service.