Chicken slightly overdone? I beg to differ

Chicken roasted just so, accompanied by roasted root vegetables, a flavorful pan sauce, browned small potatoes and roasted mushrooms for garnish. Ah, culinary perfection.

Hold on there, rotisserie boy!

Chef Dan Fluharty didn't think so, calling my roasted chicken "just slightly overcooked." But Chef, I protested, it's moist, it's succulent, it's ... It's 2 points off, Chef concluded.

And another 2 points off for the thin sauce. All right, that's true; my sauce nateur just didn't have it today. Too thin, too buttery. I could blame it on the frozen demi-glace we had to use. But I won't.

Chef did very much like my vegetables and potatoes (yes, potato is a veggie, but in Culinary World, we count it as a starch). They were roasted just right.

Thirty-six points out of 40 for the roasted chicken plating.

Another 36 for my poached salmon, which he also called overcooked, deducting 2 points. It had a touch of pink inside, but ah, well. He very much liked the rice pilaf and was as happy with my beurre blanc as I was. The turned zucchini pieces ("turned" refers to the knife cut on them) were tender but a couple of pieces got just a little too brown; 2 points off.

All in all, a good first day of the cooking competency final exam. We complete the six-week term on Friday, when I will prep, cook and plate a grilled pork chop with risotto and broccoli and a veal scaloppini with pommes duchesse and a marsala wine sauce.

I made a duxelle -- minced, dried sauté of fresh mushrooms in butter, onion and a splash of red wine -- to prepare a compound butter. If it tastes good upon unwrapping Friday, I will use a piece for garnish atop my pork chop.

The rules of engagement, culinary school style

Monkey wrench, curve ball, change of plans, the old switcheroo.

Or, maybe we should look at it as the surprise introduction of a new menu.

Call it what you will, but we students in Culinary Foundations II heard today what our lives will be like for the next three days, and it's interestingly different than what we expected, not to mention even more challenging.

First, on Wednesday, we will get a 50-question written final exam, rather than the 25-question exam we had been anticipating. Fair enough, I say. The written side of this is something that I for one am comfortable with.

Then comes the more challenging aspects of our final exams: the actual cooking on Thursday and Friday. We were looking forward to cooking two fully plated meals each day and have been working on our mise en place and production plans in anticipation.

Chef Dan Fluharty (above) revealed today, almost as an afterthought, that half of us will do one set of menus on Thursday, and half will do the other. Then on Friday, we will switch. We will not know until Thursday who will be doing what.

We all had expected to do roasted chicken and poached salmon on Thursday, and grilled pork chop and veal scaloppini on Friday. Now we will need to be prepared for all on Thursday.

Additionally, Chef said, we will work four people to a station for the exams, rather than the two to a station we have been enjoying. That means more competition for prep space and stove burners and more crowded conditions overall.

As my wife would say: Breathe.

It will all be fine. Even if it isn't, b y day's end Friday, it will all be over.

Menu No. 2: poached salmon

Part 1 of the Culinary Foundations II competency final exam on Thursday will conclude with preparation of poached salmon. The complete dish will include a 4-ounce piece of salmon fillet, rice pilaf, sautéed zucchini, beurre blanc (butter sauce) and garnish.

Preparation of the poaching liquid, called a court bouillon, is the first step in getting the salmon just right. The liquid is one-half gallon of water, 1 cup dry white wine, 2 ounces of white wine vinegar, 1 cup mirepoix (diced onion, carrot, celery), herbs and spices and a bit of fresh lemon juice. These ingredients enhance flavor and cooking, including coagulation of proteins in the fish.

The salmon goes into the simmering liquid for no more than 6-8 minutes. The key is to cook it to moistness, leaving it slightly pink in the center.

Rice pilaf is cooked using a long-grain rice that has been coated in hot oil to opaqueness before chicken stock is added for a 15-20-minute simmer. It should be flaky and a bit moist, but not wet, and flavored with herbs added at the beginning of cooking.

The zucchini should be cooked to tenderness but not mushy, accompanied by crushed tomatoes, herbs and seasoning. Chef Dan Fluharty showed us a method using canned crushed tomatoes. I hope to use fresh roma tomatoes that I will blanch, concassé and dice before putting them in the pot.

Beurre blanc is a rich butter sauce made with shallots sweated in a reduction of white wine and white wine vinegar, thickened with introduction of cold butter bits at a time until an emulsion forms. Vigorous and simultaneous shaking of the sauté and stirring of the ingredients is required to create the emulsion.

(Photo: my practice poached salmon dish from last week.)

Heat is on: culinary school final exams

Time to pull on the big boy pants -- checkered chef's style.

Hone knives on the steel.

Check stove burners and fire up the oven.

Se habla culinario. Solamente culinario por este semana.

We students in Culinary Foundations II have our menus for the final exam, cooking four fully plated meals over two days. Here's the rundown:

Thursday's first plate: Roasted chicken, braised root vegetables, turned potatoes, sauce nateur from the roast pan drippings and garnish.
Thursday's second plate (photo at left): Poached salmon, rice pilaf, squash and tomatoes, beurre blanc (butter sauce) and garnish.

Friday's first plate: Brined and grilled pork chop, polenta, braised fennel and apples, sauce chasseur made from scratch and garnish.

Friday's second plate: Veal scaloppini, risotto with saffron, sauté of turned zucchini and broccoli florets, marsala wine sauce from veal pan drippings and garnish.

Practice sessions begin tonight with poached salmon.

Life is one deadline after another

Today's cooking exercise in Culinary Foundations II came as close to feeling like my days as a newspaper editor as anything I have experienced since leaving that career 17 months ago.

Deadline loomed, as the pieces came together. Nothing was quite finished, yet everything was well in the works. The key factor was putting it all together in a complementary way -- as a story, a headline and a photo would complement one another on the front page of the newspaper, all the while making sure words were spelled correctly and everything fit.

In this instance, it was keeping the poached salmon warm so I could finish the beurre blanc, check the seasoning on the rice pilaf and spoon the squash and tomato provençal onto the plate. Oh, and make sure the plate was warm.

It worked, all coming together in a furious two minutes. The adrenaline rush was very familiar. And there was a great deal of satisfaction in having completed it with accurate flavoring and saucing and attractive plating.

(Photo shows, clockwise from top: rice pilaf; squash and tomato provençal; poached salmon with beurre blanc.)