Today's menu: Could be flounder, could be omelet

A dose of reality for the culinary classroom today: Depending on what is delivered, and what is not, we will cook either a flounder dinner or an egg breakfast.

Chef said Thursday that he put in an order for fresh flounder, and if the flat fish with the bulging eyes arrive, each of us likely will get a whole one to clean, fillet and cook to chef's specifications. First course will be a salad that hasn't yet been defined and second course a soup, possibly based on cauliflower.

If the fish don't arrive, we will cook breakfast -- French omelet, eggs over easy, scrambled eggs in a vol au vent tube of pastry or poached egg. And, maybe, bacon. Our bacon slabs are at the end of their curing, hanging in the walk-in cooler to await today's smoking in cherry-wood chips.

That's the reality. In a restaurant, one must make do with what is available.

Chef and we students are banking on the fish coming in. Then we can cook breakfast on Monday, our final daily cooking lesson before the midweek final exam.

Back to being an ink-stained wretch

Monday's lesson in Culinary Foundations III left my fingers temporarily stained with black ink, a reminder of my days in the newspaper business.

Squid ink, to be precise.

It came from cleaning and prepping a half-dozen of the slippery little sea creatures for fried calamari, accompanied by a hand-made aioli dipping sauce. 

The squid came to us whole and fresh, ink included, and it took me awhile to work my way through them (a pair of them is pictured on my cutting board). We kept tentacles and the tubular bodies sliced into small disks.

After breading lightly in flour and deep-frying for a couple of minutes, the calamari were delicious, along with the aioli, which is a mayonnaise infused with roasted garlic.

My previous report that on Monday we also would make lamb stew with puff pastry -- vol au vent -- was incorrect. We made the lamb stew but no pastry. We made polenta to accompany it.

What's cooking today? Lamb stew in vol au vent

Turning into the home stretch in Culinary Foundations III this week means puff pastry, known in French as vol au vent. It will provide the platform for a lamb stew today. The way the pastry is supposed to look is at left.

We will also make fried calamari, accompanied by garlic aioli (a mayonnaise infused with garlic).

On another track, prep work will begin for making sausage later in the week.

We have nine days left in the term -- nine days more of learning all we can about classic French cooking before moving to other classes.