The Cooking Gene

The very last class, ever, and it has to be cooking. Imagine your first day of taking a foreign language class and you walk in and take a seat. The teacher immediately starts the class by talking in the language that you are yet familiar with be it Spanish, French, or Italian. You look up to your teacher with a blank look on your face, unaware of anything she is blabbing on about and suddenly think.... oh crap. Well, that would be the exact feelings as I walked into my Culinary Skills 2 class and the chef began cooking, while going on about the way to cook these things I had never heard of and thus the "oh crap" analogy comes into play. Day two followed with conquering mashed potatoes for the first time with a wonderful cheese sauce. With each day, each dish, each ingredient, I come closer to starting my internship and thus starting the rest of my life. But though I do go to a culinary school, I have to say.... I am not a cook and never will be. I need the structure of a great cake recipe or the precise scaling of a wonderful danish in my little baking world. The unstructured world of cooking seems to be beyond my understanding, a foreign language if you will, and so I have come to terms with the missing cooking gene. Now I still have two and a half weeks to go in class and will try as I might to get through like a champ but the uneasiness will linger. So 17 days till I leave Portland, and from there.... at the moment.... it is up in the air for where I head for my internship (which will be figured out this Sunday). Its been fun but in 17 days my bags are packed and I will be running out the door to take on the world as a baker!!!!