Culinary School Once Again

Culinary school round two.
I dropped out of my previous program in Indiana because we decided to head back down South to thaw out...
But finally after working with the homeless shelter for a little over a year I am back in school. I loved serving the homeless but I need to finish learning about cooking because I love doing it and I want to get better.

Culinary school has been crazy so far. Louisiana culinary school is quite different from the Midwestern culinary experience. In Indiana, My chef would whisper to other the other chefs about me being "a Louisiana native" on gumbo day...and of course I was selected to make the gumbo. They watched me make roux like I was making a potion...

Here, I am cooking under three well respected chefs. One who owned a local restaurant and served Cajun food. So when he watched me make my roux, he responded with "that would go perfect in my Black Bayou gumbo."

We are cooking in a small space and I'm trying to do it gracefully without panicking, although at times I disappear into the walk-in cooler just to breathe. And I remind myself that cooking in Africa was even harder...

Another one of my chef instructors was trained in Europe, and yesterday I watched her dig melted marrow out of the dinosaur (beef) bones that we roasted for brown stock. She raised the spoon of hot marrow to her lips and ate it like it was the best thing she had eaten all month. Like she was pregnant and craving it...except she wasn't pregnant...
Then she told me that she used to spread it over her toast when she lived abroad for breakfast. I tasted it myself because I didn't want to miss out on this seemingly magical experience, and all I can say is that I've never tasted anything quite like bone marrow...

Aside from marrow tasting we have been cooking eggs in every way you can imagine to cook an egg. Don't let the egg cook too quickly, cook it low and slow, no brown spots on the white and defiantly none of that flaky skin around the outside- you must pay attention to the egg, use the correct amount of oil in the pan, unless you're poaching it, then add vinegar to the water to keep the white from spreading...

Possibly the most exciting thing about being trained to classically cook is witnessing the twinkling look in my instructors' eyes when they describe a dish to you that they love or are passionate about. It's like when I was little and my dad used sing to his favorite songs. And he would get so into them that the next time I'd hear the song, I would remember his enthusiasm and it would be permanently branded onto that song... So each time that particular song came on I then experienced that enthusiasm he had myself.

My chefs get crazy about certain things. When they talk about certain cakes or a great Eggs Benedict with a perfect hollandaise sauce, their eyes light up and they're transported to a euphoric place temporarily.
On the contrary, if handed dishes to taste that they are normally fond of, and if they have been mutilated by us naive students, their faces scrunch up and they respond with words like "learn to use salt and pepper."