Culinary School

Take a small sip of your wine, swish it around, and pretend to spit it out in your cup. Do not actually spit it out. You will not be able to make it through an entire evening with oenophiles otherwise.

I looked down at the brown, unappealing egg on my plate. At the Passover table, eggs represent continuity, the cycle of life. The symbolic food of my ancestors, cooked sous-vide, seemed wrong. I took a bite.

The real purpose of teaching how to turn vegetables is to put culinary students through hell.

Years ago, my father let it slip that his cousin had invented the powdered egg in the late 1930s, thereby contributing the war effort. Aha! A fellow Brickman inventor and culinary whizz!

Is high fructose corn syrup a drug? Will people soon figure this out and start producing manipulated corn syrup in their bathtubs under the cover of night?

A thought then clanged in my head: as a culinary student whose mind focused on the culinary arts more than 50% of each day, was I now a foodie?

Now almost done with the first level of culinary school, I found myself on the plane to Austin equally excited about the music festival I was going to as about the food.

As I near the end of my first month of culinary school, I find myself facing a new hygiene problem: my hands constantly smell of garlic.

I've been told that you can tell a lot from the way a person chops. Headstrong individuals wail away at an onion, while calmer people are more precise. I was the first person to cut myself in class.

I find myself wanting to run away from this tech-savvy world where people sit at computers in their offices and communicate with others, three feet away, through G-chat.