Monday, September 26, 2011

And so it begins...


Tomorrow marks the first day of my 'official' culinary journey. It's my first day of cooking school! I'm not fully prepared, technically speaking. I'm still waiting on my books to arrive in the mail, and I haven't purchased my knives yet. But otherwise...I'm so ready. I started planning this a year ago, and amidst all the mind-changing...deciding not to move to NYC after all, then planning to go to Seattle Central starting Fall, then thinking I would have to wait because I didn't have enough money, then finding out with less than a week until classes start that I received a financial aid grant...I've at least known this whole time that I'm going to start this.

Maybe I'll quit halfway through and decide to work my way through the kitchen ranks (as if I won't have to do that anyway), perhaps I'll decide that I don't want to cook for a living, after all...but I'm doing *this* right now. And that small fulfilled commitment to myself is enough to keep me going through this quarter, at least. Anything more than 3 months ahead is too far in the future to plan for, anyway.
So I have this idea that I'll blog about my culinary school experience, for general entertainment and for prospective wannabe-chefs...but I can't guarantee that I'll be doing any sort of regular documentation. My overall online blogger presence has been pretty sporadic, even this last month that I've been unemployed. I can, however, guarantee that I'll write at least once this week...and at least a handful more posts in the future, whenever the urge strikes me. That's the best I can do right now, and I'm ok with it.


Thursday, September 8, 2011

The Sour Cherry Pie Journey, Part One: The Pits


The above photo is documentation of an event which rarely occurs in the greater Seattle area (or, at least, it's rare in my experience).

I've read and heard about sour cherries enough over the last few months that as soon as I saw the first local cherries at the market, I started scouring every fruit hawker's stand for a glimpse of these fine specimen. Before this year, I had no idea that sour cherries were anything notably different than just...cherries...which happened to be kinda sour. But oh, was I wrong.