Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?

How many ounces in a cup? How many cups in a pint? Pints in a gallon? Who remembers these things? Better yet, who needs to remember these things these days?

For recipe conversion, rapid recall of these facts is crucial. Forget about doubling or halving a recipe. We converted recipes originally yielding 4 portions into 10 portions. Then, because that wasn't fun enough, we took recipes that yielded 8 portions, each 8 ounces, and converted it to 18 portions of 6 ounces. There was furious scribbling, quick calculating, and a lot of answers being yelled out.

A few quick conversions:

3 teaspoons= 1 Tablespoon
2 Tablespoons= 1 oz
8 oz= 1 cup
2 cups= 1 pint
2 pints= 1 quart
4 quarts= 1 gallon

So we did some quick conversions for things like these mentioned above. 1 sheet in our handout for "extra credit" had about 30 equations to figure out. And the last one, for all the jelly beans, was this:

How many teaspoons in 1 gallon? Aaaaand, GO! (answers in the comments, please! For the record, I've already figured it out, so I'm not cheating here!)

In other news, today was rice day. Chef paired me with another student and we quickly got to work. We started getting our Mise en Place (French for 'everything in place') together for dahl (an Indian spiced, red lentil dish). Everything came together nicely and efficiently; we happen to work well as a team. Once our dahl was put together and put on the stove to simmer for a while, Chef tasted ours and said it was perfect. (Insert bow here). We cleaned our stations and started getting together everything for the rice pilaf. As we were about to start the pilaf, Chef told us to put it aside, we would get to it later, and put together the Mise en Place for the Sri Lankan Rice. Aaaaaand we were going to demo it for the class.

After we finished the Sri Lankan demo, we finished it off in the oven, and retrieved our rice pilaf Mise en Place and quickly put up the rice pilaf. Once the stock reduced by half, we covered it tightly and finished that in the oven, as well.

We plated the pilaf by putting the rice in a ramiken, placing a plate on top and flipping it over. Removing the ramiken, you have a nice circle of rice in the center of the plate. Then we took the dahl and spooned it around the pilaf and garnished with some cilantro. For the record, when Chef showed us out to plate, he used our dahl (instead of his), and so did everyone else. By the time it came to packing up the food to take home, we didn't have any dahl left since it was all used up.

Last was pad thai. "Why would you make pad thai on rice day?" you may ask. Pad thai is made with rice noodles, and so, it's made on rice day. And it's eaten on rice day. And it's the most delicious on rice day.

Chef uses our Mise en Place for pad thai to demo for the class. He takes boiling water and puts it in a metal bowl, off the fire. He dumps in the rice noodles and tells us that how they'll cook, for 6-7 minutes. Meanwhile, the wok is on the fire with nothing in it. He says the key to it is really hot wok, cold oil. The oil immediately sizzles when it hits the wok and he scrambles two eggs quickly, sets them aside. More oil in the wok and ground turkey, garlic, chili paste go in the wok and are chopped up until cooked. Lime juice, soy sauce, peanuts, red pepper strips are all tossed in with the turkey. The rice noodles are strained and immediately added to the wok. Fresh chives and cilantro are added at the end, and he plates the pad thai. He then turns to me and my friend (and one other student) and asks us to make another batch of the pad thai. I had it for dinner...

Today was wonderful. Everything clicked and I felt right at home. I'm really excited for what's coming.

Quiz tomorrow... Wish me luck!

Tip of the day: Mise en Place means "everything in place." When you start a recipe, get all of your ingredients out from start to finish. I don't just mean to have them in front of you. Measure them out and put them in small bowls or cups at your workspace and put the containers back in the pantry. This way, once your start cooking, you won't fumble around with measuring spoons while your onions are burning because you didn't get the stock in the pot in time. It's a great time saver and makes cooking much easier!