I’ve been rolling around in my head for a while how to express this experience blooming around me…

My classmates and I have been together, every day, for just shy of 8 months.

That is a long time to see someone every day, especially in what can be a stressful environment when those people are not of your choosing.

We have a 19-yr-old Mormon from Utah who discovered he could grow and sell medicinal pot here and has since started a business so lucrative he’s living in a penthouse downtown, a 55-yr-old metal worker with a limp, a deaf kid, a white NYC boy who thoroughly believes he’s black, a mountain dude who is cool as a cucumber with a massive stutter and a wicked eye for plating, two people who either got, or got someone, pregnant they were teenagers and are now my age, three prior service military, a gay dude, and a twin.

When you hit the 5-6 month point, you’re pretty tired of looking at each others’ faces.  Couple that with putting culinarians in a baking class and “unamused” would be a mild term for it.  Boredom plus juuuuust knowing someone good enough for them to be irritating is a tricky combination.  (and I mean no offense to those who love baking, but it’s very slooooooooow).

But then progress, and evolution, unexpectedly stepped in.  And now I see the way they structured the classes is relatively ingenious for those who would benefit from it…

We start with Foundations I, where we learn sanitation and knife cuts.  We’re not near pots or pans or burners at this point, it’s just basics on cooking methods.

Then we move to Foundations II, where we lecture and see a demo one day about veggies and grains (no meat yet), and then have to recreate those recipes the next day.  We would get to pre-cut our veggies and stuff for the next day when we cooked.

Next is Foundations III, the meat class.  We break down animals one day, and then use that meat the next day in production (cooking).  Here, on our production days we would watch the demo first, and then have to go produce it.  No day to prepare, nothing broken down, but we still got to see the process.

So you’re starting to see the progression here..  FIII was a very challenging and fast-paced class.

Then we had the brick wall of baking.  Learned valuable things, but it served as more of a break from the pace of the first three classes.

I give you this background in the hopes that I’ll be able to fully express what I’ve watched happen next around me-

The class I was just in is called Cuisines Across Cultures.  We had a production-first schedule, meaning we were in the kitchen on our first day.  We walked in (our class of now 10 down from 21), waiting for our demo and not hating each others’ faces too much since we’d just come off of spring break.

And then Chef Susie walked in, handed us our recipe packets, showed us what a yuca root looked like and said “ok, go ahead.”

We all paused and looked around..  where’s our demo?  And she smiled and said “this is an advanced class, I’m only going to demo the things you haven’t seen before.  Plate-up is at one-thirty, points off if you’re late.”

We looked around this new kitchen we hadn’t cooked in before and knew where nothing was, and at each other, and with the slight scent of fear in the air, started.  Three hours later we all finished, on-time.

That one day changed our class, and our dynamic, permanently.  People started asking the hard questions, drilling down for details.  We even got to the point where we told Chef we wanted to do all the group work that was written into the syllabus individually, so we could each learn and touch everything.

I’m smiling as I write this, because I know I’m not doing it justice.  Instead of the deaf kid, the pothead, the stutterer… we now know each other by our strengths and intertwine those strengths to create individual plates.

I’ve watched this evolution happen, and I’m buzzed to be a part of it and recognize it.  The class we’re entering Monday, our last class, is going to harshly put that evolution to the test.  But the people I’m surrounded with now are chomping at the bit for the challenge, not shying away like they would have six months ago.

And that makes me smile even bigger.

When I went to school, I expected it to be like “this is how you do all there is to do in cooking.”  Here is the guide.

And I’m realizing now that yes, there are foundations and you have to build on those and make them sturdy.

But after that, cooking is just a series of educated guesses.  The more you do it, the more educated your guesses are.

But it’s still just seeing an orange at the store and thinking, I wonder what orange zest would do with my dish tonight??

And finding out.