The beginning...

The incredible French Culinary Institute in downtown Manhattan is where you can find me every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday night. At 5:45 each evening I line up with my classmates for a military style roll call, complete with uniform. Then it’s five hours of slicing, dicing, searing, sautéing, and desperately trying not to cause any bodily harm to myself or those around me. Please, a professional kitchen is risky business, a dangerous place. I have the battle scars to prove it. I haven’t singed off my eyebrows yet but I am convinced it’s possible with the sleek steel ovens that blast their 500 degree power every night. The roaring gas burners in the place could propel the latest NASA space shuttle into orbit. Even the seemingly innocent mandoline slicers are the enemy, with their razor sharp blades just waiting for an unsuspecting finger to pass the wrong way. Terrifying. And that’s not to even mention the Chef instructors, whose words can cut more painfully then even the sharpest knife. “Bridget – why would you do it that way?? Why did you use salt?? The pot is boiling over!!” The verbal blows are just as painful as the physical. Every night when I leave exhausted and exhilarated, I am glad to get out of there without a bandage of some sort, or worse, a battered and bruised ego.

It was early last year when I had a realization that everything about my life was very pleasantly comfortable…my marriage, my job, my week nights, my weekends and most everything in between. A little too comfortable. All that “comfortableness” was actually making me feel…uncomfortable. I needed, in a midlife crisis kind of way, a challenge. Why, I have no idea, I mean really, what’s so bad about being comfortable? In some ways I feel like I had been working to find that comfort for years. But you know what they say (who is “they” by the way??) “Be careful what you wish for”. After a small amount of personal soul searching, followed by numerous conversations with anyone who would listen, I was able to convince myself about the merits of attending culinary school. With friends and family encouraging me, I decided to visit the French Culinary Institute and see for myself if I should invest my time and money or find something else, like a nice hobby or book club. The thing is though; food and cooking were already my hobby. My favorite form of reading is a cookbook and I cried last month, and I mean that literally, when Gourmet magazine announced it was shuttering down its magazine. School would be the chance to elevate my love of cooking and food. I could surround myself with other people who thought that a farmers market was a thrill and reading menus was titillating. So off I went to Soho, to tour my future hang out. I loved the school from the first time I stepped inside. It was hectic and boisterous and delicious. I convinced myself as I sat in that conference room listening to the enthusiastic sales pitch, that this would be my challenge. And what a challenge it has been. I am definitely not in Kansas anymore or my comfort zone for that matter…