So many options for titles...

So many things have happened in the past week it is almost impossible to choose a title for this blog. At the beginning of the week we learned how to make different soups, including crab bisque. Well as many of you I am sure can imagine we used the giant king crab. The crab was most definitely alive and everyone freaked out when it had to go into the boiling water...a priceless moment in demonstration class. It reminded me so much of the scene in Julie and Julia when Julie has to put the lobster in the boiling water and freaks out. Definitely a defining culinary school moment.
Pastry this week definitely became more challenging. We made Madeline's, lemon cake, pistachio cake (which is amazing), chocolate hazelnut cake, and marzipan decorations. For the madeline cookies we had to grease our pans with butter and apparently I put at little too much butter to the point where they were sticking to the molds. You also have to turn them out when they are hot and just out of the oven, otherwise it will be impossible to get them out. Well after my head pastry chef was literally banging the tray of the cookies onto the marble countertops to try to get them out we resorted to using a knife and spoon to get my 16 madeline cookies out of the molds. It was pretty humorous having two of us smacking my hot trays against the countertop over and over. After that fiasco they were a little too dense, but whatever everyone at the dorm ate them in like 5 seconds...so they must not have been that bad. The next day was chocolate cake which turned out wonderfully...minus the fact that I looked like I had been attacked by chocolate and cocoa powder at the end of the day on Friday.

For the past two weeks I have noticed at night there is an animal that gives off a very high pitch screaming sound every few minutes all night long. I never really figured it out, because I just assumed it was someones super annoying dog. Well come to find out in the courtyard behind where I live is a female fox. In case you were wondering, yes, it is mating season...and yes, they sound like a girl screaming when they make their "call". I decided to google it and here is what I found..."Q:I live quite close to london and therefore have quite a lot of foxes where I live. It's quite often that I am kept up all night with the sound of them making a horrendous screaming noise which really freaks me out as it sounds so similar to a childs scream!"
A"The scream is a contact call, used by one fox to locate another. It is used particularly often by a vixen calling for a mate during the breeding season, so you may hear it more often in late winter or early spring. The foxes you hear aren't fighting or in pain, so don't worry." If it continues for another week I think that fox better watch its back, because our dorm is getting quite irritated.
My cousin Melissa came into town on Thursday and we have been very busy doing various London things. On Friday night we went to a very famous restaurant next to my school that only serves steak and french fries with their secret sauce. We all knew it must be good because there is seriously a line out the door every single night for hours. Don't worry it was AMAZING! I will most definitely be going there again. On Saturday we did Portobello Market, Covent Garden, and the London Eye. At Covent Garden Tube stop we were warned on the tube that the lifts were not working and that we should just stay on and get off one tube stop up. Well we decided that we would go ahead and get off at Covent Garden and take the stairs. At the base of the stairs it said "emergency stairs, this staircase has 193 steps"...we thought it would be fine, but let me tell you that 193 stairs is about 9 flights and our legs were burning all 193 spiraling steps. Next time we will listen to the tube conductor.
Chinese New Year was on Sunday, so one of my friends from school took about 5 of us out for legitimate dim sum. We had all the traditional dishes served on Chinese New Year. She ordered for all of us and we ate SO well! I tried lots of new foods...including chicken feet, which I must say I still have not made up my mind about. Then we went off to China town where we saw dragon dancers and tons of Chinese lanterns strung across all the streets. On our way back we decided to walk through Harrods for about and hour. I have my big roast chicken test on Tuesday, so everyone pray that it goes well.