Not Again...

Two things I see are reoccurring in my culinary life. The first is my need to bring my fellow classmate Earl into my blogs. I don't know why but his name seems to constantly come up. Just today I was thinking maybe I shouldn't use his real name just in case he found me talking about him on my blog offensive. I'll see if anyone has strong feelings on the matter first. The second observation is I have little "breakdowns" every so often, and being that there was the potential of a serious one today, I want to ponder it.

Today in class my teammate Gutty and I were looking over what we had to prepare for the menus we were cooking tomorrow. Turned out we needed to soak some white beans and marinate some chicken. Having both in my head, I raised my hand and mixed the two together saying, "Chef, the recipe calls for me to soak the chicken overnight...do we have chicken for this?" There was about a five second silence before I laughed and corrected myself saying slowly, "Marinate...we will M-A-R-I-N-A-T-E the chicken overnight." Embarrassing? No, not really...or so I thought.
We go into the kitchen and I'm frantically getting my Lamb Stuffed with Couscous ready to be braised....rubbing it, stuffing it, trussing it, searing it...oh wait, I need a pan...ahh set the oven to 325...ahh I'm losing time...the onions are burning. Typical.
I ask Gutty in my flurry what Earl was doing of the days production and Gutty said he didn't know what Earl was doing...all he knew was that Earl didn't like our group. "What?" I asked. "Well, while we were out smoking Earl told me he didn't like our group because we ask stupid questions in class."
RIGHT.
So...I immediately realize Earl is referring to my "soak" verses "marinate" question in class and now, he's decided he doesn't like us because of it.

EXCUSE ME?
I'm sorry, have you never asked a stupid question in class? Does this one question earn you the right to hate us? Two words, COP OUT.

I seriously got angry. By now stuff like this should roll off my shoulders, especially coming from Earl, but this...no no this was another story. How dare he! I was on the verge of combustion for a good 30 minutes before I started to settle down. I almost started crying, no joke. Gina patted me on the back and asked if everything was okay at one point and I could have went off on a teary rant...good thing I held back.

The best part of all this is that I had my "cake breakdown" in Baking and Pastry almost to the date a month ago. I'm not making any assumptions but...you do the math.

Don't worry though, everything worked out in the end...Earl knew that I knew he had decided to hate me for asking questions and by the time we hit halfway of production he was asking me over to try what he was making to adjust seasonings. What would he do without me?