Say What?!

While I’m waiting to steal John’s pictures from our adventures with the Moffats last weekend, I’m going to tell you about my week.

First, I got to assist Chef Della with the ice creams and sorbets class. Remember when I had that class? Yeah, it was pretty awesome. And as an intern, I got to brush up on ice cream again and even come up with my own side project!

Enter genius idea to replicate my favoritest ice cream from Baskin Robbins EVER: Pralines and Cream. It’s pretty basic, but I tried candying pecans for the first time…and then toasting them. And they were soooo tasty…it’s a good thing I ended up with too much…because we kept snacking on them. I also made my own caramel sauce to add as my vanilla ice cream (flavored with REAL vanilla beans) as it came out of the ice cream machine. Add delicious toasted, candied pecans and BAM! My very own pralines and cream. And yes, I totally knocked Baskin Robbins out of the water.

Ignore the plastic spoon. I had scooped my ice cream and realized ALL our spoons were in the dishwasher, so I grabbed a plastic one. I would NOT be deprived of my indulgence. But it doesn’t look so good in the picture…oh well. ;)

Not a bad job, eh? If you’ve ever had it and know what it looks like, whaddya think?

I was also working on a cool project for Chef Della. Sometimes the school’s sponsors send the school products to test out and send feedback to the company. The latest product was 22 different gelato flavorings. And there were some interesting flavors. Like red velvet (which came out a strange magenta color) and apple pie (which smelled like potpourri). But the vanilla bean was good and some of the fruit flavors were alright. The lemon gelato reminded me of gatorade though… So I got to make large quantities of gelato. :) I usually made about 4 different flavors a day and so we had gelato with lunch almost everyday last week. And I still have a few to go!

A singing gorilla also showed up on Thursday. Whaa..? Yes, you read that right. A singing gorilla. In a tutu. It was my fellow intern Julia’s birthday, and her parents arranged for a singing telegram to be sent to her during lunch. It was insane. And since it’s too big to email to her, I told her I’d put the video I took up here for all to see :)

It’s 5 minutes long...(he just kept going and going!) so you don’t have to watch the whole thing, but I know Julia’s mom wants to see it ;)

Crazy, huh? We all had a pretty good laugh.

And that was pretty much my week! I’m working a continuing education class next week and that should be crazy busy. I’m so excited for Labor Day weekend! ;)

An Update

Finally! It’s been so long since I’ve blogged!! I’ve been having withdrawals! Seriously. I look at my blog and think “Man! I need to write SOMETHING up here!”

So here I am.

And wow. I just opened up my camera SD card and realized I have a lot more to tell you than I thought! Well, then, here we go!

Back when I was in Arizona…(yeah, I have pictures from that far back)
We made grilled pizza. I have never done this before. I will be doing it again. Once I have access to a fabulous grill like we did at Jeff’s parent’s house.

We made popsicles! Yummy strawberry watermelon ones. I tried making them again at home, but all I had was a mickey mouse ice cube tray. We haven’t eaten them yet. But they were yummy and totally hit the spot in HOT HOT Arizona

Elizabeth and Jeff took me to their favorite frozen custard place where I got the most amazing, creamy, scrumptious milkshake I’ve ever had. Raspberry. Favorite.


Here’s my buddy Scott. It took a couple tries to time the smile right ;)

You’ve gotta love that smile!


I’ve been crafting!!! Kind of. It has to go in spurts. I got some tiles at Menards a couple weeks ago and got some vinyl on one of them and it went very nicely on the piano:

I love that saying :) I finally did the other one yesterday…but I don’t have a picture yet. It’s a monogram. A fancy one. Sorry to leave you in suspense like that :)

I had my birthday! almost two weeks ago, in fact. However, I had to work almost 12 hours that day…so it kind of felt like it didn’t happen because I was working a continuing education class that week and I only got to see John for a few hours the ENTIRE week! I did come home to some streamers and my cute boy, the class had ended an hour early on my birthday (perfect, right?) so I actually got to see him! The weekend before though, we got to go to IKEA and he surprised me with tickets to Medieval Times!

Sooooo cheesy. But we’re into that kinda thing. You like our crowns? Try not to be jealous. Everyone got a specifically colored crown, which told you which knight you were cheering for in the tournament. Turns out the green knight was the bad guy! Awkward…

The Moffats were here this weekend! It was good to see them. They came in for the weekend, and they are in Kentucky for the week. They will be back next weekend before they head back home. They also brought me PRESENTS! They got me the Our Best Bites cookbook – YAY! – a fancy schmancy oil spritzer, and a gift card to IKEA! Love them! :) So this last weekend we saw the Frank Lloyd Wright house and studio and then tried to go to the Shedd Aquarium. But there was a Bears game. Bears game = NO PARKING ANYWHERE. So we had to ditch that and kill some time downtown before our fireworks speedboat ride on the lake. We went to the Chicago cultural center and looked around. The building was really pretty!

We checked out some stores on State Street, then headed over to Navy Pier to walk around until our ride. The main bummer for me was that I’ve been sick since Thursday! BAD head cold. I took Nyquil for the first time in my life last week. Knocked. Me. Out. I’ve been surviving on Dayquil and Nyquil for the past several days. I’m doing better – mostly, but anyway, I wasn’t feeling so good, so the speedboat ride wasn’t exactly a picnic for me. But the fireworks were cool.

And yesterday was our 2 year anniversary! Yay us! But I had to work 12 hours (seeing a trend here?) and I’m still a little under the weather. I was working a Master Demo with Chef Pierre on bread showpieces, so that was fun. And during the second demo, he’d found out that it was our anniversary, and then personalized one of his pieces for me!

He gave me the bottle of wine that he’d put in it as well, but as we don’t drink, I tried to sneak it back down to the cooler without him noticing, but he found me. I explained we didn’t drink, and after his initial surprise, he said “well then! you can replace it with lemonade!” Gotta love French chefs ;) And yes, I toted that thing home on the train. Got rye flour ALL over me.

Turns out I did have something to fit right into that space! Enter Welch’s Sparkling White Grape Juice! From Christmastime. With a snowman on it.

Ta da! So we did get to have our own “bubbly” for the occasion :) John was so sweet and had anniversary gifts for me! Because I’m lame really busy, I haven’t had a chance to get going on his…they’re a work in progress…We’d decided that we’d do two gifts: the traditional gifts (1st year-paper, 2nd year-cotton, etc.) and one gift of our choosing. John was so clever. He got me the movie Tangled (YAY!) :) and for the traditional gift, he got me weekday socks!!! Hee hee

You better believe I’m wearing my Tuesday socks right now :) We are hoping to do something to actually celebrate our anniversary in a couple of weeks. We’ve got the fam in town again and other craziness…so maybe September? Goodness…when did we get so busy?!??!?

And last but not least, I wanted to show you some of what we at the school like to call “pastry tattoos”. Translation: Scars from burns, cuts, bruises, etc. ;) Don’t worry, they aren’t too gruesome! These last few weeks have had a “burn theme”

My left hand:
On my wrist we have a small burn where I went in too high in the oven to grab a sheet pan and burned myself. When I jumped, startled by the pain, I burned myself AGAIN in the same spot! THEN later I hit it up against a doorway (by accident…obviously) and ripped off the blister that was forming! OUCH! Not cool. Then on the knuckles of my two fingers there is a new one. I got burned by the corner of a sheet pan yesterday. That one’s still healing.

My right forearm:
Now that I’m actually thinking about it…I don’t remember how I got this one. I’m tired. Maybe it will come to me later. But then over the weekend I rubbed it up against the car door by accident and ripped off *only half* of the blister! WHY do I keep doing that?!?

Fun, huh? I also FINALLY got new glasses!! I’d had my old ones for a year, and they’ve been broken for the last 11 months. (yeah, did you do the math?) And no, I don’t have a picture yet…you’ll get one when I don’t look so disheveled from my day at work, thank you very much.

And that would be my randomly thrown together update. Thank you all, and good night!