Day 1 - Monday September 21, 2009

I started attending Bridgerland Applied Technology College enrolled in the Culinary Arts program on Monday September 21. My instructor Rex recommended to me that I keep a daily journal about things I did that day to help me remember down the road.

My cute sister in law Kacean volunteered to watch Ethan for me every morning while I am in school so she shows up around 6:20 right before Mart leaves for work and I leave for school. Ethan loves Kacean and she loves him just as much. They are already really close, but by the time I am finished with school, they are going to be inseparable. I'm really grateful to her for this and I have no way to properly thank her for taking 7 hours out of her day everyday for about a year to help us out.


Day 1:
School starts at 7am. It's the earliest class Bridge has to offer. The culinary arts classroom is connected to the school cafeteria. We make and serve breakfast and lunch for the staff and students that attend the school. It's probably the best cafeteria food you'd ever eat. :) Besides cooking just for the cafeteria they do a lot of catering for parties/events and lunch meetings that are held at Bridge in another part of our classroom. We prepare lunches for them and also serve it to them.

This program is open entry so you can start whenever you want and you go at your own pace. There happened to be another girl that started on the same day with me, so I wasn't alone. Adrienn is going to focus strictly on the baking and pastry side instead.

I show up at 7am and the classroom is dark. There is nobody in it and nobody to be seen. I thought for sure the lady at the registration desk told me the wrong starting time. The kitchen was all lit up and had one student walking around doing whatever she needed to do that day. A few minutes later Adrienn walked in and we both sat around for about 10 minutes waiting to see if anybody would come find us or even remembered we were starting that day. I gave up and went looking around the kitchen for somebody. I found one of my instructors, Rex and he came and got us started.

All we had scheduled to do that day was read Chapters 1 and 2 of our text (Professional Cooking by Wayne Gisslen) and take a test on it. Chapter 1 was just a short history of cooking and chapter 2 was the sanitation and saftey section. Reading and taking notes for that long gets old so a few hours later Rex came in and had Adrienn and I bake a banana sheet cake. We got it all mixed up and baked and put it in the walk in freezer until the next day.

Another thing about my class is, Bridgerland allows high school kids to take courses during their school hours, so we have high school students coming in and out all day long. They just help out and do whatever needs to be done that day. One of the high school students, Celeste, helped us bake the sheet cake.

I also went and purchased my books and uniforms. That was about it for day 1.