That was my experience when I first set foot in ICE for a tour. I reached the front desk and all I smelled was to-die-for freshly baked bread. Walking past kitchen 501, I couldn’t help but stand there...
That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot of work to be done, however. As a class, we just finished taking our ServSafe certification test and are awaiting our results. Here in New York City, the NYC...
A portion of ICE's Culinary Arts curriculum involves learning how not to be that person. The final week of Module 3 is dedicated to one thing: plating. Sure, you learn delicious new recipes using...
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had my fair share of graduations (grade school, high school, college), but this accomplishment feels like it came out of nowhere! In many ways, it did; we started in July, and...
I have always been a stalwart fan of See’s Candies (a chain in California that makes delicious old fashioned chocolates), but more recently, I've been inspired by the modern candy-makers of Brooklyn's...
In previous years, I have spent this same weekend glued to my twitter feed in a jealous rage, following along as my favorite celebrity chefs hobnob with each other, posting blurry cell phone photos of...
By contrast, my thoughts on the first day of my Pastry & Baking Arts class were something along the lines of: "Yay! Finally!" But today, a month into management, I've learned to accepted this contrast...
A trail is a combination of a job interview and a trial work shift. Basically, it’s an interview that can last anywhere from 6 to 10 hours. This is how every person cooking in a kitchen gets a job...
As my class has sailed (relatively) smoothly through the basic knife skills, stocks, and sauces of Module 1 and transitioned into the more serious cooking of Module 2, our days in the kitchen have...
The first is this: regional cuisines are varied and driven by the foods readily available seasonally and locally. If you live by the sea, you eat a lot of fish. If you are inland, you don’t. If you...
I've always loved croissants, but never imagined that I could make them. I don’t know if I ever pictured anyone baking them, except maybe some mystical French elves. It just never occurred to me that...
The pulled pork recipe I created with the sauce “on the fly” for our demo was—if I do say so myself—a major hit. Customers were coming back for seconds, thirds, and even fourths; they were buying jars...