Cooking, Just Like Chess (Sort of)

I play chess fairly well. I'm good at strategy. Piece by piece, I pick off my opponent's knights, rooks and bishops, only giving up the occasional pawn. A lot of swearing is often heard across the board from me for the first two-thirds of the game.

Then, I get too focused on the end goal. I spend too much time on the other end of the board, trying to intimidate my opponent's king. I become so focused on offense that my defense suffers. It's at this point, invariably, that I'll lose my queen, usually in a move I could have anticipated had I been paying even the slightest bit of attention.

The funny thing is, I don't use my queen all that much. She's just kind of a security blanket for me. But once she's gone, it's like I'm Samson and someone just went at me with a Flowbee. I'm rendered completely impotent as a chess player at that point. My defeat is swift and pathetic. I may play chess fairly well, but I don't win many games.

[Are you wondering how I'm going to make this analogy work? Yeah, me too. It might not. We'll see.]

Likewise, I cook fairly well. Especially since starting culinary school. I've gone from being someone who pores over recipes and makes elaborate shopping lists to one who goes to the grocery store, see what looks good, and then makes a pretty kick-ass meal around it. I'm usually confident about my cooking skills, both at the institute and in my own kitchen.

A month or so ago, I had a test on my knife skills and basic cooking techniques. Last night, I had my mid-term exam, which included a 10-page written test and a practical test, where I had to make a carrot cream soup, a salad with a vinaigrette, and a poached pear with an apple juice reduction sauce.

My test a month ago was a bit of a disaster. I owned the knife skills test, but when it came time to cook, my beans were unevenly cooked, my rice was undercooked, and my crudite was not properly seasoned. I could cook all of those things in my sleep.

Last night, I did a great job on the written part, because I'm a big nerd and made myself a 7-page study guide beforehand. But the cooking part was dismal. My pears were the exception -- perfectly cooked, arranged on the plate like a yin-yang, a sprig of fresh mint sprouting from the middle and a sauce of apple juice, lemon juice and maple syrup, reduced down to just the right consistency. My carrot-ginger soup, though, was basically inedible. It looked pretty -- a lovely orange color with a parsley leaf floating on top, and it was the right consistency -- just like heavy cream, but it tasted, if you'll pardon my French, like absolute shit. And my salad was a big ugly mess, and I didn't even taste the vinaigrette.

The thing is, I made all three of those things at home on Monday to practice, and they all came out wonderful. And when I was cooking for my exam, I was feeling confident and in great shape. I had my pears on before everyone else did, my mis en place for my other two dishes was ready fairly quickly, and all I had to do was the exact same thing I'd done at my apartment two nights before.

Here's where my queen got snatched, on both tests [Brought it back around!]. I started to run out of time. In both cases, I'd thought I was working totally efficiently, and ended up being faced with the very serious possibility that my food just wasn't going to be ready before my time was up. So I panicked. And choked. And made stupid mistakes that I wouldn't have time to fix later. Which is a bummer, because if there's one thing you learn how to do at culinary school, it's fix a cooking disaster.

Hopefully I did well enough on the written test to ensure an overall grade that isn't too embarrassing. But I really wanted to prove myself on this test, especially after botching the last one so hard. Oh well, maybe I'll score a check-mate on my final exam.

In hindsight? Not my best analogy.