Read Online White Jacket Required by Jenna Weber - Free Book Online

food budget for the month. Screw it, I muttered under my breath, and decided to just do it myself. In my closet, I found the small plastic sewing kit my mom had given me—the same sewing kit that had remained sealed for the past four years because, despite my childhood prairie-girl phase, I hate sewing with a burning passion. I told myself it must be done, though, and after I poured myself a large glass of wine I sat down on the couch with the Food Network on and prepared to hem my first pair of pants.
    I worked and worked at it, but my efforts were in vain: the stitches came out loose and loopy. I wondered briefly if I should pick them all out and start over, but then I glanced at my watch and saw that it was already ten o’clock. I set the pants aside, fell into bed, and dreamed of checkered pants and life-size sewing needles stitching up my legs.
    By the third day, my class officially lost our only fifteen-minute break of the day because a girl showed up thirty seconds late. Now we went straight through the five hours with no stopping. I didn’t mind this as much as my partners, who, along with the other smokers in the class, suffered greatly from nicotine withdrawal during stressful situations.
    On my fifth day of Basic Skills, we made our first dish to be graded, pasta with sautéed vegetables and pesto sauce. As soon as Chef said “Go,” I raced to my station and began work on supreming and zesting an orange, along with the various knife skills I had to demonstrate before I could even start on my pasta. To perfectly supreme an orange means to leave it bare and juicy, with no flecks of stringy white pith at all. Sweat trickled beneath my cravat and I fought back exhaustion. I was quickly discovering that culinary school was more than just frosting cupcakes, as I had envisioned it. I was under more stress now than I had been all four years of college combined. We had an hour and a half to complete everything, and the timer was ticking.
    I took out my sharp paring knife and made clean, easy cuts down the segments of my orange. I wiggled each glistening segment out gently but still managed to lose half of each one. I scraped off every speck of pith, for if Chef saw any white at all we would lose points. In the end, I had no pith on my segments, but they were ugly and misshapen—not at all like the perfect ones that Chef had produced effortlessly in a matter of minutes during the demo. I took a deep breath, put the segments in a ramekin, with pretty ones on top to hide my mistakes, and began work on the other knife skills. While I was working, I glanced over at Frank’s tray. I had to admit, for being crude and obnoxious, he was a pretty good chef. All of his oranges were perfectly supremed, and he chopped so fast it looked like his knife never left the cutting board. I quickly got back to my work.
    I cut an onion the way Chef demonstrated—peeling it, slicing it in half, and then making vertical and horizontal cuts, leaving the root ends attached. This was supposed to produce perfect small dice, all uniform and complete. After chopping, though, I noticed that some of my dice were quite a bit larger than the others. With the clock ticking, I had no choice but to put them all in a ramekin and let them go. After my onion was chopped, my orange was supremed, and my shallot and garlic were minced until they were barely recognizable, I took my silver sheet pan and ramekins to the front to be graded.
    â€œI’m finished, Chef,” I said as I stood there, rather awkwardly, with my large tray held out before me.
    Chef didn’t say anything at first, just made a low grunting noise while he finished jotting something down in his book. Finally, he looked up. “Ah, the enemy,” he said with a grin. “Let’s see what you got, Weber.”
    Immediately he went straight for my misshapen oranges. “These are not how I demonstrated. See how yours falls apart when picked up? You