Culinary School Presidential 1

My daughter, Tracey, is very close to graduating from Spokane Community College where she is studying culinary. The two-year coarse is made up of six semesters and one of the requirements for the graduating students is for them to prepare a five coarse meal as their final project. The food they cook is for their family and friends to enjoy and is called the “Presidential”, which is held during the month of May. With so many students needing to cook at once, the graduating class is divided into groups of four and then they choose a Friday in May to make their meal. If this isn't stress enough, they are graded heavily on their creativity, composition and presentation.

The date that Tracey was scheduled to cook was on Friday, May 9 at 11:30 am. I was very excited for her and knew she would do a good job but there was one thing that needed to happen for all this to come together. And that was for me to hop on a jet for a few hours and fly there. Now this really isn’t a big deal for most people but for me, just hearing the word “flying” makes my skin crawl so this meant I would really have to dig deep and just deal with it.

Now you would think that working in the Aerospace industry for my whole life would ease my fear of flying, but to be honest, it’s only made it worse. Why? I guess I know better (don’t ask). I was fine a few days before flight time but once I was at the airport, I was as nervous as a cat walking through a dog kennel. Once we arrived in Spokane at noon Thursday, we grabbed a rental car and found our hotel room. After talking with Tracey now that we were in town, she wanted to give us a tour of her school to show us where she's been for the past two years.

This is the kitchen which happens to be nice and clean, now that the lunch crowd has come and gone. One of the first things the school teaches their students is cleanliness. For example, chicken and beef get cut on separate cutting boards, never on the same one. The window that you see at the far end is where the dinning area is located. We'll visit that room in a minute.

That board on the wall has four rows of papers on it, one for each student that will be cooking this week. Tracey's is the third one down which has her menu on it.

Here are some cookies that she's baked and are kept safe inside a secure cabinet. Tracey hand made these from a mold that she cut from thin cardboard. Pretty cool.

This is the entrance from the main hallway that leads into Orlando's, the schools restaurant. The closed door that you see goes to their bakery, which had some great tasting stuff. Let's check out what the inside of the Orlando's looks like.

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