Add one cup of...

Recently I quit my job...

I started my Chefs apprenticeship in October 2009, literally walked out the doors of  my last HSC exam and into the Kitchen at "La Cucina @ the Hotel Illawarra". I was keen, I was ready and strangely enough I was well prepared for my time as an apprentice.

I excelled in my classes at TAFE. I had gained prior recognition for a years worth of work due to my completion of my Cert II during highschool. It was all well and good, however I did have a few issues with my time in my practical classes. Not issue issues but some small problems, mostly concerning allocation of resources...

There was never enough of the suff, at least not of the good stuff. There was a lack of quality ingredients, and sometimes we ran out.

Now I can understand that this could probably have something to do with the general funding of the course. HOWEVER it still frustrated me to no end. How can we turn out quality product without quality ingredients?
The answer is we can't... and with large class sizes, spreading out small ammounts of ingredients over large ammounts of students doesn't really work.

At one point we had to create a mushroom risotto, simple enough right? Wrong.
Without enough mushrooms to go around they didn't turn out so well.

I could give some more examples but I think that you should have caught on to my point by now and although class size may not be the root of the problem (underfunding probably was but thats a whole different kettle of fish...) it sure as hell didn't help.

As they say "too many chefs spoil the broth"...