Eggs, eggs, eggs.

We started the day by finishing our quiches, florentine and lorraine. Good stuff, though many student's dough (including my own) shrunk excessively when we blind baked them. They'll still do the job, but they just won't be as pretty.

The rest of our production for the day was: hard-boiled, medium-boiled, soft-boiled, sunnyside up, over easy, over medium, over hard (or well done), and scrambled eggs. Oh, yeah, and fold in a Western style and French style omelette. That is a lot of eggs. It was a particularly large amount because today, unlike previous days, we were allowed "do overs". If you didn't get the eggs cooked right, you'd do them again.

The reason for this was that Chef Guevara wasn't particularly worried about presentation or flavoring, only that we knew how to cook the eggs to the proper consistency and color. It may sound easy, but proper egg cookery is anything but.

We also needed a large number of eggs in order to properly test our flipping technique. Many a yolk was broken today. Luckily, I only broke one yolk on the flip, and it was the darn well done egg. I also did very well with my one-handed egg opening technique, breaking only one yolk in the process (hello, omelette).

Again, I think this is particular cooking application where practice and experience are key. I guess I'll just have to start cooking eggs whenever the opportunity will arise.

By the end of the day the class had filled two 400 hotel pans with the detritus of the successful and not-so-successful eggs. That's a lot of eggs. And, frankly, the sight really sort of turned me off on the whole egg thing (though I did have a very, very nice soft-boiled egg early in the day).