My first day of school!!

On my first day as a student at Le Cordon Bleu, I attended an orientation session, received my equipment, received my uniform, and called it a day. It was also the same day Quinn came back from SF - yay!!

My Basic Cuisine class consists of 33 people, and there are people from all over the world. From within our class, we represent 17 different nationalities. The United States makes up the majority with 11 people coming from there. During orientation, they went over the school rules, introduced the staff, spoke of the different services provided, and gave us the basic intro/general information about the school. I also received my knife set along with some other goodies that we'll need to use during our practicals. It's a pretty intense collection of kitchen essentials and is covered by our tuition. The knives are a Wusthof collection that is made specifically for Le Cordon Bleu students.

When I first tried on my uniform, it was swimmingly big, but after pinning up the pants (like an entire foot), and rolling up the sleeves, I was good to go. Our uniform consists of a cap, necktie, jacket, apron, pants, tea towel, professional kitchen shoes, and a hair net (for people with long hair). It's quite something trying to put on all the different pieces in the super-cramped locker room on the basement floor.

Since it was Quinn's first day back in SF, we went out for a nice, relaxing lunch at the St. Eustache cafe at the end of our street. I had beef tartare (again), and we caught up on the last several days we were apart. To celebrate Quinn's return, we had 2 pain au chocolats (each!). The first was from Eric Kayser, a boulangerie that I've heard of several times from online reviews. The pain au chocolat was dismal in comparison to the first pain au chocolat we had in Paris so we had to go back to the place where we got our first pain au chocolat in Paris to see if it was really as good as we remembered... and it was!