CCoatsofManyColours!: Fish Scales! :-)

You know your recreational hobbies are piano and cooking when you have a dream mixing to the two together...AKA....How to cook was written on music terminology in the dream. LOL

Anyway, my sister in law, Ariel H., and myself are taking a chef certification cooking course. We're not doing it to become chefs in the industry, in fact I would NOT ever want to work in food services b/c I know how stressful and challenging it can be contrary to popular belief it's easy. I know how tough it can be b/c of my dad who is a retired certified chef. I don't think I'd have what it takes under that pressure. I cook by myself recreational and serve that way. :-) Anyway, we want to better ourselves in the kitchen to serve our family and friends, and this is something that is on my physical bucket list to do while I'm still here physically.

The first lesson was learning proper professional chef's terms. My fav is Mirepoix. We took our first test and all passed. I got an 87%...but I passed. Those terms were not as easy as I thought. Our second lesson was making chicken, beef, and fish stock. They all came out. I thought fish stock would be nasty, but it wasn't. My dad, totally thrilled we're taking this course, went out and bought us two whole fish, and a whole chicken. I had beef bones. For the first time in my life I cleaned and filleted a fish. We haven't taken our test on this yet, but we got good practice in my kitchen last week. Hopefully I'll pass the test on this chapter.

ABOVE: I've learned in lessons that you can tell the above fish has been frozen and not fresh out of the water b/c of the cloudy eyes.

BELOW: First thing was to cut the sharp fins off so you don't accidentally cut yourself, and then you descale the fish with the back side of a chef's knife..

Then you cut the fish tail off.

Clean out the inside and then make a clean cut under the belly making sure not to cut in a sawing motion since fish will tear easily. Rinse thoroughly the blood out and off.

Then took the chef's knife on top of fish and ran it along the back bone slicing through the fish, again without sawing to keep the meat from tearing, and as shown below came out with a decent looking filet. I could do better, but it passed for a good first try.

Closer up picture of my first white fish filet.

My niece, Sophia decided to take my camera and get a shot of the action. I was annoyed, but when I saw the pic came out, it was okay.

Then I cut off the head to put in the fish stock. I know, it sounds psycho and gross, but it must be done. I know, yuck, but it turns yummy! Chef's tricks are usually kind of gross sometimes.

ABOVE and BELOW: My first mistake in making the fish stock.... I apparently didn't pay attention to the lesson we had on how to cut leeks, b/c I accidentally used the wrong part of the leeks to cook. Chef's actually use the bottom root of the leeks in this, and not the green stems. Oops, it gave it a much milder flavor, but it still worked, just not as well I suppose.

Added our head and leftover fish bones into the pot with the leeks with some butter and mirepoix and sauteed on the stove top.

Added a bouquet garni to put in the stock temporarily. Another cool chef's term though my bouquet garni wasn't pretty.

added water and let it come to a boil and then let it simmer for 40min. If you let fish stock cook longer than 40 minutes, it will turn way too fishy and will be gross.

ABOVE and BELOW: Sonia and Ariel cooking with the stocks. Shown in picture are beef stock made by Sonia, and chicken stock made by Ariel, and the fish stock made by me.

I decided to make fish risotto out of some of the stock so we'd all have dinner. We're saving the rest of the stock for some of our future tries with lessons we have since stock is the foundation of a lot of dishes.

The niece wanted to help make the risotto so we let her help stir it. I think we have a mini chef on our hands. The quote of the night for her was "Let's stay and cook all night."