Preliminaries

Many interesting twists and turns dot my journey to The Culinary Institute Of America. Today's particular surprise was the suggestion that I go take CIA Boot Camp. If you're unfamiliar, these are accelerated courses that focus on a particular area. They last about a week and are rather intensive. Three of them, in baking, pastry, and dessert, respectively, are the ones with which I have been presented. Rather than to CIA proper for an actual degree, these Boot Camps have been presented as an alternative for a hobby baker to simply become a lot more skilled. Well, I'm perfectly happy going to these Boot Camps, but, as you might imagine, I view them rather differently. What an opportunity to spend three weeks, two of them consecutive, on that campus. That is a lot of time to get to know chef instructors, learn my way around the campus, and learn my way around San Antonio, not to mention learning firsthand about the pace and quality expected at CIA.

Unlike the trip I'm taking in March or the drive down I am ultimately going to need to make, I will be flying down for the Boot Camps. My policy is that I will always take a car for a trip unless someone else is paying the tab. In this case, my mother is paying for the whole trip, and she insists I fly. So I'll be enduring the damned shoe removal at airport security and hating it as much as the next fat guy. Being there will also be a little different than actual school. Instead of staying at the school-affiliated Tobin Lofts, I'll be staying in a hotel. Rather than my grades mattering, the Boot Camps do not count for credit. Only one's integrity and drive to improve one's culinary skills matters in this context. Group, or at least team, work will likely be involved as part of the Boot Camp. Whether it's things like techniques where I need improvement of social interactions where I must improve, the boot camps, far from scaring me with the brutality that implies, seem to have only an upside to them.

More than anything else, I think what the Boot Camps will give me is some good preliminary training that I was previously intending to conduct on my own. Rather than apply pressure, as one might think the prospect of taking on intensive programs like these would, I find that the Boot Camps are effectively taking such pressure off of me by making it so I know I'll be tested for readiness before I even set foot in a CIA kitchen as a full-time student. Lest I describe them as mere culinary endurance trials, let me just say that I fully expect to learn a great deal at these things as well. Perhaps they will teach me how to solve problems, like how to ensure the custard sets on a lemon merengue pie, that I'd previously considered nigh insoluble. Best of all, they may give me some new recipes and techniques with which I could abscond home and impress my supporters and detractors alike, albeit for different reasons. After all, I'm in it all the amazement others have when I make it right.

-Frank