The Runaway Cook

lab kitchen and into (in a low echo-y voice) ThE AsIaN KiTcHeN. . . . All 24 of us meandered through the hallways and eventually filed into this tiny kitchen filled with very oversized and

very foreign looking cooking i

mplements. As a cook, you would think that I would have been extremely excited to be face-to-face with burners the size of hub caps and a roasting thing that reminded me of a pig feeder or maybe a silo. . .large enough to cook myself inside it, but I felt a little afraid to be working with so many strange and large vessels only to be making even stranger foods with them.

Luckily, the reluctance faded as I lost all sense of pride and decided to be completely ridiculous and just cook with no fear. . . this may not have been the wisest decision as it ended in lots of food flying all over t

he kitchen

;)

Being from Iowa, and an Iowa State Fair junkie, I thought I had seen nearly every kind of food on a stick that could be on a stick. Apparently, there I was severely misinformed. Today I learned how to skewer and roast a piglet. I feel terrible writing that down, but it’s the truth.

After the initial boiling and skewering of the mini pig, we roasted and toasted it over an open flame. To do this, one must slowly swing the pig back and fourth over the fire by means of sliding the pole in and forward then out and backward in ones hand.

This may sound simple, but that is the last word to use for such an act. This job is so intense women are banned from roasting pigs because it is considered danger to their lives. I have no qualms with that

idea. In fact, this farm girl could barely perform the act once, let alone over the period of and hour. I can only imagine the heat and exhaustion felt after that length of time. When we had finally finished this campfire style hog, our instructor took a cleaver and dissected that collage of meat and bone like nobody’s business.

Ok, enough about the pig already! Time to wok it out! Hahaha. Just for a minute, try to imagine 24 people who can’t flip a wok for the life of them trying to tos

s dry rice up and catch it back in these giant

metal bowls . It is a sight not to be missed. Rice flies everywhere, metal clangs on metal, and everyone’s faces are express the pure concentration or. . . panic. It is hilarious! The following is a video of our silliness in the kitchen and of course, yours truly in an attempt to show how to fry rice, however all I really accomplish is coating the floor and myself with hot rice and slightly burning the rice that did stay in the wok. It brings new meaning to the song “Walk it out”