In which I begin the transition from dilettante to pastry student

Classes begin on August 17. I am almost ready to begin. Amazon is working on shipping textbooks to me. A website called Chef Uniforms is shipping my hats, neckerchiefs and aprons. I have my 4 coats and with any luck, my mom will be willing to use her fancy sewing machine and embroider my name on them. I am also waiting on a local store to order 2 more pants for me. Knives have been sharpened, measuring tools have been bought. I feel like a six year old who knows she's getting a pony for Christmas.

Culinary school is expensive. It's not like a regular academic college where you roll out of bed, look around for a pen and notebook and skip off to class. In addition to the books and regular school supplies, I need uniforms. Uniforms that are expected to be freshly laundered and pressed before every class. I need chef coats, chef pants, hats, neckerchiefs (ugh-I hate these), aprons, shoes, and new socks. I also needed the following supplies:

Chef’s Knife
Paring Knife
Honing Steel
Instant Read Thermometer
Measuring Cups and Spoons
Vegetable Peeler
Bench Scraper
Bowl Scraper
Kitchen Shears
Microplane Zester
Pastry Cutter

Luckily I already have a very nice set of knives. I only needed to pay $7 to get them sharpened and $20 for a snazzy new red knife roll, and not the $300 or so for new knives. A good knife, when properly cared for, will last a lifetime. I will do a post on choosing and caring for knives in the future. My uniforms will cost me almost $200 all together. My shoes, Birki Professional clogs, were $90. My books are going to be somewhere around $300. If I add it up correctly, the cost of les acoutrements will actually have cost more than the semester's tuition of $675. Crazy, huh?

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A side note on this blog:

After a brief flirtation with Typepad, I have decided to keep this blog. I found I wasn't able to set up the Typepad blog as easily as I would like. I couldn't figure out how to add page elements, like my class schedule. My only beef with this blog at the moment is not being able to have three columns. Does anyone know if that's possible with Blogger? I'd like one column of page elements on each side of the center column of blog posts. If you can help me figure this out, you will be rewarded with cookies.

Moving forward this will be my only blog and the focus will be food and culinary school. I will also continue to post recipes, reviews and what-not. Thanks for sticking around. Thanks for being patient with my hiatus.