Before I took my first hands-on cooking class at Sur La Table, I considered myself a pretty good cook. But little did I know, I’d walked into Hell’s Kitchen. Our chef instructor, Monique or Lalique, assigned workstations and gave us our first task: chop a shallot into ¼-inch dice for a basil cream sauce.
Everyone around me was going chop, chop, chop, chop. It was like a scene from Ratatouille, but I’m going, slice-pull, slice-pull because I don’t have a rat under my hat telling me what to do. The chop, chop, chopper next me looked at my technique and said, “That’s not how you hold a knife.”
