My wife, Sandy gave me a delightful gift of cooking lessons at the Culinary Institute of America. In the May issue of the Eccentric, I described our arrival at the CIA, a little about the facility and my highly professional team.

Chef David Kamen proved to be a talented chef and an infectious instructor. He sprinkled his lectures with anecdotal insights as we toured the Mediterranean region from Provence on Monday, to Southern Italy on Tuesday, Greece and Turkey on Wednesday, and Tunisia and Morocco on Thursday, before arriving in Spain on Friday.

Each morning began with a lecture introducing the history, culture, flavors, and foods native to the area of study for that day. After a coffee break, we reviewed the menus that comprised our work assignments. Each team had a menu of four-to-six courses so during the week we prepared a total of 125-150 different recipes.

The kitchen work is intense. Most of the menu items have imbedded secondary and tertiary recipe requirements. If a menu calls for a quart of stock, you probably won't find it in the refrigerator unless some generous soul made extra the day before. If you need fish stock, you visit the team that received the morning delivery from the fish monger and harvest the heads and bones from the catch of the day.

You hunt down, or order separately, the bones of other suitable critters that will be browned in a hot oven and simmered with aromatic vegetables to produce the succulent braising sauce called for by a particular recipe. These will end up in the first stockpots to hit the stove.

In the meantime, vegetables need to be blanched, shocked, peeled, diced, and otherwise prepared for use. Nuts need to be shelled, skinned, and toasted. Chickens and rabbits must be butchered, while lamb legs are boned, butterflied, pounded, and so on. All of this creates the hum of the working kitchen. But the sizzle comes from the massive stove tops and grills.

The cooking ranges at the CIA seem to have three working settings: off, super hot and super duper hot. Liquids bubble and boil while meats sizzle and crackle; occasionally what you hear crackling is the flesh of a careless chef who errantly grabbed a pot handle without the protection of his or her side towel.

Sometimes the instructors can be brutally frank.

Carol, a classmate who was pursuing the intense in-residence certification program, described a previous week's course in which the instructor sampled a soup she had prepared. Tasting the soup, he spit it out, declaring it "absolutely vile!" Carol had mistakenly laced it with a generous dose of sherry vinegar, rather than sherry.

By Wednesday I was feeling reasonably confident that the good Lord had indeed intended me to be a great chef after all, and that I had simply wasted time in those other careers. My confidence was short-lived. Assigned to make the Mediterranean flat bread Lavash, I had prepared preferment dough on Tuesday. The equivalent of starter dough, it was resting peacefully in the refrigerator. To this I would add bread flour, semolina flour, and cake flour along with milk, molasses, honey, salt and yeast. A piece of cake, so to speak.

My first challenge occurred when Chef Kamen announced during the menu review that the CIA no longer uses fresh yeast, which was called for in the recipe. The conversion factor from fresh to dry yeast is one-third the amount of dry yeast mixed with two-thirds water. Since the recipe called for only 1/2 ounce of fresh yeast, I needed 1/3 of 1/2 ounce. Try measuring that!

Riding to the rescue, Chef Kamen produced a digital scale, which actually weighed 4.5 grams of yeast, the equivalent of 1/3 of 1/2 ounce! In retrospect, the amount was so miniscule that I expect I would have done just as well by simply eyeballing the yeast (please don't tell Chef Kamen I said that).

My real problem came when I placed all of the ingredients in the giant Hobart mixer, a kitchen mixer the size of a cement truck. A couple classmates helped me figure out the Hobart, which has a dough hook reminiscent of a post-hole digger and wears a hockey-style face mask to keep the ingredients inside. As the Hobart went about its work, my dough remained a pool of liquid sloshing on the floor of the cement truck.

I summoned Chef Kamen and together we reviewed the recipe – 8 ounces of bread flour, 6 ounces of semolina flour, 5 ounces of cake flour, etc. Chef Kamen asked how I had measured the flour. I explained that I had begun with one cup of the bread flour and…that was the problem. One cup of flour weighs 4 ounces, not 8 ounces. I had mistakenly used fluid ounces to measure dry ingredients.

The daily sessions ended at about 1:30, leaving time for some rest and relaxation, including a cold beer or two, before heading out for dinner.

There are many good restaurants in the area, but the best are right on the CIA campus. St. Andrews Café offers an Asian influenced menu. The American Bounty restaurant in Roth Hall serves upscale American bistro cuisine. Restaurante Caterina De' Medici, in the villa-like Colevita Center, features wonderful Italian food. Escoffier, located in Roth Hall, is the formal French dining room, where the grill room offers a panoramic view of the kitchen.

The casual Apple Pie Café serves sandwiches and pastry throughout the day. All of the restaurants are staffed by CIA students who are completing their culinary training and preparing to join the real world.

We dined in three of the four restaurants, enjoying wonderful food with service provided by polite, eager, and capable young staff, making the dining experience particularly memorable.

Sandy really enjoyed our visit to the CIA. A fine cook in her own right, she is particularly good with pastries and loved watching the ongoing pastry classes through the glass-walled class rooms. I think it is safe to say that another pilgrimage is in the future. Let's see now, Sandy's birthday is in July…