Sunday Warm-Up:



Then I folded one hand.

Then:



SIGH. LEMME RUN GOOD IN THE MILL PLZ.

I wish I could hold up vs. a flush draw on a Sunday, ONE FUCKING TIME.



This one was $1050 too!

I'm doing the cooking for a job to learn to cook better thing....

Here is the straight truth, six months of watching food network, if you have learned all five mother sauces, and basics of base flavor and how to work with common ingredients and how to make stock from scratch... same as most culinary arts schools. The only school that I've seen consistently turn out decent cooks in the US is Le Cordon Bleu in Vegas. Johnson and Whales, AI, all those places pretty much cost a lot of fucking money and is equal to community college but brand named, spend triple the money get the same education that you could get on 15k or so.

Culinary education though like TableTiger says only goes so far, getting on the line and getting pwned is where a cook is made or broke. Even a good cook, organized and prepared can run bad or get hit so hard it is hard to keep up. Think about a dish that they most you can prepare in one wok is 10, and the wait staff have 30 orders, 10 of them some idiotic special request. The place I work every night is a different menu item, that rotates thru our week and then starts all over again. The goal is each week out of the 20 that I will be running that station should I not be moved, is to make each dish better than last week. Should I reach the pinnacle of flavor, maybe I can figure out how to adjust cooking methods to make presentation better or just general plating it nicer.

Anyways by the things I've seen you post that you enjoy to make at home, I would recommend that you get the CIA (Culinary Institute of America) Garde Manger cookbook. It will have a ton of salad dressings, ceviche and pretty much all the cold side recipes. All of their cookbooks are pretty good at laying out all the basics, to beyond in a given area of culinary.