“Expect the unexpected,” IB economics teacher Katherine Peyton said as she and her colleague, theatre teacher Trena Wiess-Null, dined on the culinary arts students’ latest creations.
Walking into the makeshift dining room, Peyton headed toward the dessert table and first sampled a brownie drizzled with homemade chocolate sauce and ice cream, which was topped off with whipped cream.
Senior Andrew Rampy, an academy student from McLean High School, described the creation of desserts as a “canvas for a work of art.”
Rampy added that they have to be very appealing as many are likely to overlook desserts because of their misconceptions of desserts as being fattening. He added they try to offer an assortment of desserts to match people’s preferences.
As a result, junior and culinary art student Tram Hoang added “desserts are probably the most detailed.”
Therefore to complement the brownie’s beauty, they added a trickle of homemade chocolate sauce.
They seemed to have succeeded in their endeavor of making their desserts stand out as the brownie was the first dish Peyton sampled.
Chef Ciaran Devlin said that baking stands apart from regular cooking because it is more about “measuring” whereas regular cooking is more about trial and error.
As a result of the intricacies involved, baking to Devlin, is a “specialty.”
Cooking is not simply a matter of creativity, Devlin said, it is a matter of managing your resources.
In fact, the brownie was served as a way to get rid of excess resources in the kitchen before spring break.
The delicacy was a product of resource management, which according to Devlin, is as important as the creative aspects of cooking.
In addition, the ice cream, unlike the passion fruit sorbet they made a few days before, was not homemade.
When it comes to resource management, Devlin concluded it was a matter of “buy it,use it, lose it,” stressing that shopping conservatively was the only way to go in the restaurant business.
Due to their diversity, the lunches culinary arts have prepared has gained a contingent of teachers, who are generally pleased with the variety of food offered, according to Peyton.
Weiss-Null was impressed with their adeptness at bringing something new to the table because, according to her, they have never repeated a dish and she dines there each day food is offered.
Overhearing Weiss-Null’s comments, freshman and drama technology student, Zachary Scott, came over and said, “I wish they would start selling to the students. While we eat cafeteria food the teachers enjoy all that amazing food that the culinary art students make.”