food practical

i've got to do food science along with the cooking labs/food practicals again. it was something i had done for undergrad so i'm rather familiar with the concepts but it's nice to do it again here because i don't really know much about Australian foods. today we had a food practical for slow cooking up at the north side of town. Flinders doesn't have kitchens or the facilities to do the food practicals so we were using a cooking school's facilities. makes me miss the food lab at IU, it was nice and cosy and each group had our own set of cooking utensils/sink/stove/oven. The cooking school's kitchen is huge but it's a commercial style kitchen so the utensils were all stored at a central location which was quite chaotic going up and down the kitchen to find stuff. the ingredients we needed for our recipes were not sorted by group too... imagine 6 groups fighting for one ingredient. and the sinks are all at the sides of the kitchen so stuff has to be taken here and there. not a very efficient layout in my opinion. i think i spent half of the 6 hours there walking about to find stuff or to wash my hands/wash utensils.

the food practical was about 6 hours... which means standing around for that amount of time. it's tiring and i never feel like i enjoy cooking under such conditions. maybe that's why i don't cooking because i associate cooking with standing around for extended amounts of time and having lots of ingredients to prepare and pots and pans to wash after that.