Busy few weeks

I have to say that it has been quite an eventful few weeks. I am sorry for not writing lately, but with everything going on there really hasn't been a whole lot of time to come and write for you all. But I promise to be better about that.
   So as I said the last few weeks have been quite eventful. I started my lab classes at school where we are actually working in the kitchen cooking and fabricating things. Right now I am attending the Kitchen Essentials class, and I don't think that I will ever look at another potato the same way. We have sliced so many potatoes in learning the many different cuts that we are required to know, and eaten so many recipes that are centered around potatoes that I think I could turn into a giant potato. But I have learned some very amazing new recipes and ideas for my restaurant along the way. For example today we made two different kinds of soup. First we made a potato soup which was pretty simple. It was basically just red potatoes that had been medium diced boiled in chicken stock with crisped bacon, and sauteed celery and onions and then we simply added roux which is just a simple sauce made of butter and flower, then two gallons of milk (it was a rather large batch of about three gallons) and cooked till the potatoes were tender. In the end after a bit of seasoning it tasted like clam chowder minus the clams.
   Next we made an Indian soup. It was diced carrots and onions that we boiled down with chicken stock till tender, then we pureed it down to a soup and added seasonings including curry, cayenne, (I added sugar as it made a huge difference) and some salt. Then finally we added half a quart of heavy cream. And voila. Such an awesome recipe and was my favorite of the two.
  We also had our Tour de Coop here in Cedar Rapids last Saturday and Sunday. We had dismal weather, but it managed to stop raining for the duration of the tour, and we actually had a great turnout of about 30 visitors per coop! I don't think I have ever had such fun talking about chickens with complete strangers. There were all types of people from every walk of life who came out for the tour. We had families who came with their kids, 4-H teens and their parents, other local backyard chicken raisers, prospective chickens keepers, and they all just seemed like such nice people.
  Oh and I also went through a minor tragedy in the family. We lost three of our chickens. Two of them we lost to a dog who killed them, and the other we think died of old age/stress because she kind of just flopped over. But I am now back to full capacity as I wasn't going to just show my single chicken I had left, and I got several new girls from another local chicken raiser who was looking to thin out her flock. And I am as happy as a clam! They are a great bunch of girls with such personalities, and all the eggs I get every day! I get up to about five eggs a day on average, and my new favorite chicken is named Blanche after the golden girls ( I have three named after them and am just missing a Sophia). She is a little white leghorn with a HUGE and i mean huge comb and attitude, and for such a little bird she lays the biggest white eggs! They are like twice the size of jumbo store eggs. It's awesome.
So yes thats pretty much how things have been going for us lately.
Ciao xo