Tribune Food: Chefs In Training & In Competition, Wine Puzzles

Raise your hand if you’ve never dreamed of becoming a professional chef. That thudding silence you here? That’s the sound of not a single one of you putting your hands in the air. Because everyone has dreamed of becoming a professional chef. Every. One. We just do not believe you if you say you have not had this wish.

When we blithely expressed our desire to cook other people’s food for a living to our parents, they took a very practical approach: they hooked us up with the folks at Bamboo Blue, an Asian-fusion restaurant in the south suburbs (try the Asian Nachos!), where for two weeks out of our summer break we got up at 4am to go to the vegetable market, buy noodles in Chinatown, slice endless mangoes for the fresh-fruit smoothies, and basically have the realization hammered into our brains that while we have a near-infinite respect for professional chefs, we substantially lack the cojones to be one ourself.

If you are missing a nearby restaurant at which to intern, we highly recommend reading Emily Nunn’s bloglike article on a day in the life of Dominic Zarletti, a 24-year-old student at the nternational Culinary School at the Illinois Institute of Art- Chicago. Reading the article is exhausting. Actually living that day? Almost infinitely more so. A tip of the hat to the folks behind the passthrough, s’il vous plaît . They work hard for their money.

Also in the Trib’s food section:

Breathless coverage of the Country Chef Challenge: at Daley Plaza Farmers Market, chefs from Anteprima, Carnivale, and Coobah did a quasi-Iron-Chef challenge: $50, 30 minutes at the greenmarket, and another 30 minutes to make a dish. Unsurprisingly, deliciousness ensued. (Spoiler! Chef Kaminsky Thomas of Anteprima won!)

• Bill Daley takes a break from telling us what to drink to give us AN INTERACTIVE ONLINE WINE CROSSWORD PUZZLE (presumably not digitally interactive in the paper edition of the Trib) which just might be the greatest thing to cross our monitor all day. And we are totally going to attempt it. Possibly right now.

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Tribune Food: Chefs In Training & In Competition, Wine Puzzles