No, not a fallen souffle or having six extra dinner guests when you are serving individual roasted quail carcasses, nightmares in the sleeping soundly and pleasantly dreaming until something takes a very wrong turn in your psyche and you wake up sweating and find yourself clutching the bed post as if it were a weapons grade wooden spoon.
I must be more anxious about this culinary school thing than I imagined. My dreams last night consisted of a vivid nightmare involving small Italian cookies.
Picture a gleaming, modern kitchen. A great deal of stainless steel broken up with beautifully oiled wood. Now, image a somewhat dishevelled and panicky Victoria with a battered blue recipe card in her hand screaming, “Shit! 1000 amaretti by noon?”
The dream proceeds with me having to make ground almonds from almonds damn near fresh off the tree. I have to shell all the almonds. Then blanch them. Then skin them. Then grind them in a nut grinder (no not that kind) and then rub them through a screen to keep out the too big chunks.
By the time I have made what is essentially almond flour my hands are bleeding and my state has gone past dishevelled into a caricature of a cook in a medieval kitchen. I am covered in sweat and grime and look like I have been dragged backward through a knot hole, twice. The modern kitchen has been replaced with a stone and straw model of hell and the glow of the fires has pushed my complexion past a healthy, ruddy glow to a lobster-esque shade of just this side of stroke red.
I mix the batter for the cookies in this huge wooden tub that three of me could swim in comfortably and then proceed to bake one (!) cookie at a time.
Just as the clock at the end of what has become a football field-sized cavern begins to chime noon, I squirt the last of the amaretti from a pastry bag the size of a body bag on the the small baking sheet and place it into the fire-breathing hell mouth of an oven.
Then something grabs my foot and begins stuffing me into the oven after the amaretti. This of course turns out to be Keifel pulling on my ankle to wake me.
I will never look at those innocent little buttons of almondy goodness the same.
