Cooking Basics 1 Stocks and Soups

This was the first class I took at Kitchen on Fire in Berkeley. (It was actually the second in the series, I missed Basic Knife Skills).
Walking into Kitchen on Fire was a bit spooky. I had only taken two cooking classes, ever. Both at The Sage Table, in Oakland. The Sage Table is Dara Merin's apartment. It's four people on stools in her small but incredibly well organized kitchen, watching her cook and gab and then eating at her dining room table. Dara knows her shit, and she gives you a nice packet with the recipes, it's a great little intimate thing, and the first time I walked into her kitchen filled with Ball jars of grains, an old yellowed Wedgwood stove, jars of fermenting cabbage, strange bottles of spices everywhere, I almost cried. It was like coming home. Like, "here is someone who understands me!"
Kitchen on fire, at first glance at least, is more like a kitchen class room. there were five rows of chairs facing a very large modern kitchen with about three major work stations. A huge hanging mirror over the main cutting board served to let the back rows see what was being chopped by the lecturing chef.
And Mike C did lecture. For ninety minutes. About soups and stocks. My first reaction was to bolt the hell out of there. What am I in high school?
Then I shut my mind the hell up and listened.
Surface area. Osmosis. Thickening. Femur bones verse bones with cartilege, joins. Cooking time. Fine chop, verse large chop. Size of bones and its relation to cooking time. Mirapoix or not. Flavor transfer. Flavor extraction. Coating starch with fat. Consomme. Bisques. sachet/Bouquet Garni.
Then finally summarized in Mike C's classic east coast no bullshit style, "Crap in a pot, Cold water, bring to a boil. Got it? Any Questions?" (Imagine the physicality of a hockey player, the focus of a ninja and the patience of a priest, and you have an idea of Mike C.)
Then we all got up and in a flurry of action twelve people made eight soups. The New England chowder was a f**ing revelation.
Kitchen on Fire Rules.