It's Beginning to Thicken...

This week was the first week of team meetings for the competition in Austria. May I please express just how excited I am for this??? FREAKIN excited! The first day was just going over expectations of the competition, practice times, what we need to do as teammates to get in sync with each other, why we were paired together, suggestions to make each time as strong as possible, etc. It was really good to hear all of the suggestions and advice the coach had for us all. I was trying my best to focus and take it all in with just 3 hours of sleep the night before. I had to bow out a bit early since my job had scheduled me to work that morning. The next morning, we did verbal practices where the coach just gave us random items that popped into her head for us to try to design the plate and menu around. In the competition we'll only have about 5 minutes to plan before we cook; we started off with 7 minutes and each round, the coach brought us down just a bit until we reached 5 minutes. To be really honest, I was really intimidated at first and my teammate ran the first round as to what we could do with the ingredients told to us. After that though, I got more and more comfortable with my teammate and began to have confidence in my ideas. I actually come up with some good stuff. I had soooo much fun doing these mental practices and just hashing out ideas with my partner and seeing what we could come up with. Next week we actually begin to bang it out in the kitchen and make what we come up with. I'm quite nervous... we'll see how it goes. We had our first "publicity" event on Thursday, selling croissants and profiterols with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce (yes... a bake sale). Anyway, it was awesome to tell people that the proceeds were for us to go to Austria and compete. A lot of people were excited to hear that the school was competing.

Things are starting to fall into place. This is really happening, I'm going to Austria to compete on an international level. I'll get my competition jacket and my practicing jacket. I only hope I can make my school proud half way around the world against pros. It's a lot of pressure, it's going to happen really quickly. Hopefully it doesn't happen too quickly and make me explode. I'm definitely excited to go though! Life is going to be fun for the next 9 weeks!