Tuesday, June 17, 2008 Project Start!

Hmnn, this is where everything begins.....For those wondering, this is William C. Donnell here, and I figured I would create this blog to document and keep a journal of the process of putting together my Capstone Project for ITT Tech-Cordova. What is a Capstone, you ask? A Capstone is the final project that students must put together in order to graduate from the college, and it can be based upon just about any subject matter, as long as: 1) We use the techniques developed here at the school, and 2) We do most if not all of the grunt work involved. We have usually 10 weeks to develop our project from start to finish and the end result is usually judged before not only our peers and Teachers, but also depending on the program, many professionals already in the field in Memphis. It is with this pressure on the line that I get something good cooking right away! Speaking of cooking........

The project that I am developing is the Pilot Episode for a cooking show that I hope the school or another organization would be willing to fund. The show will be titled, "The Wild One", and as for the reason for that, I feel that it sticks to what I hope will be a "loose cannon" feel for the show. Much of the cooking programs I watch now and days have become too homoginized and relient on simple eye candy to where many viewers simply gaze in awe or feel that they cannot accomplish the same dish themselves, therefore they simply go straight for the frozen food aisle or the local fast food joint. My purpose would be to take an individual who would know absoultly nothing about cooking(in the case of the Pilot, a fresh College Student) and watch him/her learn the process. Now this won't be a fast series, as the first few episodes deal with using already prepared ingredients, but eventually we would get to concepts such as Knife Skills, Prep, etc...

For the purposes of this Capstone, I will focus on the Pilot Episode, which introduces our main players and the dish, in this case, a Ramen Noodle entree. Now I know a lot of you are already thinking, "Ramen? I can cook that in my CD Spindle case!" The type of Ramen cooking I'm talking about is more akin to this:



To be honest, the hard part will be developing a Ramen recipe that would strike very well in that vein, but all of the years I've spent in foodservice(including some teaching from Chef Leake over at Southwest Tennessee Comm. College) have to count for something! For now though, I am preparing paperwork. Lots and lots of paperwork. I have most of my timing for the episode worked out, although there will be some kinks that will have to be taken care of. I also worked on the Logo for the show and drew up a possible teaser poster as well. There will very much be a Japanese-flavor to the setup of the show, as there will be lots of Kanji around and by drawing upon shows from the east, I hope to try to again, distance The Wild One from most other cooking programs....

Well, that's should do it for now, be sure to check up here for more updates!

-W.C.D.