Hot and cold

Thursday, October 27

Today we learned all about salads, traditional and new recipes, and tossed or Russian composed salads. Then we went into teams to create a variety of salads, dressings and plated them. At the end, there were numerous salads, with more traditional ones like caesar adapted to be vegan with fresh baked croutons, pasta salad with sundried tomatos, green been and hazelnut salad, russian salad, antipasto salad, bean curd and peanut salad, carrot and olive, spinach and garden with horseradish dressing, wild rice and hazelnut salad, mushrooms a la greque, broccoli with roasted peppers, capers and olives, wilted salad, etc. We had some time to plate our salads and the chef and class reviewed our creations in terms of appearance, taste, texture, etc.

Friday, October 28

Today was all about hors d'oeuvres and our chef had a successful $2 million US restaurant and catering business in NY called Dish until she sold it recently to her co-owner. She's an expert in particular in cocktail receptions and the preparation of hors d'oeuvres for thousands.

So we went into teams and had to prepare very complicated recipes in a very short period. I had to make a phyllo triangles with herbed greens, making the herb, greens and mixture filling from scratch and then working with large phyllo sheets and cutting these by hand and roliing them into shape. This was quite the operation and stressful to finish these 100 or so hors do'euvres in an hour and a half and most people were running out of time and asked for more time and were a bit late for presentation.

So we are starting to be able to put our own touches into our dishes in many ways, adding or subtracting things or trying to improve on them while cooking or at the end, using different techniques than is written in a recipe to quicken or improve on the dish, and plating them. However, you have limited time and you want your dish to turn out at presenatation time so the experimentation is limited. Also, we need to still do our mise-en-place, follow general guidelines, work in teams and they are encouraging us more to work as a collective kitchen or team to ensure all dishes are presented on time.

Also, the chef encouraged us to start eyeballing ingredients in recipes. She said she would be angry if she saw a chef in her kitchen measuring something as they should know most things by heart, including basic recipes and eyeballing ingredients, and she shouldn't be paying for a professional chef who couldn't do this. It was very strict before with exact measurements and such when we were learning the basics, and chefs encouraged us not to experiment or plate and I understand why now as they wanted to ensure we focused on our basic cuts and techniques first and not get too distracted.

Also, while you are making your dish, the chef is calling the class often and asking students to watch something being demonstrated, or a mistake that we should note, etc. So we are expected to drop everything and then go back to what we are doing, which is disruptive and frustrating at times if you are in the middle of something such as frying. In the end, I had help from my team mates and used techniques to cut our time such as the convection oven and had our plate there just on time. Whew!

We were scolded for our tardiness in presentation and she gave us tips to improve plating and advice on catering, however she liked our plates and it was amazing what we accomplished in a short timeframe. Each dish was quite intricate, beautiful and delicious and the table of dishes included: tempeh nori packages, rosemary, pumpkin and leek dumplings with soy ginger sauce, rosemary and garlic pizzelles(snowflake cookie/cracker made in a special waffle type machine) topped with a white bean spread with sundried tomato kalamata tapenade, pumpkin cornmeal tartletswoth avocado cream, pine nut ricotta in endive leafs parmesan tacos filled with greens (these are actuallyrolled around the back of a long kitchen spoon when warm and kept there until cool), mini salmon cakes with lemon dill aioli, fried shrimp with wasabi garnish, curried chicken salad on papadum with yogurt raita. What a spread!!! Were only missing the cocktails, and we needed by the time we finished.