Tuesday Night Live?!

I know I wasn’t the only one who went to class expecting it be a nice quiet Tuesday at the restaurant. But we ran completely out of lamb and bass! We got slammed. Our dish is, fortunately, really easy to cook once the order comes in, so it wasn’t too bad.

Speaking of which, we prepared everything in record time! I also put together the poaching liquid by myself, and without really measuring anything out. It’s really easy to do once you get the hang of it. Unfortunately, just after we fell into our groove, we’re moving to the saucier station. I guess it’s good that I found this groove because I learned how to make this dish. In fact, I did make it a little spicy, however, I did get the thumbs up that it was delicious, despite being a touch spicy. It wasn’t unbearably spicy, and I didn’t even use that many pepper flakes, but I know to use less next time. But it was indeed good (both the head chef, Chef Candy and Chef Xavier agreed).

Anyhow, we had everything prepped and ready to go by 7:15! Chef asks that we’re ready by 7:45. We were sitting around doing extra little tidbits of things we didn’t really need to do. We really got our team work down as well. Hopefully we can keep it up through the next station. It looks like we’re going to be working together for the entire level.

At the end of class, we cleaned with a half hour to spare as well. So we talked to Chef Xavier about nothing. He started cooking since he was 9! He was the youngest to graduate the 2 year culinary program from the university in his home town of Corsica. That’s pretty impressive. Also, the culinary students worked from 8AM to 12 midnight. That’s a work day if I’ve ever heard of a work day.

Also, we have projects for this level. We’re assigned a French dish and we need to find a working recipe for it, and then do a bunch of research on the dish, the region and other things from the region including wine and cheeses (amongst a few other things). I was fortunate enough to draw the dish of the island of Corsica, Chef Xavier’s home town. Isn’t that great? I already came up with a concept of a cover page (as if that’s even important), and I asked my Photoshop expert buddy to bring my idea into fruition. He souffléd it! To be fair, I need to really get the contents of this report accurate and interesting, so he can appreciate it (especially considering he knows everything about Corsica). I figure I went to a decent college and I was able to write 20 page reports, so I can cram some interesting material into a 3 page report. We’ll see. I’m so booked that I need to find a good time to do it. I’ll get it done. I like the idea of the report, but I’m not liking the idea of homework.