Day one hundred twenty six

Conchiglie with pesto sauce
and pan fried scallops

Compare the lunch cookery with the breakfast.

Today we have switched from the breakfast cookery to lunch. After the first day, it seems I like it more. I still like the food we prepared for breakfast, however there are a few good points about lunch. The first one is that I returned to the 'normal' schedule, or better to say to the schedule of the last seven months (for me normal one is to wake up at 8 or 9 am). Second point is that the service for lunch is very intense but much shorter. We serve lunch for 45 minutes only, after that time we plate the balance of the food to the buffet. A not so good point is that we have lunch from 10:30 till 11:00. I'm not hungry at that time, so may be this is opportunity to loose some weight.

We have a new teams for the lunch cookery. Today our team cooked pasta (conchiglie) with pesto cream sauce, assorted tomatoes and pan seared scallops. The recipe for 60 people called for tomato concase or halved cherry tomatoes. Yesterday we did not
look recipe with a great attention and we thought we need 180 tomatoes concase. Today it was a great relief to find that we should halve 180 cherry tomatoes. Making a tomato concase is time consuming.

Dish was quite easy, except for the fact that it has to be finished to order. So we had pre-cooked pasta and as soon as we got an order we would finish pasta with sauce (already made pesto), pan fried scallops and plate the dish. At the busiest moment of the service I think we had may be five people waiting in line, which is a good result. Our sister group for the same dish had around 12...

We also made pesto sauce and here is the recipe.

PESTO
Ingredient           Amount

Pine nuts  2 oz
Basil leaves 5 oz
Garlic cloves, rough cut 4 ea 
Parmesan cheese, grated 3 oz
Pure olive oil 5 oz
Method for the Pesto

1. Roast the pine nuts in a 350°F oven until they are golden to light brown. Cool.
   
2. Combine all the ingredients in the Blender.
   
3. Purée all together. Process only until it is a smooth paste (be careful not to purée the pesto too long because it will heat it too much).