Externship week six

Guess what they are doing? 

BA Catering the continuation...

The second week in the BA Catering. This week was more interesting than the first one. I was able to cook at the event and move a little bit beyond chopping vegetables in the kitchen. I should probably clarify about vegetables. I do not mind to do a prep work in the kitchen, I understand that this is foundation in preparation of any dish (you can not cook if you did not cut your vegetables). It would be great to move forward and do something more than simply cut vegetables for other cooks.





Monday

Plated Crab Salad on
Pan de Mie Toast

Finally I've got a project to do from start to finish. This project is not a big science, however it's great to do it fully. The recipe name is Spicy Dungeness Crab Salad on Pan de Mie Toast. It sounds so complicated, but it was really simple. First thing was to make spicy crab salad. We used canned crab meat, aioli, sriracha sauce, salt, pepper, and scallions. The next step was to make small toasts (1 inch by 2 inch). I had to cut sliced bread precisely, then brush each slice on both sides with olive oil and season with salt and pepper, roast them in the oven until light golden colour. To assemble, I had to place crab salad on one side of the toast and garnish with micro greens and chopped chives.
During the day I also worked on tomato relish (clean and roast cherry tomatoes, then cook them with onion and garlic) and also grilled chicken breasts for tomorrow. Chicken breasts were grilled just to get grill marks, we are going to finish them in the oven tomorrow.

Tuesday

Grilling corn

Was a great day. I was working for the event. More than half of the day I worked outside and I liked it so much. The weather was great, not too hot and my working space was in shadow, so for me it was just perfect. In the morning I had to start BBQ. My previews experience hot to start fire with charcoal briquets was really helpful. As soon as BBQ was hot enough I started to grill corn. When it was done, we spent some time gathering all equipment for the event itself. There was a huge list what we needed. At 11:30 we started to grill salmon. It took about an hour and 15 minutes to grill all the salmon. The dish was grilled salmon with orange marmalade (a new combination for me and I liked it). During the event we kept an eye that the servers have all food items according to the menu. When guests finished their lunch we gathered all equipment and moved back to the kitchen. I was asked to whip some cream cheese and divided in three parts. One part was kept plain, another was mixed with chopped dill, and the last one was mixed with lemon and lime zest. And it was the end of the day.

Wednesday
I had a day off.  I went to the Russian Consulate to get a new passport as my old one is going to expire in November. The hours are very convenient (2-4 p.m.) so I had to take a day off at work. Also there were a couple more things to do, so the day was quite busy. It was great to have a change from daily routine.

Thursday
Was another unusual day. I worked with receivers the whole day. In the morning they explained me the process of receiving all products. Then we sorted all goods received for the different cafes (there are four of them). Also we worked on a special project, which was to re-organize dry storage room. We took all products from three big shelves, removed old shelves, installed new shelves, placed products back. My shift started at 6 am (5:52 to be exact). At 11 am I was kicked off for lunch (lunch served from 11:30). In general, the day was a bit chaotic. Did I learned something? Not really...

Friday
I spent that day with the front of the house. In the morning there was a tour for me around a campus (I did not get the idea driving almost two hours around the campus and see different buildings). After that there was an attempt to get me back to the kitchen which I politely ignored and stayed with the FoH. Then we went to restock meeting rooms at the executive building. That was interesting to see and just few people have access to that building. After lunch I worked with another guy to set up an event for 35 people. We had to gather all equipment required, all food as per the order, bring all that stuff to the venue, and set up table with food, so people could enjoy it. This was really interesting to see how it works what should be done. At the end of the day I ad a review with the chef and  a sous-chef. They evaluated my performance, I evaluated my experience.

P.S. n the picture at the beginning of this post is the blender attached to a bike. When you pedalling the mixer is working and you can make a smoothie:-)