Externship week seventeen

Everyday tasting at Crave

The gift from the above...

Unexpectedly I found out that there is a rotation this week for me. My internship at the Japanese place was just for one week. Actually it was a gift from heaven. I came to work like to a salt mine. The place I was moved to is quite nice. The majority of people are Mexican here, but they are different! They are friendly and ready to help



Monday
Worked with a receiver. Helped him to sort out all stuff we have received that day. Monday is usually the biggest delivery throughout the week. There were a lot of produce, meat, and some other stuff. After that we were working on prep. Delicata squash was the fist job. I would expect
it to be soft based on the name. It was not the case. It was quite hard. I had to cut the ends, cut in halves, clean seeds, and then to dice it. When the job was done I had a blister on my hand, quite a bad one. Then I worked on collard greens. Take the leaves from stem, cut leaves in big chunks, get rid of stems.
Even though the job today was not so exciting, it was a big difference as to compare with the last week. People are friendly, you can speak with them. This is much better.

Tuesday
Was a day of prep work. I started with two bags of parsnip, scrubbing them, washing them, and then cutting in bite size pieces. The parsnip will be roasted on Wednesday. After parsnip I moved to collard greens. There were three cases and the task was to remove hard stems off, cut leaves in big chunks, wash them, spin them to get rid of water.
Then was my favorite part of the day. We had to prepare meat for tomorrow. We had tri tip and the task was to clean it from the sinew and silver skin, remove flap part, and marinate them with garlic and olive oil.
The last project for the day was onion. They had onion soup on the menu for the dinner service, therefore a huge amount of onion was required. At the beginning I was crying again (it seems something wrong with me). It was the worst part to cut off the top and end, cut each onion in half, and peel it. After that the sous chef said to slice them. I asked how he wants to slice it by hand or with machine. He said that it does not matter, if I am comfortable with knife to do it by hand. That was actually a fun and quite relaxing job. It's always like that - you compare the current job with the previous one and if it's better there is fun.

Wednesday and Thursday

Crudity plate for TGIT 

Were two days I was doing prep work and some small tasks. There were nothing remarkable, but it was good to have a refresh how to do some job. Some of the job was: to dice zucchini, to dice tomato, to pick mint leaves, to pick thai basil leaves, and so on.
Thursday I came later and worked to TGIT (Thanks God It's Thursday). This is a weekly event when googlers gather and have a live conference call with top management. We served some food during that event.


Friday

Pho bar set up

It was my firs day working on the line at this cafe. Friday was a pho day. We served pho (Vietnamese soup). First thing in the morning I sliced meat for pho on a slicer. It was a lot of meat to be sliced. Then it was the 'fun' part to wash the slicer. After that I helped to portion noodles (noodles were cooked and ready to be portioned). By the service time everything was ready: two types of broth (chicken and vegetable), meat (beef and chicken), all condiments (tofu, red onion, jalapeño, limes, boiled eggs, scallions, cilantro, mint, thai basil). Our guests would take a bowl with noodles, add whatever they wanted and we served them a broth of their choice. I was serving a broth with another guy. It was not a busy day. Probably many people have started their holidays already and also it was Friday (traditionally slow day).
After service we cleaned up kitchen and left for weekend.