family meal

Down in Meat Lab we're split into three teams, two teams for butchering while another team embarks on skills week.

During skills week that team learns to make all of the mother sauces (béchamel, velouté, espagnole, tomato and hollandaise), after which they come up with a two-day menu to feed the rest of us.



The first team to do skills week made an entree of skirt steak with chimichurri sauce over a bed of spinach, mushrooms, shallots and polenta cakes. This was the most delicious meal I had eaten in a while, not just because I liked the ingredients, but because the steak and sauce were done really well - the steak was charred on the outside and juicy on the inside, and nicely fatty, and the sauce was herby and tangy and spicy.



The coming together part was really exciting to watch. And real professional-like.



We call this "family meal", just like how they call staff meals in restaurants.

pork leg butchery

Aside from chicken, we also butcher pork a lot - another relatively inexpensive meat. One day we each got to butcher a pork leg. Compared to butchering chicken, other types of butchering are incredibly involved. Not only is it hard to separate meat from bone because everything is more densely packed, but there are way more parts to keep track of - I can't even name all the parts in a pork leg!



The leg took me a good hour and a half to butcher. Hard to explain the process without step-by-step pictures (or a long video), but I decided not to go into detail because chances are that you won't be butchering a pork leg anytime soon (and if you are, I'll call Chef Oakley, Meat Lab chef instructor). Good rules of thumb for butchering meat is following the bones (or cutting bones out first in order to divide up parts) and following seams (fat/connective tissue surrounding muscle groups).



Out of each pork leg we got two pork roasts (seen trussed with butcher's twine), pork skin (discarded, although the fat could be made into lard and the skin into cracklins), bones (for stock), and other meat/excess fat for grinding into ground pork.

chicken butchery

Chicken's the most ubiquitous protein of our operation, given that it's relatively cheap and people like to eat it. This means that we butcher chicken almost every day down in Meat Lab. Butchering chicken is surprisingly easy, and I'm glad to have learned it because it means I can now buy whole chickens and cut it up myself to save money (whole chicken is a lot less per pound than say, chicken breast).



The most common pieces we butcher chicken into are: whole legs (skin on) and chicken breast (skin off). But we've done all sorts of variations, not just with skin on/off but bone in/boneless and different styles such as airline breast (chicken breast with drumette attached) or butterflied breasts pounded thin (such as for paillard).

All of the drumettes/wings are saved and cryovac-ed (vacuum packed) for when there are parties and they need appetizers. All of the carcasses/bones/skin gets saved for stock, so there's very little waste.

I think I've cut up 20+ chickens by now, so if anyone would like a demo, feel free to ask!

goodbye main kitchen

After veg station, it was time to rotate back into the same station I started in - prepping for Latin Quarter. The station was chaotic as always, what with order sheets changing every day, so there was always something different to keep track of, not the mention the last-minute requests and modifications.

I tend not to lead unless asked (or unless the leaderless situation warrants it), so one day I got into this situation where I thought I was making a certain number of things but kept getting asked to do other things. Which was fine, except I wasn't getting my stuff (namely red mole sauce) done. Dustin and I had talked about working together on the mole, except he had gotten pulled into doing other things too, so I was alone and demoralized and stopped caring and burned all of the dried peppers that were needed to go into the mole.

So I went into the storeroom and cried, partly over the burned peppers and failed mole but mostly over how I've been feeling like I've been alone and abandoned with stuff to deal with. But Dustin helped me get more peppers (thankfully there were more), and when I came back to my station, I found everybody helping me to stem and seed them. I almost felt like Chef Hammerich (whom I had approached earlier when tears were just starting to escape) said something to everyone about how I needed help - that's how much these hands seemed like miracles.



Today was the last day of our rotation in the Main Kitchen. Chef Hammerich made a speech about how he really enjoyed having us, noting that we were exceptionally good at helping each other without being asked - a rare and almost unteachable trait.

That makes me love being a part of this group, or any group - because isn't that what we're here for?



Go team.

lentil soup

One day my friend Cris brought over some lentils, chicken broth, and mirepoix vegetables (carrots, celery, leeks). In order not to disappoint his intentions (and to make something of things), I made a pot of lentil soup.

From my time in soup station, I knew that I needed a ham hock. So I went to Trader Joe's, which was the wrong place since all their meats are neatly pre-fabricated, with nothing as primal as a hock of ham to be found. They did, however, have a package called "bacon bits & ends", which I thought would be great as a flavor substitute. C'mon, it's bacon.



That went in the pot first to be browned and to release some oil. Originally I was going to use only half a pound (half the package), but then I thought why not and used up the whole package. I mean, there was going to be a pound of lentils, so the two pounds balanced each other out? :)



Once the oil was released from the bacon, I put in the diced mirepoix to sweat/soften. The standard mirepoix has onions instead of leeks, so this was a nice change of pace (carrots can also be substituted for parsnips, and the combination of parsnips + celery + leeks is white mirepoix, which is often used for light-colored stocks like fish stock).



My roommate Molly was making dinner at the same time and had some leftover tomato sauce, so I stole some to mix in. (Adding tomato product to brown is a process called pincé, which is commonly done for stock/sauce-making in order to add color and flavor.)



Then I added chicken broth, the whole container was 4 cups of liquid so I added another 4 cups of water since the instructions on the lentils called for 8 cups of liquid.

Brought the whole thing to a boil, then simmered for about 45 minutes. And there you have it, lentil soup for the soul.