elote special!

Between McKenna and I we had to come up with one special every day. My idea was to do grilled Mexican corn, or elote. My first experience with this dish was at Habana Outpost in Brooklyn. They have an outdoor patio where food is served out of a truck. The corn wasn't just freshly grilled, it was topped with cotija (crumbly white) cheese, chili powder and lime. I fell in love with the crunchy creamy spicy tangy sweet savoriness of it and wanted to replicate it.

First grilling the corn:



Then I smothered the corn in a mayonnaise mixture (with cayenne, salt and lime juice - exact measurements here), sprinkled queso fresco over it (cotija wasn't available for order) and garnished with cilantro and lime wedges.



My sources say it tasted pretty good. I liked the mayonnaise mixture myself - could probably use it on all manner of fried foods.

Since I grilled 24 ears and we only sold 10, we cut the kernels and used them up for specials the next day - as garnish for our chorizo and beef nachos. Yum!

burrito station

After two weeks of staring at this (and repetitively ladling and occasionally burning my hand) I was very glad to switch into doing some actual food assemblage.



My next station assignment was the sandwich/nacho station in the Latin Quarter, the themed quick-service outlet we have next to the cafeteria that I did prep for last semester. The sandwich/nacho station is merged with burrito station, which meant that McKenna was my partner in crime. Here she is with our daily batch of guacamole. Gangster.



I don't know why but guacamole used to be something we ordered pre-made. Not that I'm all for pre-made stuff, but we go through so much a day it's extremely helpful to have it pre-made. That and we never have time to prep - that's the secret of third semester: you have to find time outside of class to prep.

Thankfully though, most of our station's stuff is prepped by second semester students. We just have to make sure to order everything we need (and enough of it) the day before. Here's the hot stuff:



And the cold stuff:



McKenna and I learned how to make each other's items so we could cover for each other as orders came in, as sometimes they come in really fast. Within a two-hour window we make about 50 burritos, 20-30 nachos and 10 sandwiches. And this excludes our specials...



Don't worry, I took this picture when it wasn't busy :)

a year in

I recently read a blog post about prioritizing positive energy in one's life. I concurred wholeheartedly because that's what led me on this whole life path. I was at an energy-sucking job, so to take my life back I decided to invest completely in an activity that had a proven record of focusing and exciting me (cooking).

Sadly, this third semester hasn't involved much of that. As my degree will be in Culinary Arts & Hospitality Management, this semester is focused on the hospitality side of things, which for now means that I am serving people in the cafeteria. More specifically, I am ladling out the soups I used to make as a second semester student.

Gone are the tight-fitting white commis caps and checkered pants. They were never very fashionable, not like the baseball caps and black pants I now outfit myself in every day, but funny how I long to be wearing them again, and again straining myself to carry hotel pans and stockpots and sweating next to the steam kettle.

It's not that I'm not cooking at all. I'm taking two advanced classes - Advanced Baking & Pastry, and Garde Manger (cold foods). So far in Garde Manger we've only been watching Chef do demos, which is nice and all - but it wasn't until I ducked out of class to sheet some puff pastry dough for Advanced Baking did I feel some of that - the intense task absorption that to me is an oasis of calm.

I have to find more of that, or else I'm going to lose it. Purpose, life. What I spent the last year holding on to.

mini chicken & waffles

For our last day of skills week, we did a couple of appetizers. Tishara and I continued together to make mini chicken and waffles.



To make the chicken pieces small, we used a round cutter on some chicken breasts.



These were floured, egged and breadcrumbed. The flour was seasoned with poultry seasoning, onion, cayenne, salt and pepper and leaned toward the spicy side.



The waffles were made with a standard waffle iron, then quartered. I added a bit of orange zest to the batter to freshen things up.

The waffles were topped with maple syrup and cinnamon butter - piped with a star tip to look nice.

As for the garnish, we were recently taught how to cut strawberries into roses, so we did that. I made bouquets out of the roses by using skewers as stems, apple peels as leaves, and an orange as a base.

A pretty end to second semester of culinary school.

tiramisu reimagined

After sausage and cheese, Tishara and I got to work on crafting the dessert while Jason, Dustin and LaToya worked on an entree. While poring over the pastry textbook in the library, Tishara mentioned that she liked ladyfingers. While I didn't want to make tiramisu, I thought we could make something that was the tiramisu deconstructed.

To do this I thought about the flavor components involved in tiramisu - chocolate, cinnamon, cocoa, cream. Each of these components would be reconstructed as something else.

First there was chocolate. We decided to do chocolate cups to hold our dessert. To do this we had to inflate some water balloons with air, manually. My lungs weren't up to the task, but Tishara got it done.



Glazin the balloons (to form the cup shape) proved to be no easy feat. Although we chose to use chocolate glaze (easy) as opposed to tempering chocolate (hard), what gave us trouble was trying not to have the balloons explode on us. First the glaze was too hot, then we were applying too much pressure. Eventually I was able to get the balloons all glazed by rotating them through the glaze on an angle (as opposed to sinking them directly in). Then we had to double-dip them because the glaze was too thin.

The next day we eased the balloons out by poking them with a skewer and letting the air out slowly (popping them would have destroyed the cups). Chef told us that they would come out more easily if we had sprayed them with oil and wiped them off (for just the thinnest layer of oil).



The cinnamon and cream components were turned into cinnamon ice cream, made with the help of an ice cream maker (and Devon's expertise). Cooking the creme anglaise (ice cream base) was the hardest part - one batch was destroyed because the temperature got a little high and the eggs in the cream got cooked.



The cocoa component was the finishing touch - in the form of cocoa nib tuile cookie garnishing the tops of each dessert.

We kept the ladyfinger component though - they're crumbled in bits underneath the ice cream.

Turned out delicious, and that's just the beginning of my journey in dessert.