service station

Originally I thought I would have two weeks in service station to ruminate on life and culinary school miscellania, but after a mere week and change I have rotated to salad station, where the challenge of making something that looks good and tastes good is besieging me once again.

Sadly, what is really besieging me at the moment is some sort of upper respiratory tract infection that has been plaguing me on and off for the past two months. I really wouldn't recommend doing ten thousand things back to back and pushing your body to limits made possible only through the constant use of antibiotics, but some lessons I just refuse to learn.

And so, saddled with over a hundred dollars worth of urgent care bills and the daunting prospect of being rejected by student health yet again, I am taking my first day off from school tomorrow. Wish me luck in returning to the land of the living.

bygone specials

This past week I have switched from breakfast station to service station (where we serve food to students/faculty/guests in the cafeteria). To commemorate my time in breakfast I'm going to post a couple of the specials I made:


This was a smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel, artful arrangement courtesy of Chef Morse and replicated by yours truly.


These were called toad-in-a-hole (also known as egg-in-a-basket), where an egg was cracked into the middle of a french toast and fried until the whites had set.


These were the ingredients for a spinach torta (recipe here) that I was real excited about but came out terribly because it was underseasoned inside and burnt on top. The idea is great though - a layer of baguette slices on bottom, spinach/red pepper/sausage/cheese piled on, then an egg + cream mixture poured throughout, all baked to yield a creamy quiche-y dish (similar to a strata, except in that cubes of bread are mixed in as opposed to slices on the bottom).


This was an open-faced bacon and egg sandwich (recipe here) I arranged myself. I never got to taste it though :(


This idea was a spin-off of hot dog on a stick, which is coincidentally Julius's employer.

To see specials created by my classmates as well as culinary school photos that have not been posted to this blog, please visit my flickr or see the new sidebar to the left!

croque monsieur

The very first breakfast special I ever made was the croque monsieur, or a glorified ham and cheese sandwich. The literal French translation means "crunch mister", which makes no sense. However, there is a variation on the dish called croque madame, which, as you might guess, means "crunch missus". It is the monsieur version of the sandwich with the addition of an egg on top. (Get it? Females have eggs!)

Despite the French and their weird naming of things, I think the real travesty is how Americans butcher the pronunciation to the point where the correct pronunciation in America is now the butchered version. Case in point: croque monsieur is supposed to be pronounced "croque missyear", but instead it's pronounced "croak monsur". Le sigh.

The preparation for this dish was rather involved, as it required that I make bechamel sauce, which first involves making roux from flour and clarified butter. So I had to melt butter down and skim the milk solids off the surface. Once the roux was made I added scalded milk to it, and then simmered the sauce with an onion (with a bay leaf pinned to it by some cloves), some nutmeg and salt and pepper. After simmering for about an hour the mixture was strained, then kept warm until use.

For the actual sandwiches I toasted some bread (with the crusts cut off), brushed the bottom slices with dijon mustard and piled on thinly-sliced ham and swiss cheese, then added the top slice, drenched the tops with the bechamel sauce, then piled more swiss (and parmesan) on top of that.


The sandwiches were baked until bubbly, then put in the broiler to get the slightly brown and crispy-spotted crust.

For garnish, Chef told me to use cantaloupe and strawberries. The cantaloupes were fanned - which is a common garnish technique. Basically you take a piece of fruit or vegetable (in this case, a wedge of cantaloupe), and cut it into thin not-sliced-through-all-the-way slices. Then you lay the piece on its side and push the slices successively across so they fan out. Yay aesthetics!

breakfast!

I didn't mean for the tone of my last post to sound so weary. If I'm worn down in any way, it's just physically and not emotionally (otherwise I would never wake up in the morning). But, having rested up this weekend, I now have more upbeat things to say!

Like how a week spent in breakfast station has finally given me a good grasp of everything that needs to get done and how to go about it (and quickly). On the previous topic of eggs, I have gotten good at cracking two eggs at once.


Here are my teammates Naomi and Ariel in the middle of cracking two cases of eggs.

On Friday we were short on people (it was pretty much just me and Naomi and Ariel, half the number of people who are usually there) and I was told by Chef Morse to make two omelettes at once. And I protested my inability, and he said "you can do it", and I said "ok fine", and I did it, so now I can say that I can make two omelettes at once.


The omelettes in question were huevo ranchero omelettes, my spin-off on the huevos rancheros we made the day before. Apparently my omelettes were the hot item of the day (in the student cafeteria, which we run).


These are the huevos rancheros I was talking about. Fried tortillas topped with beans and cheese, then topped with tomatillo sauce (salsa verde), then a fried egg, then garnished with cabbage/radish/pickled jalapenos/tomato/avocado/onion/cilantro and crumbled queso fresco. These, unlike the omelettes, were a breakfast specialty item (more on those later).

In terms of the breakfast staples we put out, there's muffins and danishes and things (from the pastry side), oatmeal and grits (made by the student chefs), omelettes and scrambled eggs,


sausage and potatoes,


french toast,


and pancakes (though round and non-mickey mouse-y, unlike this one we experimented with).

All of these we get out of the way before we start the breakfast specialty items (like huevos rancheros). Will cover those in a later post!

worn down

Bernie talked about blisters from the near-constant hand-washing we do, and I concurred with the cracked and rough patches on my own hands. (Which, after today, were joined by miniscule burns from the industrial griddle and hot oil.)
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One of the people in our class quit the program today (as did a rumored several people from the pastry side).
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Waking up early and dealing with difficult personalities does wear on you.