Sorry I haven't had time to post more than a few pictures this week, but I've been using all my spare time to start planning for the 150 person holiday party I've agreed to catered on December 11th. Yes, you heard correctly, 150 people, and me cooking (with the help of a few culinary minions from school). I've never catered anything in my life, but why not, right? The job came out of the dinner party that I hosted for my parents last weekend, one of the couples who attended has an annual Christmas open house party and she asked me if myself and a few friends from school would want to cater. How could I turn that down? Even though it's definitely a lot of stress, it's been fun so far and my friends and I are having fun planning out the menu and all the details that will make the night a success. Chef Pascal has also agreed to help me, mostly with the menu and figuring out the costs of everything. We're going to do 9 to 10 different passed hors d'ouevres and 6 or 7 different items to put out on a buffet table, as well as 5 different dessert items for people to snack on all night. I'm not sure how I'll manage all of the prep work involved while I'm in New York every day from 6:30 am to 5 pm...my freezer will be fully utilized (and possibly my mother). It can be done though. But I might be a little crazy for agreeing to do it. So in the next few weeks if you're wondering where I've gone, I'll be buried under a pile of mini pulled pork sandwiches and quiches, figuring out how I can squeeze 500 hors d'ouevres into my family's refrigerator.
On another note, I started level 4 on monday after a stressless midterm on Friday. I actually picked the last number out of the hat, so I was the last person to plate my two dishes, barramundi with sauce americaine and apple tart. Everyone picked numbers out of a hat at the beginning of class that corresponded with when they would have to present their two dishes to the judges that were waiting down the hall. Half the class made beef consomme and pork chops with green peppercorn sauce while the other half made barramundi and apple tart. Both of my dishes came out pretty well and the day went by without any major catastrophes. We all passed, fortunately. But the sad part about moving up to Level 4 is that our class is split into three different groups: Buffet, Production and Family Meal. Each group has 6 to 7 classmates in it and each focuses on a different thing. Buffet has one week to put together what is basically a catered event, picking a theme, a menu and all the recipes and executing everything on the last day of the rotation. Production is just stock-making and breaking down fish and large cuts of meat for the use of the restaurant at the school. Family meal is the large production-type cooking where you cook lunch for the 300 staff members and students at the FCI. For my first rotation I have buffet. We chose to do a more modern take on Thanksgiving, doing traditional ingredients but in a different way. Some of our dishes will be wild rice stuffing arancini, sweet potato gnocchi, turkey breast cooked at low temperature to keep in all its moistness and then glazed with a garlic-honey sauce, braised turkey legs in a sweet potato, bacon braising liquid and apple cider doughnuts filled with a salty caramel sauce. Hopefully it all comes together on Monday when we have to pull all of our work together into something presentable. In addition to all the recipes, we also have to work on making the presentation aspects of the buffet, with the help of Chef Pascal. We made a tree made out of this weird bread dough and then finished it with a blowtorch (that was my job :) I'm such a pyro). It's not edible but it looks like a real tree...sort of. Then we've also been carving vegetables for the display (turning radishes and beets into flowers and things like that), and making molds and stuffing them with dried salt as a stand for certain plates. The display stuff is a little old school and not really my style, but it's sort of fun to learn and see how you can turn a watermelon into a pretty flower. Tomorrow is our last day of prepping before the big event on Monday, wish us luck!
<3 Elise
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