Let’s start off by saying today in class I had THE hardest time trying to stay away for some reason. It wasn’t that the class was boring or that I only had 4-5 hours of sleep, I just couldn’t keep my eyes open. Even though I was struggling to stay awake, I still managed to pay attention and learn a few things. Today in class we learned about different kinds of salads, the main one we had to do for practical was salade nicoise, we also learned frisee aux lardon, salade des nonnes and salade francillon. Salade des nonnes is a rice and chicken salad, salade francillon is a potato salad with mussels and frisee aux lardon is a hot salad which contains frisee and prok belly. Salade nicoise is a vegetable salad made with tuna and garlic vinaigrette. The dish over all isn’t too bad to make, the hard part is chopping everything to be the same size and making sure that everything is seasoned properly. I managed to finish everything in time but was still one of the last ones to present to the chef. When I present my dish to the chef, I told him a few mistakes I made, I over cooked a few of my vegetables and because of that some of them broke apart easily. Other than that he said that I didn’t dress the salad with enough of the vinaigrette and pointed out that many spots were dry.
This was kind of a downer, there I was thinking oh man I could have so done better, and I wish I had done better and so on. So lost in thought, I just kept myself busy with cleaning my station. Then the chef announces that we have to get out our frozen soufflés from last week, garnish it and then present it as a class. He gave us about 20-30minutes to complete the task; we had to bake these almond cookies, assemble the soufflés with the candied oranges and place our soufflés in the order of the class list. This all seemed quite easy to complete, but the trick to this was to get everyone to finish at the same time. This meant everyone had to be baking all together so no one is dragging behind. We managed to completely present the soufflés all together except for the fact that we were 5 minutes late. After we were all settled down, the chef walked around looking at the soufflés and gave us an opinion on it. The first few were pretty good, then he got to mine, I started to feel a bit nervous. The almond cookie we had to make wasn’t made very well, mine didn’t roll into a cigarette properly and the other style I did kind of shatter into pieces. After going through different scenario in my head about how bad it might be, the chef complimented me about the soufflé. I was shocked that the chef said that about my soufflé, after getting a mediocre review on my salad this compliment on my soufflé made my day.
As the days go by, all I can ever think about is how much I’m learning everyday even with my bad days and my good days. Good or bad they all add up and equal into the amount of information I’m learning. We’re on lesson 10, the lessons are getting harder and hard but I’m still loving every minute of it.
Salade des nonnes
Frisee aux lardons
Salade Francillon
Frozen Souffle
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