Today was a bit of a long day for me. I didn't get a whole lot of sleep, so I started to get tired only an hour or two into the day. Tomorrow for lunch I am in charge of the special. I am making roasted chicken with a sage vermouth sauce. I also found out as I was walking out the door that I need to do a starch and a veggie as well...I'm in for a very busy morning tomorrow.
I started the day off by doing a test run of the recipe as I had never made it before. It helped me to figure out what I will be doing tomorrow and to taste test it out. While I sat waiting for my chicken to thaw, I made some bran and craisin muffins. They turned out good. Sometimes bran muffins are really bland and not sweet at all, but these ones had a little bit of brown sugar making them much better. The craisins added a lot to them as well. I will post the recipe tomorrow.
After that, I started on my chicken. I seared both sides of the chicken and then put the pan directly into the oven to let it roast and finish cooking. When the chicken finally decided to be finished I pulled it out of the pan and let it sit while I made the sauce. I made the sauce in the same pan to use the chicken drippings, added my veggie stock with some chicken base in it (we didn't have chicken stock), some dry vermouth and sage leaves and shallots. When the sauce reduced down enough I added some butter to smooth it out and make it more of a sauce. I picked out the sage leaves and topped it with a chiffonade of sage. (sort of like sage confetti). I had a piece for John and a piece for Rex. John said it was good, his only complaint was that it was a little salty (from the chicken base, I didn't add any salt at all) and the chicken was a little dry (I had some major issues with my thermometer and it not reading correctly). Other than that, it was good.
Rex said it was good and that he honestly recommended that I at least taste a little bit of it so I know what I made. I told him I came into this class with the impression that I would of course have to taste things I made, but that I would just taste it and spit them out so I didn't get too sick. I had a small piece of the chicken with the sauce, and it really was good. After spitting it out and I tried to flush my stomach out a bit with water to maybe help with my stomach ache that would come later. I did get a pretty bad stomach ache within an hour or so which lasted about 3 hours. It could've been a lot worse, so I'm glad that it wasn't.
So last week Rex and I got to talking and I found out that the kitchen at BATC doesn't have any granite for chocolate work. Granite is something I can get my hands on very easily, especially cutting board sizes. Rex and I talked about working out a trade granite for something I might want. I kept thinking about ingredients or something like that ... but Rex mentioned my knife kit. I was pumped about that! Mart got to work and made three really really nice boards. Two large ones for the school kitchen and one for Rex's home kitchen. I also had purchased some ingredients for us to make the mozzarella and they added that to what they owed me as a trade and it made it so I got my kit for a whopping ... $18!! Definitely worth it! I really wanted to use my grant money to buy some killer nice knives, but I won't be getting any of it until later on this year or even next spring so I would have had to wait until then to get some. For $18 I can get a knife kit to use until then and then I will have two differnet kits...which I am perfectly okay with.
Today, I brought the boards in and Rex and I traded. I honestly feel like I got the way better end of the deal and I felt bad about it all day long. He told me at the beginning of the day that I did get the better deal, but he was okay with that. After feeling bad about it and not even looking through my kit all day just because of feeling bad I finally talked with him again to make sure he didn't want me to pay any extra and he told me no he was fine with our deal unless I just wanted to pay him extra because. :) He said if he would have gone to a granite shop the boards would have costed him more than we traded for so he thought it was pretty equal. That made me feel better about it so I came home and tried them out.
They are really decent knives for not a ton of money. They will definitely last me as long as I take care of them.
Here they are, my Mercer forged knife kit:
It has 22 pieces (I think that's what I read)
The case
A thermometer
A peeler
A melon baller
A cut ruler
A pastry bag and some tips
A boning knife
A paring knife
A chef knife
A bread knife
A carving fork and a carving knife
A steel
A pastry spatula
Covers for all my knives
And I think that's it.
I'm pretty excited! I feel more official with my own complete knife kit rather than a couple of my mom's old (but really good) knives I took in Kacean's old knife bag.
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