Today I helped with the lunch special again. Nobody had signed up to do it and Rex was going to end up doing it. After I found out something about him, I was really really glad that I did it instead of Rex. Today's lunch special was a composed shrimp salad. That just means a salad that is arranged pretty on a plate. When he first told me what we were doing, I was completely confused. I thought we were putting all the lettuce in one huge hotel pan and then dishing it up when someone ordered it so I couldn't figure out how he wanted me to decorate a huge pan so that it was functional to scoop out at the same time. Rex on the other hand was super confused why I was so confused about decorating a plate. When I finally just had him show me what he wanted me to do, he looked confused but agreed and started decorating a plate. I finally understood what he meant and told him that I thought we were decorating the entire hotel pan and that's why I was confused. It finally made sense to him why I was so confused about the whole project.
Anyway, today the salad had 3 (in the picture it only has 2, but I added 1 more each at the end) ginormous shrimp on it! I think Rex guessed they were 16/20 count which means there are only 16 shrimp per pound. We made 5 pounds of shrimp and only had 63 shrimp. Crazy! It had some fresh corn (blanched), celery, tomato, avocado, a lemon and lime wedge and then some cocktail sauce. They were just going to get the dressing from the salad bar.
After we started peeling and de-veining the shrimp I found out that Rex was allergic to shrimp! That's why I was really glad that I was the one who worked on it instead of him. To show me how to do one he had to put a mask on and some gloves. I made sure to clean up around me as I went so I didn't leave anything shrimp around for him to touch.
I ended up making 20 salads. I took them out to the cafeteria line and got them all set up, put the rest in the walk-in to chill and headed back to my station to sanitize everything. 15 minutes later I walked back up to look for someone and they had sold half of them already! That's really really good for the special. I refilled the tray with the remaining in the fridge and left. I guess today was a slow day and they ended up with only 7 or so plates left. That's really not bad for such a slow day they told me.
After I finished the salad and cleaned up everything I made a shrimp stock with the shells from peeling them. Shrimp stock only has to simmer for 30-45 minutes so it's a quicker process than say Turkey stock. I let that simmer while I started reading chaper 4. When it was finished, I strained it and chilled it in a water bath and then I had to leave. Kacean was called into work a couple hours early and I needed to get out on time.
Mozzarella is on the schedule for Monday. This time it's going to happen. It should be fun.
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