Day 30 - November 3, 2009

Day 30:

Big surf and turf lunch for president of ATC colleges, breaded chicken fried steaks

Today was the huge lunch for the president of the ATC's. (Applied Technology Colleges). I started the day by plating up some salads. I had some mixed baby greens, so they were light, crisp and sweet. I added some diced roasted red peppers, a piece of melted Parmesan and we made some candied grapes. The grapes were so delicious, I loved them! To make the grapes, we lightly whipped up some egg whites, dipped the grapes into the egg whites and then into a bowl of sugar and shook off the excess sugar. After they set up and hardened a little they were so good. I am going to try making them at home and freezing them. Anyway, my salads were then served with a vidalia onion vinaigrette.


My salad:


For the steak we served a new york strip marinated in worchestershire sauce, salt, pepper and garlic. I made a huge mistake and put granulated garlic on it instead of fresh. I didn't know he meant fresh. It freaked me out that I might have messed up the steaks. Luckily, we caught it in time and wiped them off and put more worchestershire sauce on them. He said they were good and turned out okay even with my mess up.

To serve with our steak, I made shrimp scami, carrot sticks and roasted potatoes.
I had a choice on the carrots between a sweet maple glazed carrot or a savory carrot. I am not always a huge fan of sweet foods so I picked the savory carrots. We lightly steamed them and tossed them in fresh horseradish (it was like a sauce), sour cream, salt and pepper. They were so good!

The roasted potatoes were first steamed and then coated with butter and roasted until they were golden. They were really good as well.

As for the shrimp scampi, it's pretty much the easiest dish alive. Melt butter, add a ton of minced garlic, add the shrimp and cook until they just barely turn pink. Season with salt and pepper and top with chopped parsley. Yum!!

We wanted to top the steaks with a demi glace. It's a sauce made of stock that has reduced down until it thickens and has a little bit of tomato pasted added at the end. Ours was veal stock with beef base to make it beef flavored with the tomato. It seemed to go well with the steak, I didn't try any. It was a bit runny, it could have reduced more to make it thicker for sure.

This picture shows the process of plating up our meal. We line everything up in the order we put it on the plate and the last step is to put it onto a serving tray.



Our finished plate. The food was delicious but I wasn't happy with the actual plate. The colors are all too similar and that bothered me. It could have used some green. Oh well, at least it tasted good. :)


For dessert we served a brownie cheesecake with some raspberry puree and a chocolate ganache. Rex slaughtered the presentation of the sauces, it almost looks like a smiley face. The raspberry had a hard time coming out of the piping bag and we were in a super hurry. Hopefully next time the desserts look better.




When the plates came back the waitress we had for the day said they were all really happy with the food and that we did a good job. I'm so glad it went well. :)

After the lunch I breaded 48 chicken fried steaks for lunch tomorrow. We coated them with egg and then coated them with seasoned flour. After that, they went in the freezer.

Day 24 - October 26, 2009

Day 24:

Today was a nightmare of a day! I was in charge of lunch and a luncheon that we were catering. I had prepped my flank steak last Thursday, so at least those were ready to go. I bought one of the flanks and made it for dinner Thursday night to try it out. The pictures I have of the steak on here are the one I made at home, not the ones I made at school. Same with the squash soup...I just didn't have time to take any pictures at school.

We decided to make twice baked potatoes, soybeans with roasted red peppers and a pureed squash soup with an apple, onion, cranberry relish on top. The day just started off bad and got worse as time went on. We had to wash and bake 46 potatoes, so I had Dallan get to work on those. I had preheated the oven but there was some mis-communication and the potatoes didn't make it in the oven for quite some time. They took FOREVER to bake all the way through and pushed me way far behind schedule. Also, John and I decided to make edamame (soybeans) for my vegetable. When we pulled them out of the freezer, John saw that they still had the shell on but said to just leave them like that and serve them with the shell. I took his word on that and didn't do anything with them until 10 minutes before they should have been served. That turned out to be mistake #2. My soup was made and left sitting over the burner to stay warm, but on low it kept it boiling...mistake #3. Luckily the soup was okay and very tasty! I was under so much pressure to get everything finished in time that I again misread the recipe on the soup and didn't do it all the way. On the bottom of some recipes there is an optional garnish, well I thought this was one of those recipes. I saw a list which included apples, onions, cranberries...but I didn't bother reading the rest of the list. I just picked apples for my garnish and diced them up all pretty and small and put them in lemon water so they didn't turn brown. Mistake #4.

The closer it got to 11am, lunch time in the cafeteria the worse things got. My potatoes weren't cooking fast, so they finally got close enough to finished about 10:30. I still had to hollow them out, mash the insides, flavor them, refill them and rebake them. Adrienne finally stepped in to help me and saved me on the potatoes! She filled them all and put them back in the oven. I pulled out my soybeans to start cooking them about 10 minutes before like John told me to, and Rex decided that they shouldn't have the shell! The shell was way too chewy and not good so we had to start shelling them like crazy. It took forever to shell 9 pounds of soybeans! I had planned portions based on soybeans in a shell so I ended up way too short on the veggie. My steaks were cooked in the convection oven, which was a lifesaver, I could cook them all at once instead of one at a time.

I know this doesn't even begin to explain my nightmare of a day, but I have never heard my name yelled out so many times in a kitchen or any other room in my life. Things just kept going wrong one after another and John and Rex started to just pick on me. They wouldn't let up at all either. They like to tease me and pick on me because they know I can take it, but at the end of that day I had been pushed far enough. I was so tempted to just throw in the towel and leave for the rest of the day. It was so crazy stressful and I vowed to never again be in charge of an entire lunch by myself again.

My last straw for the day was when were were plating everything up and Rex told me to go get my soup and my relish. I looked at him blankly and said I'd go get my apples and be right back. He looked at me blankly and saw my bowl of apples and asked where my remaining relish was... The recipe hadn't given optional toppings, they had given a recipe for a relish topping! I had only done one of the ingredients! I think Rex was on the verge of giving me a hard time again when he saw I was probably close to tears so instead he told me to grab a whole bunch of ingredients and meet him back there in like 30 seconds. I swear he whipped up the rest of that relish in less than 1 minute and we topped the soup and sent it out. What a relief to be done with that day. The good news at the end of that day was everybody loved the soup and the steak!

It ended up being a really hard and trying day, full of time crunches which I didn't make, being harrassed so hard that I almost couldn't take it anymore, but having some really good food in the end.


My relish that topped my butternut squash pureed soup:



The soup and topping:


My flank with the marinade right before I started cooking it:


Finished and resting:


Perfectly cooked! You don't want to cook a flank over medium.