Sunday, September 27, 2009
"A meal without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye"
Greetings yall!
Ok im so sorry its been so long since my last post...please dont lose interest! Its just things got real busy here real fast, and if i had free time to myself i spent it catching up on sleep! Its a whirlwind but i am loving every second of it.
So since my last post, I was hired as an assistant chef at Grahams Personal Chef and Catering Company! We do private dinner parties, weddings, events at wineries, and every weekday all the deli salads and hot lunches for 3 local gourmet markets. When i say deli salads i dont mean your average potato or pasta salad either - we make over 50 gourmet salads, and they are delish. Basically its just me, a friend of mine from the program who started last week, and Chef Graham. Its busy and hard and demanding but i learn so much, its great practice, and a lot of fun! Check us out at http://grahamspersonalchefservice.com. With that I catered my first major event last weekend - we served dinner for a wedding party of 140. Our appetizers included figs stuffed with blue cheese mousse, polenta canapes with wild mushroom, grapefruit and beet skewers marinated in blood orange and honey vinnagrette, pate served on brioche with carmelized onions, and goat cheese - grape - pistachio "lollipops". For dinner we served chicken with a fine herb sauce, seared scallops with a sunchoke cream sauce, butternut squash and spinach gratin, glazed carrots, and a pomegranate and candied walnut salad. We didnt do the wedding cake, but we did make chocolate cabernet truffles to pass. Everything was so delicious! Did i mention for everything we make homemade stocks, vinnagrettes, even our own mayonaisse? Needless to say im learning tons, getting crazy practice, and servin up some great food. LOVE it!
As far as school is concerned, we finished our first block and this is our last week of the second block - it goes by so fast! Almost done with food safety and product knowledge. Food safety is the servsafe class, so needless to say its pretty boring but important. Product knowledge is intense - every day there is new theme, say mushrooms or greens for example, and we learn everything there is to know about all the varieties and sample them and have to remember it all! Its a lot of information so the tests and such are pretty challenging. Our finals for this block are on friday, which means monday we start a new block and are FINALLY in the kitchen! We start with meat fabrication and ID every day from 2 - 830! Yes, i dont start class til 2 as opposed to 830 right now, which is great right? I mean i hate mornings. but WRONG! Since i have pm classes, that means i will work the morning shift at Grahams. This means I have to be AT work at 6 AM - alskd;jf;lkdsajf;lkdsaf.
So when im not in class or doing hw or at work, im trying to soak up everything this area has to offer because thats all part of the experience! For example yesterday we were up early to check out the napa farmers market, then went to a dahlia farm - GORGEOUS flowers.
Thats all for now, I need to tackle some of our many projects we have going on right now. One is called "my life as" and we are basically writing a paper on the complete production and food process for an item we were randomly assigned...mine happens to be cacao nib to hersheys kiss :). The next is a paper on a recent interview I did with a vendor at a farmers market, and another is a poster creation and presentation on an artisan cheese of our choice - i chose a local cheese, humboldt fog cypress grove goat. Its a crazy cheese! But the winner has their poster framed and hung in the ventura center which is a huge deal.
Ok yall, I promise to make time for more posts and regular updates. I miss the east coast and everyone back home so much! Hope yall are doing great. Until the next post...eat well! <3
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