Kitchen Academy Blog

Week 23: Prawn with the Wind

Its unbelievable, but there is only one full week left to go! We started this week off with an Asian buffet, which was prepped last Friday. Since the food is mosty fresh and rather quick to make, there wasn’t too much preparation actually required. Nonetheless, the class was divided into groups of 4 for the task. Each group had to create their own dishes and interpret the recipes accordingly. This all had to be well organized and executed in a timely fashion. We pulled together and did really well! We made pad Thai, fried rice, chicken satay, and peanut sauce. We also served up a whole roasted pig! We cut up a fully intact, dead creature, and yet again I found myself somewhat disgusted by it. I think it was extra difficult because it had a face! A face that could stare at you. Moving on…! On Monday we fired up and unveiled all our Asian creations onto all 3 classes of students. Lots of raving moans and satisfied groans were to be heard…Today was spent prepping for our tasting menu event next week.

The theme that we are focused on is an ‘out of the box’ breakfast. So each team has to come up with different dishes based on what a tasting menu consists of: hot/cold appetizers, meat/fish/chicken dishes, vegetarian dishes, and dessert. All together it will be a 10 course meal. I was assigned to the ‘hot appetizer’ wing with my teammate Robert. We decided to come up with a Swedish-inspired dish: crispy salmon rolls with fresh fennel and guava butter sauce. We had all day yesterday to test out the dish and price the ingredients (right down to the salt and pepper seasoning.) Each team has to cost out their own dish and place an order for what is needed. Our entire class budget for the entire meal is $1500. Thankfully because our dish is simple and easy to make, it comes out to about $1.34 a plate. Normally that would sell at a restaurant for about $12. Its just amazing to see the high markup for these dishes. So finally we tested out the salmon crisp rolls and they turned out amazing! We probably made 4 different versions before we arrived at a final choice.

So tomorrow is a prep day for Friday, the last buffet of the school year! We’re doing a Mediterranean buffet. I’m really excited about it and it’ll surely be adding more elements to my Middle Eastern foods repertoire. I promised to bring my own falafel recipe, which will be fun to share with the class…

Week 22: Savory Last Moments

Welcome back to the Top Kitchen cooking diary! The work we have been doing in the kitchen is now becoming somewhat of a graceful routine. The dynamic of prepping for a day/serving for a day has been a relatively stable system. Different menus and different cooking processes are being explored within every new serving cycle. Although this week we had a slight alteration in the pattern, cooking and serving Spanish tapas all in the same day. Tapas can be found in trendy and traditional Spanish restaurants alike. They are usually presented as small portions on miniature plates and have a wide spectrum of flavor possibilities. We didn’t focus so much on the plating in our class, but created quite an assortment of little creations and ended up just eating the lot ourselves. This included empanadas, various shrimp dishes, and paella. I was put on gazpacho duty and had a successful run. I sort of gave it an Israeli twist, with ingredients like parsley and mint, flavors that don’t normally show up in gazpacho but add a surprisingly nice flavor to it…

Yesterday was game day. We cooked venison, pheasant, and ox tail. I was in charge of the vegetarian dish, another “mystery box” concoction. I created an Israeli salad with quinoa, served with a skewer of grilled vegetables marinated in pomegranate molasses sauce. Today was a complete lecture day, with no kitchen duties in the queue. We learned more about food costing; what budgets are like, how to price a dish, etc. This is something I’ve really been excited about diving into for quite some time. Tomorrow has us preparing for Monday’s service. It will be an Asian buffet. I’ve sort of been dreading this section of the course, as we’ll be roasting a whole pig! I’ve seen said lifeless animal perched up on the shelves as I’ve been walking into school. Now our moment has come! It really makes you wonder about the origins of food and how it applies to your daily life…

So we have only two more weeks left of school! And my six-week externship starts early next month. I ended up getting that part time job at Sur la Table cooking school. I’ll also be training with a company called CEO chefs. They setup cooking events for corporate team building. In addition to all this, I’ll be focusing developing a business and marketing plan to provide cooking classes for the rich and famous. This whole school experience has been nothing short of spectacular and I’m really sad that its ending. I’m really going to miss everyone!

Week 21, day 3: Day of the Rabbit

I am really enjoying every minute of this new class. Getting some experience developing a menu and getting a sense of what its like to work in a restaurant kitchen is a lot of fun. Our routine is structured around bi-weekly meal services. The day before each service day is spent prepping, which has us learning the new dishes and techniques as we move along. Today we worked on fabricating rabbits! Not to delve too far into the vulgar, but a skinned rabbit looks exactly like a skinned cat. I admit, not the most appetizing thing to think about. We fabricated 12 rabbits in all and split into cooking teams. I was on the group in charged of making seared rabbit. I also made some pate from the livers that would have been otherwise unused. It was a complete experiment that turned out quite well! Its going to taste even better after it chills overnight. I’ll most likely serve it with crackers and maybe some pickles too…

Tomorrow we’ll be in the kitchen to start cooking and preparing for the service. After presenting the food to our patrons we will start all over again. We’re also still focused on getting ready for our tasting menu to be executed during the final week of class. As a class we decided to create an unusual breakfast, with all sorts of twists and turns on traditional recipes. Robert and I were put on the hot appetizer squad, and we’ll be creating these salmon-potato egg rolls, which we’ve coined “salmon clusters.” We’ll be serving them with a customized jalapeno guava sauce…So that’s it! The next few weeks will be spent developing the recipes, testing them, and costing them (something I’m particularly enjoying). Food and math do go together in the most interesting ways!