The Culinary Tales Week 11: Life’s a Buffet, So Grab a Plate!
Week 5 brought an array of dishes and we capped the short week with a buffet for friends and family. This was supposed to be a laid-back week with interesting menu items: grilled mahi mahi, trout, gumbo, mousseline, halibut…
But things got off to a rough start when, already panicking about being ill-prepared for the weekly quiz, we were joined by Guest Annoying Girl.
GAG, with insider info from her classmates in the earlier class, made sure to establish her in-the-know superiority by telling us we had to know which meat wasn’t yield-graded (veal) and that one of the other answers was “country style” or “St. Louis” (referring to one of three types of rib meat associated with pork; the other two were baby back ribs and spare ribs.)
After the test, which I had passed despite bringing an error to Chef’s attention which brought my grade down, I had to work on a stove/oven I wasn’t familiar with. (Another guest student had taken over my station so I was displaced.) That set the tone for a really off day.
My grilled fish (yellowtail instead of mahi-mahi) ended up cooked on the well side (we always aimed for medium to mid-rare). My jasmine rice was undercooked (it is simmered for only about 4-6 minutes, then the heat is turned off to let it carryover cook.) AND I forgot to add soy sauce to my stir-fried vegetables (it was an Asian-inspired plate.)
My second plate was just as bad: we were supposed to pan-fry trout and serve with Pommes Parisienne – which is another way of serving potatoes by using a small melonballer to scoop out potato balls (slightly larger than boba pearls) and then frying them in clarified butter (because my stove top was not straight, I couldn’t get good, even color on my balls.) The trout was a disaster; all we had to do was chop the head and fin off, season it with salt and pepper, dust it with flour and fry it – probably the easiest method we learned for cooking fish. But no, it must have been written in stone somewhere that once I got on a roll, I couldn’t stay on a roll.
I found out after class that the station I worked on was infamous for not heating up – no wonder my fish skin didn’t brown. And, when I was trying to flip the damn fish, the skin tore which cut my choice of presentation sides to one (and it didn’t turn out either.)
Putting Monday behind me, I was ready to tackle Tuesday but GAG had returned and brought TWO more guests with her and really tested my patience. (At this point, Chef had taken to calling her my new best friend.) A couple of my classmates told me to shake it off, but it’s never that easy, is it?
The day’s menu consisted of shrimp gumbo with jasmine rice and flounder (we were originally supposed to use sole) vin blanc with salmon mousseline, red onion confit and mixed grain pilaf.
All three guests decided to set up right next to me at my station. To make matters worse, there were only four stations on my side and now six people had to squeeze in to share them.
AND… just to paint a more colorful picture what a piece of work these guests were, instead of taking up the logical available spaces, they left empty burners between them and spread out into MY range to take up MY burners. Ugh, seriously.
One of the guests wasn’t that bad (let’s call him Nice Guest.) We teamed up to do the rice sides so that we didn’t have to use more burners than necessary and it worked out. NG even stayed to clean up with us. (The other guests left early.)
To be clear, GAG got on everyone’s nerve, not just mine. Young Pro, who could kill the original Annoying Girl if given the opportunity, said he didn’t think it was possible that someone could be more annoying than AG. Class Buddy told me he got tired of her bitching and whining that he sicced Annoying Girl on her. Even Chef said GAG tried to mouth off to him and he said something that shut her up.
Anyway, my shrimp gumbo turned out fabulously (and the jasmine rice cooked perfectly this time!) I missed my window on the mousseline dish (was eight minutes late because, while I made a couple of tactical errors with timing my tasks, I also had to get a whole new fish from the walk-in because someone stole the one that Class Buddy was holding for me), but I think I still got an “A” for it.
The mousseline was an interesting dish. First we had to fillet the flounder, different from salmon (a “round” fish) because it’s a flat fish, which meant that when you filleted salmon, you got two fillets, one from each side of the bones. You got four fillets with flat fish because their bodies are stretched out a little.
And… a funky thing about flat fish: their eyes are on one side. When they’re born, the eyes are on separate sides, but as they get older one eye travels to the other side. Gross and fascinating! Like sex, if you really think about it.
(Fun trivia: Flounder from Disney’s The Little Mermaid isn’t really a flounder… the most telling sign being that both eyes should be resting on one side.)
Back to mousseline making… after filleting the fish, we removed the skin and set aside. Then, we took some salmon and made a mousse out of it (hence, the name “mousseline”) by sticking it in a food processor and mixing in cream and egg whites.
We laid two flounder pieces lengthwise, overlapping in the middle, then spread the mousseline over one side like peanut butter, seasoned with salt and peper, then rolled up into a sort of matterhorn shape (but less phallic.) We used toothpicks to hold it together and set aside while we worked on the sauce.
To make vin blanc (white wine) sauce, you reduced stock (in this case we used chicken stock flavored with the leftover bones from the flounder), mixed with shallots and white wine, then cooked the fish on top of it. (By the way, we also flavored the chicken stock used for the gumbo with shrimp shells.)
We managed to have an annoyance-free rest of the week after that. The menu the next night was coquilles St. Jacques and steamed halibut. Though we were not required to make the steamed fish, Chef encouraged us to take a stab at it if we had time. Instead of halibut, we were given sturgeon, which, despite producing a prized caviar, is a disgusting-looking fish that I can best describe as living so far down the ocean that it missed the evolution boat.
I didn’t even bother with the sturgeon and just concentrated on my coquilles St. Jacques (which is pan-fried scallops) served with orange beurre blanc sauce and julienne vegetables. I didn’t brown the scallop surface enough, but it was still cooked well and the sauce was great!
The rest of the night was spent prepping for Buffet Day the following day. We made a largely Mediterranean/Southern European menu of arroz con chorizo (Spanish rice with sausage), roasted potatoes, prime rib, veal scallopine, moussaka, panna cotta, cioppino, and pasta. I teamed up with Sweet Momma to make the Spanish rice and roasted potatoes.
Interestingly enough, while we cut the vegetables separately, our cuts were identical – which meant we were doing it right. (Either that or we were both screwing up the same way.) Even a couple of classmates commented how great our cuts were looking. When cuts were done right, the Chef noticed and it bought you some extra points, I think.
Cooking for a large crowd is a challenge in itself.
While our recipes were tailored for individual dishes and could be easily adjusted for a dozen, cooking for 70 people was something else. We cooked product in large roasting pans and learned that some parts of the pan cook fine, but some parts overdone, some underdone.
But Buffet Day was a success. Some of the Baking I and II students came by to sample our food and reported it was excellent – Chef had said the toughest critics would be our fellow students. But more importantly, we got to share our learning experience with friends and family.
I did learn something new… when you have food bits that have stuck to the bottom of your pan, sprinkle some baking soda, pour some water in and simmer. The gunk will come off. In the toughest of times, I tried looking for whatever positives I could. Even if it meant something as simple as a nifty new cleaning trick.
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