The Culinary Tales Week 26: How Low Can You Go?

August 7, 2014

 

 

If I thought the first week of Garde Manger was brutal, it was a lot worse during the second week. The biggest problem was my team. Individually, they were great kids but hardly star students.

 

There was Stoner Guy, a screw-up who had failed/dropped Intro I a couple of times. On his third try, he liked our class so much that he worked extra hard to keep up and stay with the group, which was sweet, really. He volunteered to be the group leader.

 

Then there was Pothead, who was often higher than Stoner Guy himself. Pothead was – tragically – intelligent, if you can see past the bloodshot eyes and marijuana daze. He was a steady worker but dropped dishes like crazy (people who had a habit of dropping off dishes at the cleaning station but never bothering to wash them were called “dishdroppers.”)

 

Rounding out the group was Little Girl, aptly named because she was the youngest in the class and also the shortest. Nice girl, but annoyed me during our group assignment because she had no initiative and instead wasted energy rattling off the things that needed to be done, rather than doing them.

 

One of my pet peeves is when people waste time bemoaning a problem when fixing it would take less time and effort. Once, at work, one of my co-workers charged my desk, grumbling about something he was tasked to do. I reasoned, “If you just did it, it would have been done in the time it took you to complain about it.” He retreated back to his desk, defeated by a good point.

 

In addition to complaining about the things that needed to be done, LG also wasted the bulk of prep time making a drink with leftover product, rather than concentrating on the items that we actually needed to do. Which caused The Nazi to yell at us.

 

We had to produce ten canapes, 15 pieces each. Funny thing about canapes: they may be small, but they are a pain in the butt to make.

 

A canape is made up of four components: base, spread, filling and garnish. Sometimes, the filling and spread are combined. Ideally, one gets through canape production by preparing the individual pieces ahead of time and assembling on the day they are served.

 

You’d think with three days of prep and four pairs of hands this wouldn’t be challenging. But not with my special ed team.

 

We had no plan nor organization. I blame myself for this, because this was where my age and work experience as a project manager would have come in handy. We all had to take turns being team leaders and I should have just taken the reins, but SG volunteered and I was more than happy to defer.

 

Before production could even begin, we had to submit a schedule and platter layout, largely the team leader’s responsibility. SG didn’t have it ready and we lost prep time waiting for him to scribble them out (we were not allowed to start until this was complete.)

 

We were to make:

1. Blue cheese mousse on a brioche base with cashew garnish
2. Prosciutto and melon on pecan shortbread cookie with mascarpone spread and mint garnish (we had to scoop balls of honeydew and cantaloupe, slice them in half, glue one of each together to form a ball while sticking a mint leaf in the middle and laying this on top of prosciutto slices)
3. Smoked salmon mousse barquettes with salmon roe garnish
4. Curry chicken salad on a bouchee (vol-au-vent) with roasted half-cashew as garnish
5. Smoked trout on rye bread with red bell pepper/butter compound base with chives as garnish
6. Deviled egg on pumpernickel toast point with caviar garnish
7. Mushroom tartlet with cream cheese spread (we could pick whatever spread we wanted, so we settled on cream cheese because we didn’t have to make a real spread) and parmesan cheese garnish
8. Ceviche in cucumber cups with parsley pluche
9. Smoked salmon on potato crepe base with creme fraiche and caviar garnish
10. Shrimp and avocado profiteroles garnished with lime wedges

 

 

In addition to our team assignment, we were tasked with making the mascarpone cheese for the class. Stoner Guy ended up screwing this up, and we had to borrow cheese from an earlier class. And we were all required to create a chaud froid platter.

 

Chaud froid is a fancy platter on which to set your food. The bottom layer is made up of milk, flour, water, shortening and gelatin. The gelatin is what makes it solid enough to hold the weight of food. The upper layer is aspic gelee, which is water and gelatin mixed together to create a translucent coating. This can be edible, and in that case, consomme should be used instead of water to give it more flavor.

 

We were supposed to practice working on our design for our final. I went with a harlequin theme so mine was a simple design of diamond shapes in purple and red. Little Girl’s would have been an awesome Finding Nemo design had her black dye not smeared all over the tray. But our fearless leader ran out of time and only presented a plain white platter.

 

Buffet Day was interesting. I brought in fancy platters from home but the rest of my team didn’t bother to bring anything else to decorate our table. Pathetic.

 

We only completed 4.25 out of the 10 required dishes. Pitiful.

 

Additionally, we had a visiting hoity-toity chef from corporate headquarters and we were ordered to be on our best behavior. NO talking unless it was work-related, NO smoke breaks, NO fooling around, and sanitation better be paid attention to.

 

Chef Nazi had to stop production for about 30 minutes to make us clean. She was wildly embarrassed that we had a visiting dignitary on a night when the kitchen was, disastrously, at its messiest.

 

We were normally asked to step outside while the chefs reviewed the presentations. That night, Chef Nazi stepped out and somberly asked us to grade our own work. (She was beyond angry.) We graded ourselves a 29 out of 100. The chefs gave us a 28.

 

I didn’t even think grades went that low.

 

And the saddest part was that the highest grade was a 60. All of the buffets sucked, and ours sucked the most.

 

 

Our second buffet was oyster/seafood-themed and we almost didn’t make it again. For this buffet, we were only required to make two oyster dishes with side sauces plus anything else we wanted to make with the extra product the chefs brought in.

 

Once again, my team had no plan and no sense of priority. Stoner Guy and Little Girl decided to work on the supplemental dishes and Pothead and I were left to do the mandatory dishes. But I couldn’t understand how my teammates could not focus on the mandatories and instead fret over the non-essentials. (To be fair, LG’s seafood pasta and SG’s lobster fritters were delicious.)

 

We waited until the absolute last minute to start shucking oysters. None of us had ever shucked oysters before; it wasn’t as easy as it looks on TV when the pros do it. In fact, many of my classmates had never even eaten oysters before. One of my classmates remarked that he would never eat them, to which Chef Nazi responded, “Have you eaten p*ssy? Then you’ve eaten oysters.”

 

I’ve said loads of inappropriate things in my life, but that had to be the most inappropriate thing I’d ever heard. I don’t offend easily and that time I was shockingly offended. The bar kept getting lowered as far as my estimation of our teacher.

 

I was disappointed that Class Buddy, having dropped out early in the week, wasn’t there to hear this and share my incredulity that something like this actually happened in a school setting.

 

As if the week wasn’t bad enough, I lost a comrade-in-arms. He, Advertising Buddy and I were the only ones who spent our days in corporate jobs; stressfully balancing work and the rigors of school, seeing through the bullshit since we were older (we had clued in from the start that a lot of the chefs’ tough-guy acts and theatrics were for show, to scare the kids into getting in line), deliberating whether it was worth it to trade in our cushy, well-paying white collar careers for a life in food service … none of the other kids in class could relate.

 

I looked forward to wine class that Saturday. When it came time to tasting the wines, instead of spitting them out, I swallowed them all and helped myself to LG’s share (she was underage), eager to get drunk at noon because it was that kind of week.

 

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