Following our mock midterm, we all felt a monumental weight off our shoulders (but apparently forgot that the real midterm is fast approaching). We knew that class would be in a different format, leaving the "team of two people making two recipes together per night" deal and moving to a four-person simulated kitchen team. As you know, the classic kitchen has four main stations: Garde Manger, Poissonnier, Saucier and Patissier; each island of 4 stations is meant to simulate a kitchen, so each of the four participants on an island represents one of the stations. So here's where it starts to get confusing, so bear with me…
I started the night as Poissonnier, while the other three kids at my island were the other three stations. I was tasked with making the skate dish (ugh), while they each had a recipe of their own (Consommé, Chicken Grand Mere and Lemon Tart). Chef made his first surprise twist of the night: each island would be given an additional recipe to complete together – the Pots de Crème dessert. Our recipe cards were taken away after 10 minutes, so we had to scramble to pull the memories filed in our brains and try to remember the procedures and full ingredients.
So this might sounds like a busy night, with everyone working on a million different things at once. There was one more addition to our night…the canapé. Behind Chef, we were shown a box of random ingredients: avocados, chorizo, asparagus, Brie, cherry tomatoes, jalapenos, radishes and Shitake mushrooms. Ok…what's the deal, are we being given an entirely new recipe? No, this was the exciting part! We were asked to create a one-bite canapé out of any of the ingredients in the box, or in the entire kitchen, to be presented first. Creativity was important, but appropriate size and eat-ability were the most important aspects of whatever we chose to create. We had a quick island pow-wow, deciding to pull the chorizo, the avocados, the jalapenos and the radishes. Since I was the one who had time to spare after butchering the disgusting skate and wiping the 3-inch layer of slime off my arms, I was tasked with creating most of the canapé while my teammates were busy scrambling to complete their recipes. I pureed some jalapenos with avocado, onions and a dash of lemon juice (with the obvious salt and pepper) to make a spicy modified guacamole. I then pan fried some white bread squares in butter to be the base of our appetizer. If you've never done this before – placed bread in a pan with a copious amount of butter – you have never lived. It crisps up like you wouldn't believe, and stores a little pillow of melty butter in the middle that releases when you take a bite. Woo Wee! My teammate fried a few slices of chorizo, and we began to compile and get ready to present.
We had been told we'd have a BIG SURPRISE tonight and to keep ourselves especially organized and neat to make it as easy as possible. I thought that maybe they'd be returning the ingredients to the storeroom earlier than usual, or perhaps we'd have to give up some of our ingredients yet still make the recipe work. Or maybe we were being filmed for a new ABC music-umentary "Chefs in C Minor" and there would be several close-ups. I quickly practiced my "Who me? Sure, I'll be the soprano" reaction, but no…it was ten times worse.
I was trucking along nicely, had butchered my skate (ugh) into four beautiful and nicely portioned filets, I was finished up the mise en place for the Grenobloise sauce, cutting potatoes into stupid larger-sized footballs called vapeurs and preparing each of the items for our canapés. "Everybody, stop what you're doing right now and don't move." Oh shoot, they finally figured out I ate that grape at the grocery store without paying. "I want you to grab your knives and your tools, and nothing else, and move to the station behind you to pick up where that person left off." Excuse me? EXCUSE ME?? But no! I already did everything for myself! I was all ready for my own skate with my own Grenobloise sauce! My partner had already put her chicken in the oven, and my other partner had cooked his tart dough already!
What ensued was a complete sh*#show. There was terrified screaming, knives were being thrown, people were jumping off the fire escape and calling their spouses to say goodbye. Surely Chef can't be serious, right? Oh, he was serious, very serious.
After we all got over the initial shock, and were able to transfer our tools (and canapé ingredients…thank God) to our new station we had to quickly take stock and assess what had already been done/what needed to be done. I had to tournee more freaking potatoes, but perhaps that was karma punishing me for complaining so much. The skate fillets I was left with were sloppy and incorrectly portioned, and the Pots de Crème that had been made was done with too much milk, and therefore was not solidifying appropriately. It didn't matter, though, because this was our new station and we had to salvage what we could. The lesson learned was that this is what happens in a real kitchen – food is made and prepared, and as a Chef we must come in and create a dish that we're happy with using the available components.
We compiled the canapés starting with a buttery crouton, topped with a slice of crispy chorizo and a swirl of beautiful, bright green spicy sauce and garnished with a curl of red radish peel. Delicious! Others made stuffed cherry tomatoes or used chorizo as their base. Another group made crispy baguette slices and a sort of bruschette.
Luckily, the sauce and skate are cooked last-minute, so I had complete control over that. I made my beurre noisette, or brown butter sauce, threw in some capers, lemon juice, lemon pieces and parsley and poured it over the nicely browned and pan-friend skate fillets. A potato football was put on each plate, and all was presented right on time.
Everything went really well (except for our watery Pots de Crème) and we had a really great time doing it. In that first moment when Chef announced that we'd be packing up and moving to deal with someone else's mess we thought the world was going to end and we'd never be able to get through it. But we did, and ultimately made the best of it. Take my word for it: if you just power through and stay determined, you can get through (almost) any challenge thrown in your path. And for the record, I'd make a killer soprano.
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