Our Family Meal chef, a woman who appears to be my age yet seems to have the knowledge of 20 years of chef-ery, assigns us tasks according to when we arrive and what we've worked on in the past. There's always so much to do each night, so we get started immediately whether we walk in the door at 5pm or 5:44pm. I've cut massive amounts of fruit for the fruit salad, churned a vat of sesame glaze for the chicken bits, breaded hundreds of catfish filets for the deep fryer and grated pounds of cheddar cheese, so when chef asked me if I've made the salad yet, I was excited to get started on something new. Let me tell you - making food for hundreds of people isn't easy, but cutting, cleaning and drying head upon head of lettuce is no walk in the park either.
The process is done right next to the huge industrial sink in our area, which is first sanitized and filled with cold water. A head of lettuce is selected and the rotten/yucky parts are torn off. The the whole thing is cut through several times (almost like cutting an onion) and then chopped vertically. The pieces are thrown into the sink, and a new head is selected! It seems super easy, I mean, how hard can it be to cut through lettuce?? But by the end of the box my wrist was failing me and I was forming a red, hurty callus on the side of my right index finger. Damn thee, physical trials and emotions tribulations of culinary school. Damn thee.
Once all the lettuce was cut and rinsed, it was loaded into the massive salad spinner (appropriately a bright green) and spun to my heart's desire. Then it was packed into the individual pans that would later be sent up to each of the classrooms. To finish off my "salad" theme of the night, chef asked me to make the dressing and package it into individual squirt bottles to accompany the lettuce. We choose a buttermilk maple dressing, so I got started compiling the ingredients. Someone in the morning class had been kind enough to make four whole quarts of mayonnaise, so I naturally was a jerk and swiped three of them. I combined the mayonnaise with buttermilk and maple syrup, churning with the immersion blender until it was a creamy, thin mixture. I finished it off with a generous heap of salt and pepper, and it was ready to go.
So that was it! Salad - check. Dressing - check. For some reason, chef had picked an enourmous menu for dinner (which would come in handy later in the evening...), deciding to serve brisket sandwiches with barbecue sauce, grilled chicken, pork sausages, creamed corn, macaroni and cheese and coleslaw. There was so much food, in fact, that we had to trek two carts to deliver food to the students upstairs. Needless to say, it was all delicious, and I savored my second brisket sandwich in a week. I also took home the entire pan of leftover brisket, and plan on having a third sandwich for dinner on Thursday. Brisket is the key ingredient to a happy life (in addition to love, honesty and laughter...in no particular order).
We were thrown a curveball about 45 minutes before we were supposed to serve dinner: there was a specialty interest class using the Italian kitchen, and they were expecting to receive dinner (even though they hadn't put in an order for the 25 students). We quickly gathered empty pans and siphoned off a little bit of food from each dish to send to their classroom. We gave them plenty of food, the exact same amount the other classrooms had received, but received a phone call about 15 minutes into dinner saying that they had run out of food and would need us to send up some more. Who the heck was up there, the entire University of Texas football team?? We were lucky enough to have made so much food, with lots of leftovers for the downstairs dinner, so we sent up several more pans of macaroni and cheese, coleslaw, creamed corn and a few remaining sausages. I guess they haven't been initiated into the "Eat Less Cook More" attitude necessary of any culinary student, but it's no big deal. They paid a lot of money for that one night of knife skills...I'd take advantage of a free dinner too!
It's a busy week of work and school for a certain inappropriate and pale culinary school blogger. Yay for paychecks!!
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