Hors d’Oeuvres – Catering & Buffets, Week 1

WE ARE FINALLY OUT OF THE CLASSROOM!


Don’t get me wrong: I did enjoy both the ‘Food, History & Culture’ and ‘Nutrition’ classes. Dice and Ashlee were both fun instructors, and I’d definitely take courses taught by them again. The material was interesting enough, but what ticked me off is how some of the students were really disrespectful of them. Yeah yeah, I know, “we’re here to cook!” Whatever. We’re here to learn. But while I enjoyed these classes, I’m glad we’re finally back in the kitchen. ☺


So here we are, in Chef Bruno’s Catering and Buffets class. I could tell within the first few days I’m going to love this class. We do work as teams, not individuals. I don’t have to stress about completing all elements of a single dish by myself. Instead, we work out as a team who’ll do which elements, and then we get to it, pulling everything together in the end for the final presentation.


The class is broken up into units, or sections, with each one building on an element or type of catering or buffet management until the final week, where we pull all these pieces together into The Grand Buffet. So this week we started out easy: hors d’oeuvres.





So here’s Chef Bruno demo’ing the Duck Breast Canapé. OMG, this was freakin’ delicious! The idea is to prep and sear a duck breast (drrooooooollllll!!!!!), then allow it to cool. Then we took a Pullman loaf and cut uniform squares, toasting them lightly. We supréme’d mandarin oranges, then sliced those wedges in half so we had a better-fitting piece of orange for the canapé. Finally we took some pistachios, soaked them for a while to loosen the skins, then shelled them. We chopped ‘em up nice and fine, then began the assembly.





The trick with hors d’oeuvres is symmetry and consistency: each piece should feel balanced not only visually, but in taste as well. For our team’s canapés, we made a delicious orange-rosemary butter to spread on our toasted croutons. We then placed an orange slice in one corner, some chopped pistachios in another, then a thin folded slice of seared duck breast in the middle. The result: freakin’ delicious.





Each week will get harder, with more items on the menu of greater complexity, requiring more prep and much better time management. The fun of it is the teamwork required. No one person will ever be responsible for one thing entirely, but we’ll each divvy up tasks and pull it all together for the final show. Once I have the pics from our final presentation (I forgot my camera that nite!), I’ll post the menu and the corresponding items.

Time Management and Confidence

Chef Kang said it again, and again, and again, almost all last week, and the week before: “Cameron, you gotta work on your time management!”

Well he didn’t just say it to me. He said it to lots of us who have trouble juggling eighteen separate little tasks and completing our 2-3 dishes per night in a more timely fashion. The basic setup is this: You listen to the lecture and watch the demo. He has the recipes there, so all you have to do is follow them. Once he’s done and we get to work, we ‘go shopping’ and gather up all the ingredients, then start prepping them for our dishes.

And this is where the time management thing comes in. We could prep everything, then go about making one dish at a time until we’re done. Or we could prep for our first dish, get it started, then while we’re waiting for, say, the chicken to braise (20-30 minutes), we prep and start our next dish. The idea is that our work overlaps, and we complete our 2-3 dishes in much less time.

The only problem is, it’s hard to know just what steps you can do ahead of time or while overlapping something else when you’re still just figuring out what you’re doing! I have a hard time with retention of the demo, so I tend to re-look at the recipe several times as I go. Some of the steps I’m more familiar with (we covered them before and have done them a few times already). But a lot of stuff is still relatively new, so getting what stages can be overlapped with others is more difficult.

So what I think it boils down to is confidence. I tend to get stressed that I’m going to get too many things going on at once and will end up screwing something up. It won’t be the first time that I over-reduced a sauce I had going on the stove while I was running around getting other elements of a plate together.

But the more I do this, the more familiar I’m getting with the basic techniques: grill some meat, start a braise, make a pan sauce, etc. Knowing how to fit those steps into production in a way that reduces any wasted time is a little difficult, but I’m getting the hang of it. Practice makes perfect.

These past weeks were pretty fun. Week One of class was beef, which was really rather easy:


This is my grilled steak with gratin potatoes underneath and creamed spinach on the side. While I may have had some difficulty getting everything in on time, Chef never complained about the doneness of the meat, which was near-perfect every time.

Week Two was poultry. I certainly needed more practice in breaking down a chicken, but we also broke down and cooked a duck, including confit (cooked in its own fat). I missed turkey night (out sick), but since Thanksgiving is coming up, I’m sure there’ll be plenty more to come.


Above is a simple grilled chicken breast, marinated with some oil, garlic, salt & pepper. We made some tossed greens and surrounded the plate with a delicious fruit salad, which was really very easy:

• Cantaloupe
• Honeydew
• Pineapple
• Red bell pepper
• Jalapeño
• Red onion
• Rough chopped cilantro
• Lime juice
• Salt

Just cut all the fruit and vegetables the same size, proportioning them how you want them. Throw in the cilantro, squeeze half a lime over it, toss in some salt and balance out the flavor with a little sugar or honey if it’s too acidic.

Tomorrow starts Week Three, which is fin and shellfish, including things like oysters and shrimp. I’m a little nervous since I can’t really stand the taste of most shellfish! But hey, I ain’t tried it all yet, so we’ll see. ☺

Namaste.

Success!! (or very nearly so)

What a night! It seemed as if all my time management issues were behind me. I’d studied my flashcards on the bus and at work, knowing what sauces we’d be making tonight (a slew of ‘em!). I felt confident walking into class, ready to go… only to realize I’d forgotten my cravat!

WTF?! I scurried on over to Student Services, waited forever for some dude to root through a cabinet and find me a loaner, which I then had to sign out (sheesh!), then I ran back over and got in line for inspection with nary a moment to spare. Whew!

Production went (mostly) awesome. I was on top of things, planning out in advance the different sauces I’d have to make, gathering up my stuff and being all organized and such and what not. I was cruising along when Chef Kang told us we’d also have to start a veal stock. What?! Um, well, ok. I’ll squeeze it in.

And I felt the squeeze. I was raring to go with both of my reductions going on the stove at the same time (Chef walked over to me with a smile on his face – yeah, I got this time management thing down, buddy!), then I had to break to drag out these big ol’ roasting pans full of veal bones. Ugh, talk about breaking my rhythm.

If that weren’t bad enough, I broke my Buerre Blanc, too! S—t! I think it was the heat of the plate I presented it on that broke the butter and vinegar reduction emulsion I was shooting for. I was told to (gasp!) do it again. Ugh. Double-ugh.

And then it broke the second time! Oh geez oh Pete! This time I went running around, looking for a freakin' chinois to strain my freakin’ sauce, leaving it to sit there and separate. A little last minute whisking helped pull it together well enough for the presentation, though, so I managed to pull that one out of the fire.

What really cheesed me off, though, is that I couldn’t get to the very last sauce. We’d had to make five sauces tonight, and dagnabit I was gonna get all of ‘em done! I was, seriously, THREE MINUTES AWAY from straining my vinegar reduction into my Hollandaise to make a Bernaise when Chef called it for the night! Ack! I gave him a pleading look as he walked by, frantically whisking egg yolks and clarified butter with one hand while sautéing shallots, thyme, vinegar and white wine with the other. But no dice. It was time to do the dishes…

Oof. Well, at least I can say I’m really prepared for tomorrow night’s sauce practical and quiz, and I get to have steak! Well, they were there for us tonight to use with our sauce if we wanted to (and, um, had time!), but anyone who couldn’t get to theirs tonight can have it tomorrow. Mmmmm… steeeaaak… <drrrroooolllll!!!!!>

And on that note, good night.

Time To Get My Act Together

‘Twas a rough week at CHIC, folks. I’m sure part of it was the feeling of being overworked at my day job (I’ve been puttin’ in quite the number of hours), but I have to admit that part of it was just my lack of preparation.

We’ve just finished Week One of six weeks of Culinary Foundations Two, and I already feel like I’ve repeated the whole of Foundations One class. Sure, we’re reviewing a lot of basic things, like making stocks, etc. But the amount of production is much higher. See, the last class was really only a little over two hours (7:45pm to 10:05pm – BTW, who came up with this ‘:05’ business?!). But Foundations Two is all evening, 6pm to 10:35pm (again, that extra five minutes, what is it FOR, I ask?!?).

This means that after a short lecture and demo, we set off to make a lot more stuff than we ever did in the first class. Wednesday and Thursday each I struggled to keep up while we had to make four or five separate sauces or dishes. Wednesday I did pretty well, even though I only turned in three items. Chef Kang was happy with both the flavor and the consistency of what I brought him, and I ended up making a pretty dang tasty little number called a Cauliflower Gratinée:


But Thursday… well, Thursday was another story. I was burnt out. Honestly, I was fried. I struggled through the day at work, then I struggled through class. We had five freakin’ sauces to make, and honestly, there’s no reason why I couldn’t get them all done. I struggled with TWO of them, and then I barely cranked out a third only after Chef stepped in with an assist! How humiliating! When the instructor steps in and starts doing it for you, you know you need to work a lot harder. ☹

I’m not (entirely) knocking the help – he did give me a bit of a ‘kick in the pants,’ which helped me at least get one more sauce done. I felt pretty sheepish walking up to him with it, after he’d called it for the evening (‘end of production, everyone clean up’). He gave me the chance, and it did turn out alright (a simple-as-all-heck-darn red wine and shallot reduction, for Pete’s sake). I just felt like it was a ‘gimme’, and I went home disappointed in myself despite it all.

The highlight of the week, though, had to be sitting down with Chef Beckman and recording a CHIC Podcast. Here’s the thing that got me interested in culinary school in the first place. Chef Beckman’s podcast comes out once a week, and is syndicated individually or through the excellent Culinary Media Network feed. What I love about it is the laid-back style. Meeting Chef Beckman was a treat, and he’s certainly one of the easiest people to get along with I’ve ever met! We rapped about my experiences (limited as the were) in the culinary world, and why I wanted to attend school. For anyone out there who either attends CHIC or is even remotely interested in what culinary school instructors are chattin’ about, this is a must-have addition to your podcast feed.

So on to Week Two, and this time I wisely read ahead in the syllabus and made flashcards of everything we’d be making this week. With all certainty, I’ll be studying those flashcards on the bus and at work. But my biggest crutch right now is Time Management. For the love of the gods, they could teach me a whole class in this! Some folks seem to come by it naturally, and others are picking it up well enough. But me, I’m still struggling with it.

I can concentrate really well on making one sauce at a time, and making it pretty decent. But to be working on five sauces at a time, and to get them done well, is quite a challenge. It’s one of those things that, quite frankly, just doesn’t come naturally to me. It’s probably because I’m still struggling with the basic cooking part! So it’s the kind of thing I’ll need to devise my own system for. This is like a lot of other things I've done. I need to figure out my own way out of the woods on this one, and that’ll take a lot of work. But I know that once I get it down… look out. ☺

A’ight, it’s late, it’s Sunday night, I’m beat having worked from home all day, so I’m hittin’ it. Check out The CHIC Podcast, as well as CMN. Good night, and Namaste.