First Week of Intro Garde Manger OVER!

What a great class! I learned so much there in the first week. Our Chef really knows his stuff. He's won some serious awards as a Chef and knows how to present food efficiently but making money while satisfying his customers.

I got some seriously good instruction from Chef Rob on how to properly make a cheese platter to please the people. One I won't forget. I took this photo of my platter to show you how it looked. I was soooo proud. Earlier in the week we cooked and prepped a dozen pears in white wine and another team prepped the same in a red current jelly mix. They are really tasty after cooling and chilling. Really easy to make too.

By Friday, our team of 4 made four different recipes of Canapes totalling 225 individual canapes. Then we made a Caprese Salad with mozarella cheese and tomatoes on a bed of chiffonade romaine lettuce topped with salt, pepper, olive oil and chiffonade fresh basil. In addition to that we made 2 separate cheese plates and prepped some duck confit for next week. We had to deep fry folded won tons for the seared ahi tuna canape and deep fried flour tortilla squares for the fried chicken bunch and toasted bread rounds for the shrimp canapes. All these had a seasoned cream cheese to match the protein and of course, little add ons for eye appeal.

We load trays of everything and drop them off in other classes as well as serve as hosts to all the students and Chefs who pop in our class to "graze". I heard some of the visiting students remark that our stuff was really professional looking and when they made theirs it looked like crap! Ha. They had a different chef than us. We are learning from the best. Fortunate indeed.

Our class is divided into three groups or teams and each team has their own set of requirements to make but every team makes 75 canapes daily and 225 on Friday for the big food day. Its hectic but fun. We all work good together and get a lot of stuff done including, clean up, cleaning out the walk in refrigerator on Fridays and retrieving our trays from the other classes at the end of the day.

Monday our team (Team #2) moves on to the sushi making format. We prepped 2 large fillets of salmon into Scandanavian Style Gravlax so we will have some delicious tasting paper thin slices of gravlax to make up some canapes with. Its really good stuff.

I ate so much on Friday I was almost sick. I ate deviled eggs (not like your mom makes), rare flank steak canapes, ceviche canapes, shrimp, fried chicken and seared ahi canapes, sushi rolls, fruit, cheese, and anything else I ran across. Butchery was like a walk in the Sahara dessert. We had all this good stuff around us but couldn't eat anything. Now, we're just the opposite.

I can't believe I still have a year to go and learn a ton more stuff. I feel like I'm reading a really good novel that I don't want to end. Next week, I move to another Chapter. YES!