Make Up Lab

Oh. My. Goodness. This lab was so much fun!!! I wish every lab could be this much fun. I needed to make up a lab from the day I missed the week before. When I approached him about making it up, he asked how many classes I had missed. I told him two, but he reminded me that I had made one up already, and tried to convince me that I was fine. I responded with, “Will I have an A? Not an A-, because that doesn’t count towards a 4.0 GPA. I need an A.” He seemed slightly taken aback, possibly a little annoyed, but agreed that I could make it up. Wednesday was a designated make up lab day for anyone who needed to make up labs for the whole culinary department. Natane also needed to make up a day, so we were able to work together. The day I missed was, again, prepping forcemeats and since a.) we have done that a bazillion times and b.) forcemeats are a two day process, Chef just said we could pick whatever we wanted to make Garde Manger related. I was excited.

I had picked a couple recipes offline because there wasn’t enough time to actually order product and I wanted to make sure I had some options. When we got in, Melissa (the storeroom manager) pointed out two speedracks in the walk in, specified that those contained product we couldn’t use, but said we had free reign over the rest of the ingredients. Awesome!!!!!!

We ended up making a Honey Potato Soup with Spicy Sweet Potato Crisps as a garnish. I enjoyed the subtle sweetness of the soup and the contrast with the spicy crisps. A bite that included one or two crisps was perfect. I finished eating the soup for lunch.



Then we made an amazing sandwich that was spread with guacamole, then topped with chicken breast, bacon, and onions and mushrooms that were sautéed with white wine and soy sauce. The chicken was a little overdone because my thermometer is broken, apparently. It does this weird jumping thing and won’t go above 120°F. I didn’t realize this at the time though but when I rechecked the chicken, knew it was time to pull it and that my thermometer was broke. We fried up some tortilla chips to serve with the extra guacamole on the side.



To round out the day, we fried some flour tortilla chips and tossed them with cinnamon sugar, drizzled them with a honey reduction and served them with a side of honey yogurt dip. Delicious!



After that, we had to take the next steps with the class’ salmon that we began to cure for next week. I rinsed all the salt and herbs off the salmon while Natane made a molasses sauce. Then I re-cured the salmon that was to be used to the gravlox next week, and Natane brushed the remaining pieces with the sauce. After that, we cleaned up, took a quiz and went home!

It was so much fun to be able to come up with dishes based on the ingredients we had and to be able to have the time to be completely creative with what we wanted to do.