Teafoodie: Last week

Sorry for being MIA last week - whew, it was a busy week and I had no time to upload pictures or post anything. 5 weeks left in Phase 1 and then a week long break. I can't wait! I'm enjoying my time, but not having any downtime is wearing on me.

On Monday we made potato gnocchi. If you've never had gnocchi, it's basically pasta, but made with potatoes instead of flour. Blah! Would much prefer pasta to gnocchi, although ours was a bit starchy, which may have had something to do with why I didn't like it. It's fun to make, though and I may try it again. We made a tomato sauce with fennel to go along with it. It was made with both fennel and toasted fennel seeds. Different - a bit of anise flavor to go with it. Of course, we added a splash of Pernod to the sauce to round it out (Pernod is anise flavored liquor). We also made a quick salad of frisee (bitter), with roasted red peppers and a vinaigrette. The frisee was too bitter for me, but I ate the peppers. For dessert, we made jam cookies - sandwich cookies with jam (or chocolate ganache) inside. The top of the cookie is cut out, so you can see what's in the middle. Sorry, I forgot to take pictures that night.

On Wednesday, we had a guest speaker, so we had a relatively easy night. Our guest speaker was the woman from the school who does the placement for the externships. Nothing really new, just to start to get us thinking about where we'd like to extern. I still have no idea. As scared as I am of working in a restaurant, I think it'll be the best training. Hotel is another option, but could be overnight hours. At any place, I think it'll be a lot of hours for very little pay. Really scary to think about.

Anyway, that night we did a whole roasted chicken. We stuffed the chicken with vegetables and lemon wedges, salt and pepper. We then browned the whole outside in a skillet before putting it in the oven to finish cooking. After butchering the chicken, we put the carcass and vegetables back in the skillet with some chicken stock for an au jus.

With the chicken we did mashed potatoes made with garlic confit. The raw garlic is covered with oil and put in the oven until tender. You can then use the garlic-infused oil or the garlic cloves. We used the oil, which was ok, but I'd prefer using butter instead. The flavor seemed a little funky.

We also did asparagus - nothing big - cooked, shocked then sauteed with salt and pepper.