Week 8

For my final project, I am making a cookbook. Since I recently learned how to make an aioli, I wanted to include that in one of my recipes. I had the idea to make a salmon dish with pesto aioli covered in puff pastry. I also added sautéed mushrooms and tomato for a little bit more flavor and color.

Week 7

This week I learned how to make an aioli. An aioli is a mayonnaise that has garlic in it. To make mayonnaise oil is emulsified with a base of egg yolk, lemon juice, water, and mustard. The process making this emulsification begins with whipping the egg yolk base and slowing incorporating the oil. As the food processor incorporates the oil faster, the oil droplets become smaller, causing the sauce to thicken. Because of the unique composition mayonnaises, they have to be kept at specific temperatures to maintain their consistency.

One unique food we made this week were star fruit sandwiches with an herb spread. I thought it was a little bit weird, but star fruit are in season, so why not?

Week 6

This week at my internship, we catered a wedding. For this I did usual prep work of chopping lots vegetables. I also did a lot of baking. One of the unique things I made was cornmeal, lemon, and black pepper cookies. I have not had a chance to try these cookies yet, as I just made the dough and scooped it, but they look very interesting. I also made several cakes including a ginger cake with pistachios and orange cream cheese frosting.

Since today is Purim, I made hamantashen. Hamantashen are somewhat similar to sugar cookies, but have orange juice in the batter and are commonly filled with fruit jam or poppy seed. The one thing I discovered when making these cookies was that I could not rely on the recipe. My first problem was the dough was very sticky. Since Arizona is dry I did not want to add too much flour so I refrigerated the dough to make it easier to roll out, but it was still too sticky to shape into triangles. I caved and added more flour. This solved the texture problem. My other problem was that first batch was overcooked. I baked them for 15 minutes, when the recipe said 20, and they were still over cooked. I fiddled with the recipe and made excellent hamantashen.

Week 5

This week at my internship I did mostly prep, dicing gallons of vegetables.

One night I made an interesting dinner.  It was a salad with a peanut butter-cherry dressing. The salad also had grilled chicken, which was marinated in a sauce also containing cherries. The sweetness of the cherries complimented the saltiness of the peanut butter and made a very tasty and unique dish.

Week 4

One day this week I made various types of cookies. One type was very unique.  I made a sort of chocolate chip cookie with a twist. I started out by making simple dough that one normally uses for a typical chocolate chip cookie. Then, instead of adding chocolate chips and walnuts, I added chili powder and white chocolate chunks.  At first I thought this was a very strange combination, well I still think it is a bit unusual, but the spice of the chili powder actually brings out the sweetness in the white chocolate.

I asked about the origin of the white chocolate chip cookies with chili powder and the response I received was “why not?” Many of the recipes I have made so far have been traditional recipes taken from various cookbooks that have been amended slightly. If the resulting food tastes good, then why not make it again?

Week 3

Recently I made biscuits for Sunday brunch. I have made biscuits before, but never in this quantity. One problem I find when rolling out dough of any kind, is that dough often sticks to the rolling pin. If you flour the dough too much it becomes dry and falls apart, and if you do not flour it enough, the dough sticks to the rolling pin. The solution to this problem is to lightly flour the dough and then have a piece of plastic wrap between the dough and the rolling pin. The plastic wrap easily peels off the dough and the rolling pin in clean.

Week 2

Since Friday was Valentines Day, the past week was a little hectic. For Valentines Day Feast has a new menu and I prepared a few parts of the dishes.

Some of the most time consuming projects I had were juicing. One of the menu items included romaine juice. I not only learned how operate a juicer, but that romaine lettuce hearts are very difficult to juice. The resulting lettuce juice smelled a lot like a freshly mowed lawn. It is definitely not something I would ever think of to do. In addition to juicing romaine lettuce hearts, I also juiced carrots. The carrot juice was used in a risotto dish. I found that carrots are much easier to juice since they are much less flexible. Even though they were easier to juice, I had to juice a lot more of them, because carrots have a much lower water content. Since I peeled so many carrots, my hands has been orange for the past couple days.

I also helped make an interesting salmon dish today.  It was a salmon filet with a cream cheese, lemon, and dill spread, covered in cucumber scales.