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.

Week 1

Hello!

For my senior research project I am examining how restaurants make the recipes they use. In order to study the creation of recipes in action, I am working at Feast, a prominent local restaurant.

This week I started learning the ropes and the inner workings of a kitchen. Since the gem show is this week, Feast is very busy, and so I have started to help out with catering. There were a lot of parties this week, and so I mainly learned how to make various appetizers. One thing I did a lot of was put various combinations of ingredients on spears of Belgian endive. Belgian endive, for those who have never eaten it, is a leaf vegetable that looks similar to a tiny head of romaine lettuce. The size, shape, and neutral taste of Belgian endive makes it perfect for hors d’oeurves. During the week I put hummus with olives, beets, butternuts squash, oranges, and ceviche on these leaves. In addition to making lots of hors d’oeurves I had my own solo project of making asparagus custard, which entailed using six bunches of asparagus, two quarts of cream, and a large bucket.

Thanks.