Pretty Perfect Pastry

This morning chef gave me my first job as setting up the pastry section. He also ordered everyone else to leave me alone and not give me any jobs until this station was perfect. Probably partly to do with the fact that it wasn’t set up well yesterday, and also partly because the ice cream freezer had been defrosted again last night and needed to be cleaned and refilled. So I went to work – gathering all the required dishes for the pastry section, and organizing the fridge. I filled ramekins with apple crumble mix then made another big batch of mix. I prepared more strawberry compote. I reorganized and relabelled the contents of the fridge. Then I decided to get a dessert of the day special going. There is always a dish of the day, and most often a starter of the day, but not always a dessert of the day, which there should be. I found lemon tart in the freezer, and decided to go with that and raspberry sorbet. The cook on mains helped me make a lime syrup to add to the whipped cream canister along with some cream to make a lime cream. So then I had to get this ready, but what was really annoying was the cream canister now contained the lime cream instead of plain whipped cream. They told me it wouldn’t be a big deal, since I probably would not get that many scone orders, but they were forgetting that I also need plain whipped cream for all of the ice cream desserts – the sundae, the banana split, the peach melba, and the chocolate berry coupe. So I had to whip up a bunch of cream and have it ready in a piping bag fitted with a star nozzle. The dessert was plated with some lime supremes and microgreens and a bit of crumble as well.

Dessert of the Day - Lemon tart with lime supreme, lime cream, microgreens, crumble, and raspberry sorbet.

There were a lot of us on in the kitchen today, and although we wanted to ensure we had plenty of prep done to last us through the weekend, we had quite a bit done already and weren’t feeling any panic. The only issue was we had someone brand new start today, who of course wasn’t familiar with anything, so had to be shown what to do. I worked away at my own small prep list, which included some more pastry tasks as well as handling all the orders for pastry, and making five liters of garlic whack (I mean mayo), coriander and lime yogurt sauce, horseradish crème fraiche, and garlic butter. I also kept being told by the cook on starters to handle some of his orders for him, even though it wasn’t that busy. This is slightly annoying when I am trying to get things done (for his station) and he keeps handing me off his jobs so he can do something less important, like sit in the office. 

The head chef was very nice to me again today, I think he is pretty impressed with me, and that’s why he picks on me less now. He will still be nit-picky about certain things I do, but in a nicer, “I’m only trying to show you how to do it with finesse” kind of way. Speaking of pretty impressed, he doesn’t like the use of the word pretty. “What kind of shape is the pastry section in for the weekend?” he asked me. “Pretty good.” I replied. “Pretty good. I don’t like that answer.” “Well, I’m not going to say perfect, because I am working on the crumble mix now. If I told you perfect, then I would just be lying to you and no one likes a liar.” Later on he was making fancy sandwiches with a new type of bread, and I watched him and asked questions as I was between orders, and asked if I could try some, and he said, “Of course you can!” He got very frustrated at one of the dishwashers, due to a language barrier, and had to get someone else to come in to translate. The dishwashers just aren’t doing all their jobs to his satisfaction lately. At the end of the day, I heard the mains cook ask how he thought the new cook had done, and chef replied with, “I don’t know yet. It’s hard to tell after one day. I have to see someone under pressure. Like Rebecca. She handles it well, she just starts singing through service.”

I was handling the starter section orders in the evening today. It wasn’t too bad at all. The only issue I had was when the other starter cook told me to start wrapping things up around 8:30p.m., as he did not expect any more orders to come in. I didn’t think this was a good idea considering we are open until 9:00p.m. and a bunch of dessert orders could still come in as well. A few more orders did come in after that, and I told him he could do them, since he said I could put everything away and I didn’t want to dig it out again. But I wasn’t doing them, I said. He passed enough of his orders off on me today. The waiter on the pass was cheering me on. But still, he didn’t do the orders and I ended up having to do them!