Soup of the Day

Today is beginning to sound like a bit of a repeat – I began at 11:00a.m. working in the bar, mostly the dessert station – making sure everything was ready to go and enough back-up supplies were made, then helping out on the hotline as needed. However today, as every day, had it’s differences.

It began when chef asked me if my station was set up. It was, so I said yes. But apparently a few things had not been put away properly from the night before. Was it my fault, no? But should I have left it like that? No. A lesson you are better off learning early on in life, is that you will get the blame for things you aren’t responsible for. It’s inevitable, particularly in kitchens, particularly as a student intern, as they often get the brunt of it. I relearned that lesson today, and also learned not to tell chef my station was ready if it wasn’t 100% clean.

Speaking of clean, if we weren’t doing anything at any time today, we were told to clean. That is very typical in kitchens, and it saves on the cleaning time spent at the end of the night once service is done. The problem was, I was doing something pretty much all day. From baking tarts, to cooking apple filling, to making strawberry compote, flash frying battered fish, chopping vegetables, plating desserts, learning how to put together main courses, etc., I was keeping plenty busy. I made one mistake today – I used the wrong color cutting board for chopping mushrooms. This may not seem like a big deal, but in industrial kitchens, cutting boards are color-coded according to their intended use (blue for raw fish, yellow for cooked foods, etc.). Cutting boards are washed between uses of course, but this is still done for food safety reasons. Back home green is used for all produce, and there is no brown. Here, green is for salads and fruits, and brown is for vegetables. Sounds not that bad, except there is a big sign on the wall stating this. Whoops!

Around 6:30p.m., when supper rush was under way but dessert station was still pretty quiet, I was ready to begin scrubbing the place when one of the chef’s said to me, “You see that pile of carrots over there? Make a soup out of them. Add whatever you want, I’m not gonna ask. If it’s good, it will be the soup of the day tomorrow. If it’s bad, it’ll go to the compost bin.” No pressure. If they had given me a day, or even a few hours to think about this, sure, no problem. But this had to be done and cooled by this evening, and I had to use what we had on hand that wasn’t intended for any other dishes. As I was chopping the carrots, I started to think back to what I had learned in my soups, stocks, and sauces class. I like making sauces, and have become quite good at whipping one up on the fly, but soups? I guess I just had to think of it as a less rich sauce that you would want to eat a lot of. Immediately ginger, sweet potato, curry, and coconut come to mind when I think of carrot, but I didn’t want to do something typical. So then I thought of doing a brown butter base, and making some kind of coconut garnish to go with it. I made a carrot soup by sweating roughly chopped carrots along with a little celery and white onion in some butter I had browned. I added water and vegetable seasoning and boiled until carrots were just tender. Then I puréed it and added salt, nutmeg, Chinese five spice, and hot smoked paprika, playing around with the spices. I stirred in two cans of coconut milk, reblended, and adjusted the seasonings. While the soup was cooking, I mixed together a bunch of shredded coconut with some soft goat’s cheese and more of these spices and salt and pepper. I then spread it out on a large tray and toasted the mixture. I tasted, and thought they were both good and good together. I brought a sample over to the chef nervously. He had been giving me some odd looks while I had been working on the soup, and I wondered who had more confidence in me during that time – me or him (my confidence levels were quite low, overcome by nerves). He said it was quite good, and that it would be used tomorrow. The head chef was also impressed by it. I told them to be completely honest, but they both liked it. I breathed a sigh of relief. Wow, now I was impressed with myself. I can do this. This is only my fourth time in this kitchen. I still don’t know where everything is. But they trusted me enough to make a big pot of soup for the next day, without even clearing the plan with them first? And I did it in a couple hours, by myself, spur of the moment. Wow! I’m certainly feeling better now than I was this morning when chef told me my station was not, in fact, set-up properly.

My soup of the day - Brown Butter Spiced Carrot with Toasted Coconut Crumble

I got home late today, because we did need to scrub the place. Also, although we technically close at 9:00p.m., we can’t exactly turn patrons away and orders came in quite late. I left around 10:15p.m., but my dessert station was spic and span!