Walking Into A Mess

As I’ve mentioned before, I hate having two days off and walking in having no idea what my section will be like. First thing’s first, I glanced at the prep list left for me. From the looks of things, there wasn’t much for me to do, but I didn’t necessarily believe it. Next I glanced into my two refrigerators – the one in the pastry prep kitchen and the one in the service kitchen. I understand that no one else is going to put everything in the exact same spot I would – I have my own OCD organization to my kitchen – but there are general spots. Not much was in the correct spot, and even in the wrong kitchen, so I had to go searching.

I wanted to begin working on something, but wasn’t sure what to do and couldn’t even get my basic daily jobs done (scaling bread, scooping sorbet, traying petit fours) because I had no idea how many diners we were expecting tonight and none of the other chefs were in yet. So I read all the function sheets and notice bulletins to prepare for this week, and made my lists  - three wedding tastings and a large function were upcoming. I also made croutons, which I knew needed to be done.

Next I attempted to sort out my section. Here are some of the things I had to fix: labels – wrong dates or missing labels, cheese tray – not properly wrapped, some cheese dried out, too much blue cheese cut, mislabeled cheese, wrapped brie stored improperly and prepared incorrectly, sauces – improperly stored, crème brulée – incorrectly cut and stored in the wrong container and not wrapped, fruit – too many fruit flowers prepared, put in wrong location, too much fruit cut, fruit not properly rotated, passionfruit roll – completely ruined, sweets cut the wrong size, items stored in wrong fridge, items not ordered, etc.

This may be difficult to see - but they are the caramel spirals for the delice dessert. Usually they have to be made to order because it is too hot in the kitchen to store them and they collapse. Tonight I was practicing making them, and am becoming quite good at them. 

In between fixing things, I went on to scoop sorbet, tray and bake petit fours, make bread – which was quite difficult once I discovered we had no yeast and none had been ordered (tomato basil, cranberry almond, cheese onion), make financier mix, make delice chocolate, make caramel, make white chocolate and lime ganache. Then I knew I would have a lot to do tomorrow so I also prepped vanilla and lime crème brulée and chocolate mousse to make first thing tomorrow. 

I cleaned up and set up. For some reason we had six people in the kitchen with only thirty-six diners booked, so I knew I would only need to focus on pastry and not helping out with apps, starters, or veg. So I had a few small prep jobs I could do during slow points in service. I managed to slice delice chocolate, assemnble more delices, roll more passionfruit rolls, slice fruit, assemble a tray of fruit flowers, cut two full blocks of cheese, and make a bunch of caramel spirals. It seemed like no pastry orders were coming in at all – the first one must have come in after 8:00p.m., when service began at 6:00p.m. After that they were fairly slow, until they finally became steady near the end of service, and I actually ended earlier than usual. Plus got a lot of prep done in the evening!