I woke up pretty early this morning because I was so anxious and excited about this first day in the kitchen with the whole crew (I've only met like 3 - 4 kitchen staff as of this morning). I left my house about 15 minutes earlier than I normally would to make sure I would be on time. However, River Road was plagued with WTF-UTILITY-TRUCK-POLICE-CAR road blocks... apparently some telephone poles needed to be replaced so dual lanes were merged into a single lane... quite annoying. I lost a few minutes there, but I thought I still had enough time to stop by Wal-Mart to purchase a hat to keep hair from falling into food (The Chef advised me to get one... but I think I shoulda just gotten a haircut). This is a shot on my way home... they were STILL working!#
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| From Would Jus Eat It? |
I bought a crappy New Jersey Devils hat because they didn't have much of a selection. The stupid guy at the register decided that the $10 dollar hat (which had a blatant $10 sign on the rim) would be 20 dollars. Luckily I noticed, which made things take longer than I wanted it to. He had to call his manager over because the damn price was different. As the manager went to check on the location of the hats to see the prices, the dumbass realizes that he just scanned it two times (I had previously suggested that the machine probably read the tag wrong and to do it again)... and I'm out the Wal-mart door 5 minutes later than I expected. Dumbass.
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| From Would Jus Eat It? |
This made me late for the 11 o clock meeting for the first day of training at Uproot Restaurant. Yeah, I showed up at 11:03 or so but our Chef and everyone else were already seated and discussing his vision for our kitchen and the direction the restaurant is taking. The 5 - 6 of us each recieved a copy of dishes and pricing for them. I was so excited when I saw this preliminary menu because it was full of simple ingredients that will complement each other very well on a plate and wonderful choices of proteins and fresh locally grown vegetables. They also have a few luxurious ingredients such as Fois Gras (YUM) and quail from a Farm on Griggstown (which is 6 minutes away from my house) which I consider really high quality (expensive) so I'm pretty excited to use some of those ingredients in the future. Well, I already can use the quail but properly using Fois Gras may require a bit more experience... Deveining and cleaning while maintaining the quality, texture and flavor. Yum. This is our little employee handbook which is about 15 pages of very useful restaurant and upscale food service (not bullshit you see at Charlie Browns on Rt. 206, FUCK THAT ESTABLISHMENT, I'm going to burn it to the ground) type information.
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| From Would Jus Eat It? |
I also got a copy of the 6 page wine list... holy CRAP. This thing is ridiculous!
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| From Would Jus Eat It? |
The Good Stuff! One of my first laughs/smiles of the day was staring at the immersion circulator and seeing the temperature at 133.7 degrees farenheit. That made me laugh, I reached for my phone to take a picture, but by then, the temperature had gone up. Fail.
So what exactly did I do today that had to do with cooking? Barely ANYTHING! Early in the afternoon, I was lucky enough that the Chef allowed me to sit in on a front-of-the-house tutorial on bar tending and serving policies given by our manager and sommellier, Jonathan. I also got a little copy of three of Uproot's signature cocktails. "The Tree", "The Fruit", and "The Root". The ingredients featured in each cocktail sound amazing and also make perfect sense with the name of the cocktail. The spirits used in these cocktails are spirits that are locally produced and very unique. For example, Johnathan, explained how Appleton Estate Rum uses sugarcane specifically for the production of rum, whereas a commercial brand, such as Bacardi, buys all sugarcane waste product (by product) that comes from making granulated sugar and produces rum from that. I'm not saying I don't like using Bacardi or dislike the flavor, it's just nice to know that Uproot favors local, small companies, rather than the big commercial mofos (Yay for shopping at Wal-mart today!).
Anyway, back to those cocktails. The Tree uses very woodsy flavors with Gin, The Fruit uses an Apple brandy with our homemade grenadine, The Root uses the rum with ginger. Of course there are tons of other ingredients such as flavored simple syrups and fresh fruits, and sodas, but I'm not going to give the ingredients out, come try it for yourself!
www.uprootrestaurant.com !!!!!
Soon after a quick lesson in bartending and the flow of the front of the house, I assisted the manager with the movement of $5500 worth of alcohol. There is such an amazing collection of wines and spirits... I don't know how I'll ever learn each and every Pinot we have or what goes with what... For now, I'll just say Red wine and White wine. Just kidding, I'm a bit more experienced than that... I'm pretty sure I can tell a Riesling from a Chardonnay and a Pinot from a Cabernet.
Back in the kitchen. The Chef wanted me to work on my knife skills a bit and cut some stalks of celery. I've never used a vegetable peeler on celery to take the fibery outside strings away... but I think I will from now on if I serve celery in a salad. After that, I got to listen in on a quick tutorial on cleaning/butchering meat. I gotta get myself a nice meat cleaning knife in the future. It sucks that you can only use like 60% of what you buy from farm. There's so much fat that needs to be cut off and internal linings to be trimmed away. A 4 dollar per pound cost of meat would ACTUALLY cost you like 5.50 per pound. Anyway, I got sent off to do some actual work after watching that. I peeled, quartered, and juiced 20 pears and watched over a pot that was reducing the liquid. I was told to SKIM the mofo constantly and skim I did. The reduction smelled amazing and I definitely have to start using fresh fruit reductions at home... the smell of 20 pears reduced to 3 - 4 cups of syrup is unbelievable.
For my last little task the Chef asked me to prepare a few cuts of a carrot which is a final task for culinary school. I've never done this before but I've seen it done and I tried to mimic what I saw... I think I did a decent job and I wish I had taken a picture of it. I completely missed a cut (the julienne...) and instead I went straight to a fine julienne. Fail. I knew something was missing. Batonnet (Big sticks), Julienne (Match sticks), Fine julienne (Thinner), Medium dice, Brunnoise (Small dice), Fine Brunnoise (Tiny dice). Need to learn how to not fail so hard in the future. Also had way too much scrap carrot gone to waste. Luckily we didn't measure it... I probably only had like less than half yield and the rest waste. Shit. This is what some of it was supposed to look like (Mine actually came out MUCH better, that person's julienne is crap and inconsistent, batonnets way too long, nothing really square):
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| From Would Jus Eat It? |
(This was taken from someone else's blog from 2007)
I'll make sure I take a picture when I do this at home, I'm not too bad and I don't think it's that "difficult".
I guess that's about all for my first day.
Why on Earth does Google have a nice shot of Big Bird's crotch on the homepage today? Oh, 40th Anniversary! Cool.
Funny link of the day. Guy gets ROCKED by the recoil of a rifle. Intentionally holding it like a retard...
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