A party

Friday night we were supposed to be doing a private event for a group of 80. I got in Friday afternoon as the chef (she doesn’t like to be called chef, but its just easier terminology) was trying to figure out how to make our food stretch because apparently it was instead going to be 100. People complain that Top Chef throws those guys into situations that would never happen in real life--except that they do.

The main issue was that we only had made 85 portions of the bavarese (halfway between a pudding and a panna cotta) that we were serving for dessert--the rest we could just do slightly smaller portions and make it alright. Luckily our regular menu serves a bavarese but in a different flavor; our plan was to just slip some of these in and sauce them up the same as all the others in the hope that nobody would notice the inconsistency. We didn’t have any more mandarins with which to make new pudding anyway, and they were all set in individual cups.

I started my day by prepping a squash that was long and thin, like butternut. When I say long, I mean it--I needed two cutting boards for this thing because it was about the length of my leg. So perhaps “prep” is also not quite the right word. Because of the size, maybe “butcher” would be a better term. Not to mention the fact that the squash was very hard and the knives in the kitchen all a little dull. At one point chef mentioned that my grunts of effort made it sound somewhat like I was participating in a wrestling match (or at least I think that’s what she meant....). It took about an hour and a half to get all the squash peeled, diced, and in the oven. At this point I could hardly grip a knife anymore and had lost all upper body strength.

Starter: Puree of roasted squash soup with black kale

The soup is super simple, with the ingredients being just squash, a bit of potato, oil, butter, almost caramelized onions, broth, salt, and pepper. It has a nice smooth texture even though we don’t pass it through a fine strainer, and the color is that bright orangey-yellow that makes squash soups so wonderfully delicious. The black kale (cavolo nero) we just boiled off quickly and sauteed in a pan. Turns out that at the restaurant they don’t overcook their greens (much).

Primo: Tortelli filled with broccoli and served with a sweet paprika sauce

Tortelli are big tortelloni; they are about the size of a golf ball. These we filled with a broccoli and ricotta puree which I was not a huge fan of. The broccoli was very overpowering and still had the little bits of florets intact, which meant that the filling had a kind of rough texture. We make fresh pasta at the restaurant, but the rough filling sort of hid the nice texture of the dough. The paprika sauce is very neat, a definite improvement on a red pepper coulis, with the sauce being much stronger and richer while missing that taste of bell pepper which I dislike anyway. I still haven’t learned how we do the sauce, but I will for sure.

Secondo: Roulade of chicken stuffed with prosciutto and fig with potato-swiss chard puree

Myself and the sous, Susanna were cutting the chickens while Keiji was doing the stuffing and rolling of the birds. About halfway through the chef walked over and asked Keiji where the prosciutto was. “Prosciutto?” was essentially his answer.

Hence ensued a discussion of how it is hard to stuff something with prosciutto and dried figs when you don’t have the prosciutto, and from here we began a discussion of how to get prosciutto into the dish. We immediately decided we didn’t have time to re-roll and -stuff the birds already done, and we had to be consistent, so the first thing was that we continue on. We then thought of various plans, from cooking the birds with prosciutto on top (no, because then the string would be under the prosciutto), cooking the birds, untying them, and adding prosciutto on top when we went to reheat them (no, we’d lose the crispy skin of the birds and the prosciutto would get tough in the oven, or would fall off when cutting), pushing little pieces of prosciutto into each slice after cutting (no, that’s stupid), or sauteeing up cubed prosciutto and just drizzling it on top as a garnish and pretending that the menu was wrong, not us (that’s what we did). The skin on these birds was deliciously crispy.

Dessert: Bavarese of mandarin orange with Strega sauce.

Strega is some kind of Italian liqueur. I can’t figure out what’s in it, but it makes me think of what mint would be like if it were a spice instead of an herb. Good news was we ended up having enough bavarese because after being told 100 were coming, only 70 showed. This is probably in large part because while they originally were coming at eight or eight thirty, we got a call at half past seven that they wouldn’t arrive until just after nine. At eight thirty we were told just before ten. And they did show up just before ten, but my guess is some of the conventioneers decided it was too late and they were tired and so they went home. This solved some of our problems, but made it a very late night. However, I really enjoyed it and was glad to have so much to do all evening (or at least until 8, when our prep was all ready and we were set up to go with no guests. During this down time, the owner opened up a bottle of prosecco for us, we did an oil tasting, and we discussed why it is that American cooks work so much harder than Italian cooks, but whether or not there was an ensuing difference in quality of cuisine. The jury is still out.)