Long Time No Blog

Sorry folks, I know it's been a long long time since I've posted. School has been crazy and I've been slacking in the remembering to take home my camera department. Luckily I haven't been slacking in the picture taking department (not too much at least). So let me go back to where I left off.

It's been a while, so why not start with something hardcore French, like aspic? We had a garde manger workshop, which is basically all cold preparations. Normally in a resto the person in charge of this does all the salads, cold apps, and terrines...which means jelly and lots of it. More than even that trout was jellified. I have a photo here of the whole buffet we did, but I don't really have closeups because the chef was standing over our dishes - all of which were so shiny that his reflection was peering back at me with every picture I tried to take.

We were a bit taken aback by this workshop because the way they do workshops is to give us the name of the dish, the list of ingredients, and then let us go at it for 5 hours, or in this case, 10 (spread out over two days) with absolutely no instruction or explanation. So we had all these terrines and fish mousses and salads and canapes and just had to do our best. No one ever went over the true French meaning of garde manger which means you have to gloss EVERYTHING to a high sheen with jelly. Slice your fish mousse? Brush those slices with jelly. Plating a terrine? Make a mirror of jelly on the bottom of the tray. I don't know about you but seeing the reflection of fmy ellow buffet eaters as I'm trying to serve myself a delicious slice of fish mousse is sure to help curb my appetite.

So our group was really well-prepared and we thought we were doing awesome until we realized last minute that everything had to be coated in jelly. We were then forced to quickly use gelatin leaves to finish the glossing because we ran out of meat gelatin. Gelatin helps, you see, to make sure than nothing dries out. The French think they're so logical. Is your cake dry? Soak it in boozey syrup. Will your pork pate dry out on the buffet? Preserve it in jelly. Why not just solve the problem at the source? Why not make a moist cake to start? Why preserve something in jelly after the fact? Why not just avoid putting foods with a tendency for dryness on a buffet table for hours on end? Anywho....the fish mouse, that lovely item with the spinach spiral in the middle, was truly the hit of the show. And it was done by Yours Truly. It's Tilapia (yuck) and scallop mousse on either side and salmon mousse rolled up in the spinach in the middle. Heidi's monkfish terrine (in the picture with her proudly displaying it) was a piece of art, truly. Monkfish, cherry tomats, parsley all suspended patiently in layer after layer of jelly. The chefs were super impressed. It's funny because the chef kept warning us to put plastic wrap in the molds to be sure that our masterpieces would unmold....and Heidi forgot. Then she panicked and the chef was being a pessimist. He didn't think it would come out. I reassured her - a decade's worth of jelly salads unmolded in the 1970's without any plastic wrap. Heat a towel, loosen the outer layer of jelly and SHLOOP! out it comes. Voila! Magic. Housewives 1, French Chefs 0.


We were also smart enough to buy some pansies

(edible) and put one on each plate of our buffet to tie them all together and make them beautiful. It was fantastic. Allison's gallotine (cold deboned poultry rolled in a log and stuffed) was also a work out art, though I don't have a closeup shot of that.

So due to the lack of my photos without chef-face reflected back, I only have these few to show for now, but my friend and groupmate Allison has pics of each dish individually and when she finally gets around to sending them to me, I will post them, each with a description of what they are. Yay jelly!