Week of 9/27 - 10/1
Again, time just flies when you’re having fun. I literally didn’t know what day it was this entire week. Everyday seem to blend due to the amount of stress and adrenaline that’s going through your body. It was scary yet kind of fun. I think this is because I thrive on the stress and I love any chance to get my adrenaline going. Since we had a good idea what hot food competition was basically about we needed to turn up the heat. So this week regardless of what day it was everyone was working in turbo charged mode.
Monday was our prep day once again; so we had the whole entire day to get our mise en place and equipment ready for the upcoming team skills relay and the cooking phase. Boy are there a lot of equipment that we need to just do a hot food run-though. By the end of the day we were pretty much prepped for the week but we heeded to go over our equipment list once more. We ended the day by huddling together and talked about going home and really thinking over our station’s dishes.
Tuesday was skills day and I was shaking both with excitement and fear. I was excited because it would be my first time in a team relay to do pastry and I was shaking in fear because I also had vegetable cuts, which aren’t one of my stronger skills, the second run through. For pastry I started off with a bang; once we were given the go ahead I quickly carried my sheet try loaded with my mass amount of ingredients and equipment to the table and set up. I was so pumped with adrenaline and excitement that my hands were shaking as I separated eggs. I blasted through pastry cream quickly and that’s where I lost my momentum. I think because my orange was on the softer side it was a little harder to zest and my paring knife wasn’t sharp enough so it tore through the segments while I was cutting them. Although I lost my momentum in segmenting an orange I quickly got it back with my pie dough which got us a slight lead. Overall I did good, two points away from a perfect score but I defiantly need to work on knife skills, which brings me to the second team skills run through and my turn at vegetable cuts.
I didn’t do that bad but there is a lot of room for improvement, especially with my tourneed carrots. In the beginning my knife skills were really close but I think because we were thrown a lot of different things like cold platter, the hot food dishes, and fabrication for both fish and chicken I put it off and because of that it suffered a bit. This run through just gave me a wakeup call. It tells me that I need to be rounded with skills and that I I really need to focus on cuts as much as I do the other things.
Wednesday was our third run through. Oh my goodness was this day a horrible day or what. We still had a small bit of organizing of our prep to do in the morning and we had our mixer locked up. Oh and we were the first team to hit the kitchens. Great. Thankfully we got the mixer back and everything seemed to be in order so we got into the kitchen, set up, and just went to work. I had salads so I went to work and tried to bang out my dishes as fast as I could so I could help others. My cuts for the beets were uneven and I took a while to do it so that just reinforces my need to practice my knife skills. Half way into the run through the gas goes out. We were all freaking. Good thing I put in my crisps and beets in the oven prior to this happening. So I wasn’t hugely affected by it. But entrée suffered because the ovens shut off when the gas stopped flowing so chicken was still raw and needed a few more minutes. With everything coing at us we adapted and everyone just moved around as needed. We ended up quickly deep frying the chicken to cook it thoroughly and I helped anyone that needed help. Although we had a rocky start we actually came in two minutes ahead of our previous time, which is awesome. I think our group has this kind of energy and communication that we power through things and we call out for help to anyone that can lend a hand. We also push one another which is great. All this paid off and we’re improving.
Thursday was our last run-through before final exam. Things went by really smoothly today. Everyone had timelines stating where they needed to be at a certain time in the competition and it actually helped a lot. We could tell where we were and if we needed help with anything. For the most part I was on schedule for everything but I didn’t get to fry my chicken till later because I was fussing around with the potatoes. Those potatoes for the croquettes just didn’t seem to want to go through the china cap. One of the reasons why I think it didn’t go through was it didn’t boil long enough so it was harder to push through. This took a bulk of my time and made me have to push back sautéing my chicken till about 55 minutes into competition. Other than that everything seemed to go well I got my vegetables done, chestnuts were cooked through, and sausages were stuffed. So today I was ahead sometimes then I fell back. Overall we improved by a leap and bound. We improved our time by fifteen minutes. Holy man that is just awesome. Granted certain things didn’t make it to the plate we overall did well today, well to me I think we did.

Week 10/4- 10/8
Since Monday was our day off Tuesday we began prepping for everything. We divided up which hor d'oeuvres each group would do and had to get rolling on our proteins, salads, sauces, and garnishes and our canapés. The hor d'oeuvres that we selected was a Kauai shrimp with two toned tomato soup and summer roll with hoisin peanut sauce. Our canapés we had a clam shell profiterole filed with a goat cheese mousse and garnished with a port wine pearl. Monday night I made a sample batch using a pate choux recipe I learned in fundamentals but it came out more like tear drops than clam shells. So I just used them to gauge the size we needed and made another batch using a recipe I learned in patisserie. This recipe came out great. You could actually see the ridges and almost identify it as a clam shell. So Tuesday we didn’t have much prep to do because it was too early to do certain things so we once we finished everything that needed to be taken care of that day we went through each list and decided if it would keep until Friday. Then from there we kept ourselves busy.
Wednesday was just another day of prep. We had everything we needed done and only had items that needed to be done the day prior to do. So we were in pretty good shape. The only major setback was our terrine. We had our mousseline for both inlay and outer later done so that was good but we were just waiting on the cow tongue to come in. Then from there we still had to cook it and then make the inlay cook that, then cook the entire terrine. A lot of work. The tongue eventually came in late and we had to scramble to get everything prepared and ready for cooking. At the end of the day we got the inlay cooked and got it set inside of the outer layer and it was ready to go but since everyone needed to leave we decided to hold off on cooking the terrine until Thursday that way we wouldn’t be rushing to cook it. The one thing that we forgot to do was to put a little aspic inside of the terrine to hold it all together. But other than that the day was good.
Thursday was the last day of prep and we were slightly behind schedule a bit. Things that needed to be done the day prior weren’t done so we needed to get those things done. One item in particular our terrine. Although busy as it was, I was overwhelmed mentally with the sphereifications I needed to get done. My goodness the entire day I was playing scientist. Sodium Alginate, Calcium chloride, and sodium Citrate all chemicals that I don’t wanna hear anymore about right now. Let’s just say that I was mentally exhausted from trying to get port wine and maple syrup to sphereify the entire day. In the end I got the port wine to sphere up but the maple syrup I had trouble with. Eventually I just gave up and needed something else to do. So I cleaned up quickly and picked up some of the other things on our prep list. The good thing was that we got caught up and finished everything so that was good. The bad thing was that I still had to come up with some way to make the maple spheres.
That same day I worked at my job and had literally no time to experiment with it like I would’ve done so I decided to just make faux caviar. Faux caviar is just tapioca cooked three-fourths of the way through then marinated in the desired liquid. The slightly under cooked tapioca will absorb most of liquid and well marinate and absorb the flavors. I bought some tapioca on the way home and just whipped it out according to a recipe I had. This was my first time making anything like this so I was sort of winging it, hoping in the back of my mind that it would work out in the end.
Friday is the day we’ve been prepping and waiting for this entire week. Hookipa, KCC’s annual fundraising event. We got to school at about 10 and only had about three hours to do some last minute prep and pack everything that we needed. Oh my god the faux caviar was partially a success but not really. The liquid didn’t absorb as much as I wanted it to so I had to rush in class and boil them thoroughly then marinate them as much as I could. The ones I marinated in port wine turned out well they just needed to cook a little longer. The maple syrup ones were horrible I needed to rinse off the excess sugar and cook them thoroughly and try to marinate them in maple syrup long enough to get some flavor in them. After this I just hoped for the best and if anything I was going to leave it off. Then we were transported to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel arrived at about 3:45pm from there we had until 5:15 to get our platters, canapés, and hor d'oeuvres out. Our group decided to just split up and take care of each section. So I took care of the platter and our canapés, Melanie helped me get the first platter out and started on our soups, and Trevor and Charles did the summer rolls. We were crunched on time a little but we divided it all up and in the end it turned out well. I think the plating up the platter through me off because it wasn’t as organized as when we did it in class. But I eventually got into the hand of things and just platted it up as close as possible and things went relatively smoothly.
Holy man it was nerve racking when we plated everything up. All the other students came in and just stared at us, whispering, and taking picture of us. It was stressful. After the first wave of things we had some time to grab a drink of water and reset. But after 5:30pm everyone started to eat our starters and we became busy. All our platters were running out and people were just tearing through our hor d'oeuvres and canapés, so we were busy nonstop till about 6:30pm. Overall this was great the amount of stress and worry fueled me to work harder. I mean as chef we put ourselves into stressful situations and thrive on it. The rush of adrenaline just gives us this sort of high. It’s great. So I really loved it.