First day of AM Cafeteria, and I mean AM. Class starts at 5am, which means I have to be up by 4am. Groan. Decided I was not going to walk uphill in the dark (4:30am and it’s already 80 degrees) so I hopped on the motorcycle and was there in about 5 minutes.
Walked into class to find that I forgot my wire whisk (fortunately the first day is always a freebie, since how the heck can you possibly know what you’re going to need ahead of time unless you managed to corner someone from the previous class?) The chef gives us the menu plans, explains his expectations, and then kicks us out into the kitchen.
Now, I have to say up front here, several of us went into this class expecting the worst. Bad enough that we were going to have to work under high pressure without killing each other, but last week we fought a small battle against this new chef in order to keep our weekend. The chef was requiring us to show up on Saturday July 1st and Tuesday July 4th, even though these had previously been scheduled as a holiday weekend (and the school isn’t even open on the 4th.) We went to our Student Advisor, who got it overturned.
We went in this morning expecting fallout, yelling, shouting, angry mad chef throwing knives and threatening us with demerits for minor offenses. We were instead greeted by a happy, friendly guy who sounded a lot like the conductor for my sister-in-law’s orchestra. No mention was made at all of the previous week’s skirmish. He repeated several times how great we were doing, and how he was so surprised at how quickly we were picking it all up.
Erm. Okay.
Chef gave us the rundown on how to make breakfast, we ran around getting the required ingredients (I made a ton and a half of pancakes) and managed to serve everyone cheerfully and professionally. Pancakes, scrambled eggs, fried eggs, eggs over easy, omelets, bacon, and hash browns. W00t.
And then lunch happened.
Because we were new at this, there were two chefs working the kitchen and the menu was sort of scaled down. Between the two of them and the seven of us, we made Chicken with Biscuits and vegetarian pasta with two different kinds of cold salads plus the salad bar. It all happened so fast I don’t remember a lot of it, but I do know there was a panic with the salad bar. More lettuce, more spinach, more chick peas, the lettuce in the walk-in is weird looking so cut more, the spinach is wet and slimy, they ran out of Balsamic Vinegar, need more roasted peppers, more tomatoes for the deli line, we need more bread sliced, where’s the oil dressing, and a couple other things I must have blocked out. In all the confusion I somehow missed lunch.
So we get out of there at 1:30pm, tired but invigorated, and head down to Sanitation class. We had it outside under a tree on the church front lawn, and it lasted about 20 minutes before being called on account it’s too damn nice outside. Good thing I put all those quarters in the meter…