The passing week was all about salads, fresh vegetables, cooked vegetables and grains mixed in salad. It sounds like a pretty easy week but the underlying purpose of this week was actually gaining more cutting skills. We sliced bigger amounts of vegetables to julienne, émincé, ciselér, brunoise, mirepoix, paysanne and turné. What was interesting about this week is that we worked mostly independently, having only few short demos. This was all about cutting, fast and precise.
Mercredi: Crudités Variées
Colorful vegetable for the fresh salad
Looks like a salad ingredients
Starting the juliennes with a mandoline
Chef's Juliennes of celery root
Julienning my red cabbage. Stained my fingers purple that became black later that evening. Dad I was thinking of you while doing this. My thin wasn't thin enough.
Did you ever see that size of a lettuce drier?
Made a mayonnaise, classic vinaigrette and citron olive oil vinaigrette as the three dressings for the salad
chef's plating
like spaghetti but it's julienne
The celery root with mayo and carrot with vinaigrette
...
Red cabbage with red vinegar. Did not like that one.
Cucumbers with chives
Tomatoes and radishes
Lettuce
Chef's final presentation
My final presentation
The Juliennes were fine but I presented not clean enough and under the light oily spots were visible on the plate. 🙁
Jeudi: Légumes à la Grecque
We had artichokes and this day's main goal is to learn the "turning" technique
While cisoléing my onions (we had 3 onions had to be cut very fine) I cut my left index finger and had to put bandage and rubber protector from water and it made cutting the rest a lot harder and slippery (and even more so for the next day). The problem was that it put me out of focus and since then things started to fly around the room and I had to get it together to finish on a good time.
Turn it like a globe over one finger
What are we doing here and why exactly? The same thing we did to the zucchini
Start cooking, olive oil, cisolé of onions, garlic, every one of 6 vegetable separated (this is the pearl onions) and then white wine, salt and pepper, water.
Lemon water for the artichokes
Anatomy of the artichoke
This is a shitty artichoke! We want fresher!
Pulling out the outer leafs
Position of the hands when turning
Note to self: artichoke stains won't bleach out of the fabric. Don't let it touch my apron again!!
Chef makes it look easy again, it's not! Hands are tired!
Cut the yakki away
Keep turning
Mellon ball away all the hairy inside
Chef seasoning his cooked vegetables with some special salt
How can we make this look nice over a plat?
My cooked vegetables before mixing them
Chef plating
Plated and looking good!
My vegetables waiting for the artichoke, cook faster!
My plated dish, it got a very good comment!!
Just needed a drizzle of sauce, this pic was taken after this drizzle. It was so yammy.
Personal confession: I was wondering why we’re cutting the carrots and zucchini like that but fact is: it taste better that way.
Vendredi: Taboulé (couscous, quinoa and au blé which is wheat)
Vegetables and grains
couscous, from semolina
Au blé
Red quinoa
Many herbs but not as much as I'm used to have in a Taboulé salad
Che'f cut vegetables, the yellow thing in the left container is the lemon zest of three lemons cut into 1mm squares. This was a nightmare with the bandage over my finger!
Chef demo of fileting a grapefruit
Take the avocado out his skin in one spoon scoop
Every grain had his different mix of herbs and vegetables.
Quinoa
Couscous
Au blé
Mixed and seasoned
..
Served in three glasses
Nice to nibble over these. Chef was checking mostly the presentation and cuts of the vegetables but I asked nicely that he will have a taste (in french of course, who can say no) and I got some pointers on the seasoning as well. And the presentation was good so I'm proud!
As you can understand I had a very healthy leftovers this week. I noticed how I’m tempted to put more lemon and garlic to everything. I didn’t consider myself as a big fan of the Mediterranean flavor but I guess I am. Few last words about this week I want to tell all you Israelis reading my blog that we can be very proud of the Israeli’s cucumbers which are the best in the world (Chef’s notation in class)!!! Wohooo!
from now on i will only cut my carrots and squash like the chef says… well, maybe I’ll start from tomorrow… or the next day… maybe only when the chef is watching 😉
הצילומים הפורנוגרפיים של הירקות ממש עושים חשק אז עברתי על כל הבלוג ואז יצאתי לאכול שוארמה – מאוד ים תיכוני
הבעיה היא שכשאני כותבת על האוכל, או עושה שיעורי בית (לקרוא מתכונים) או כשאנחנו לומדים בכיתה, זה עושה אותי רעבה כל פעם מחדש!
Very nice and very healthy!! I liked that food..
And also learned what is julienne..
[…] the chef is in a bad mood, everyone is in a bad mood. Next day my onions and carrots were cooked (a la grecque) for the salmon entree dish. Legumes a la […]
[…] a good practice to a technique which is the reason I’m doing the stage. While in school we learn how to turn it, we only had 2 artichokes to turn and now I can proudly say I can turn the hell out of an […]