Well, it's official. My last day of work for my internship at Restaurant Eugene will be August 6th (3 weeks from now). It feels like this internship has been flying by, but it's not over yet, so on to what I did on Friday.
When I finally made it to work, I got to work on the Persian Pickled Peaches that I was supposed to have done on tuesday but didn't have enough of the ingredients that I needed. But now, the white wine vinegar was supposed to come in that morning and I just had to mince the ginger, which was the first thing I did upon arrival.
When I was about half way through mincing the amount of ginger that I needed, the vinegar arrived. Now I finally had everything I needed to pickle the peaches. First step was to soak the ginger in the vinegar and toast the coriander seeds. After that, all I had to do was combine everything together, bring the pot to a boil, and let it boil for 5 minutes.
While waiting for the peaches to boil, I went on a scavenger hunt for jars and lids to put the peaches in. Eventually, and after a phone call to David, I found enough jars and lids for the peaches (as it would turn out, I would only need about 1/3 of the jars that I found).
As I was jarring the peaches, we had some drama in the kitchen. I won't go into details, but I will say that Chef Hopkins was furious. I will also say that Chef wasn't mad at anyone that works at Restaurant Eugene, but rather at something that happened. For at least the next half hour, Chef was going around the kitchen informing everyone about how to handle that situation in the future.
Even though Chef was angry, he still had his sense of humor. At one point he said, "I need to hang out in the walk-in for a bit to cool off." Ryan told Chef, "I just finished making some lemonade if you would like some, Chef." To which Chef replied, "Ooh, lemonade. It'd better be good or else i might just pop!"
My next task was to work on the squash au gratin for service that evening. I had to very thinly slice squash and layer them at least 8 layers (I had enough for 10 layers) tall on a half sheet pan with cream and salt. Once I was finished, I put it in the oven for 20 minutes and then into the walk-in until needed.
As I was working on the au gratin, Jackson asked me to cryovac some fish that he had portioned with olive oil for him. I have done this many times before, so this didn't take me very long.
Since I arrived to work at noon (two hours later than I am scheduled) I decided that I would stay two hours later than I was supposed to, and after finishing the au gratin, I had about 30 minutes left before I was supposed to leave, so Woody told me to organize the walk-in really well because we have guests coming in the next day.
After straightening everything up and moving things around to make more space for more than the half hour that I was supposed to do so, I asked Woody if he wanted to check it before I left. Since Woody was working on the line, he didn't have time to look over everything in the walk-in, so he asked James to take a look at it. Turns out that James was a lot more strict than I was expecting and kept finding things in the walk-in that needed to be consolidated, or straitened, or separated, or labeled. But it's all good cause before I left for the night, Aaron gave me a leftover s'more beignet right out of the fryer. If anyone ever goes to Restaurant Eugene, the s'more beignets are, in my opinion, the best dessert on the menu.
Till next time,
Ben
121 hours left
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