You Just Made a Sandwich

When I arrived to work on Saturday, there were four women that I had never seen before on the line with Chef Hopkins.  Then I remembered that I spent two hours organizing the walk-in for guests, so these ladies must be the guests.  Turns out that they were having a private cooking lesson with Chef Hopkins.

Since I there wasn't anything that I needed to be working on, I started making more mustard.  We had 2/3 of the mustard seeds left and I was planning on making mustard for a while and finishing off at least another 1/3 of what we had left.  That was until Jason and Woody told me that they needed me to make 800 pieces of bacon and that making the mustard wasn't necessary as long as there was enough for the weekend (which there was since we still had about 20 L of finished mustard still left).

For the bacon, I had to use the industrial slicer and slice it about five times as thick as we normally do.  Then, I layered them on silpats on half sheet pans and put them in a 320 degree oven for 12 minutes to start.  After 12 minutes, the bacon was not fully cooked and we needed it to be crispy, so I kept adding time until i got the bacon to the desired doneness which ended up being 45 minutes of cooking time.  Then I would slice more bacon and start it all over again.  I thought that making all this bacon would take me the entire rest of the day (which it turns out it would), but I still had time to do other things while the bacon was cooking.

One of the things that I was able to do while the bacon was cooking was to cryovac portioned halibut and foie gras for Jackson.  While I was cryovacing the foie, Ryan asked me, "Did you hear that we have protestors coming tonight?"  I had not heard about this, so Ryan explained that a group of people were coming to protest outside the restaurant because we serve foie gras.  Some people have too much time on their hands.

Once I finished with cryovacing things for Jackson, Jason asked me to make more breadcrumbs (another task that takes a long time to do).  While cubing the bread that I was to use for the breadcrumbs, I mentioned to Ryan that all I'll be doing today is making mustard, bacon, and breadcrumbs to which he replied, "You just made a sandwich!"

Now it was time for family meal.  Today, family meal consisted of home made flour and corn tortillas, taco meat with cheese and onions, sauteed spinach, and fettucini with a light cheese sauce.

The rest of my time was spent making bacon and small tasks that people needed done for service like, crushing ice, picking micro basil, cutting cherry tomatoes in half, and quartering beets.

As I left restaurant Eugene for the evening, I saw the protestors.  I didn't see them for very long as I was driving by, but I would have gotten a picture if I could.  They were holding signs that said things like "Stop Animal Cruelty" and "Restaurant Eugene is not Green".  For those of you that don't know, the big issue with foie gras is that the ducks are force-fed in order to make the liver fattier and that is what they were protesting.  That being said, Restaurant Eugene is probably one of the most green restaurants in all of Atlanta.  Absolutely nothing is wasted and whatever is thrown away is sorted into recyclables and into compost bins before being thrown away.  I like animals as much as the next person, but those ducks were bred to be used for foie gras just like cows are bred for milk and beef and just like how chickens are bred for eggs and chicken.  Like I said earlier, some people have too much time.

I know that I haven't been taking many pictures lately, but I have been very busy and often forget to take pictures of things as I am doing them.  However, I did take one other picture today......

BACON!!!

Till next time,

Ben

111 hours left