Week 11: Cooking Potatoes | Cooking Grains and Legumes

Our group waiting for the potatoes to be done. They ended up taking much longer than expected! Luckily we had whipped potatoes though, which had simple steps after the boiling.

What a week! Our first day was our SURPRISE event day! (Chef, you are officially responsible for half of my weekly anxiety) The day actually ran relatively smoothly, which was a relief. Our group got "whipped potatoes", which go through a Tamis to get the right texture. I had no idea that you
could use a drum-sieve to get that texture; up until that point, I had assumed that you had to mash them to the right consistency. We put all of our dishes together and got to sample each one. I believe that the Latke (potato pancakes) were my favorite, second to ours of course. Also, salt is a potato's best friend.

Here are the many different kinds of potatoes that we made! There were different types, from Latkes to scalloped potatoes to those weird cookie looking potatoes on the left. What was great about this assignment was that each was made from the same kind of potato, yet there were so many different flavors and textures!

 We also made an easy-to-understand version of the recipe, as shown below.

We have found this year that planning is our friend. Our first step for the potato project was to write out the instructions in an easy-to-follow fashion. This made everything after go much faster.

On the second day this week, we learned how to create pasta dough. It takes at least a day for dough to set so that it is the right consistency (or doughy-ness), which is why we prepared ours today. This way, we can set up our lasagna on prep day instead of doing EVERYTHING on event day! We learned that making dough is an exact science. You have to make sure that everything is prepared....

Here is our layout for the dough. Chef's approval was needed, and given! It was nice to have everything out before starting.

Above and to the left are steps in the dough making process! Above is chef's layout of the dough ingredients, so that nothing goes un-mixed. The other step was mixing in the wet ingredients into the dry, in the middle, and slowly stirring it to get the dry into the wet, like sand on a beach! 

then you combine all of the wet ingredients, all of the dry, and mix them together! Not everything is super complicated after all (;

We also got our requisitions back for the pasta event! (as shown below)

The few mistakes on our requisition were as follows: 1. We need to homemake our tomato sauce, so we found a new recipe to do just that. 2. Instead of Mozzarella, he suggested we use Jack! 3. Instead of a dessert for our side, we will do stuffed mushrooms. Yum!

One thing that we were able to use this week from a previous week was a concept from week 9, as well as a popular bedtime story: slow and steady wins the race. It is easy to get flustered in the kitchen, however as soon as you start "hurrying" in any process, something is bound to go wrong. When we made our pasta dough, we were sure to measure everything out properly, lay it out to visually double check, and then have Chef come by and check as well! We still went as fast as we could, but we made sure to focus on quality over speed.