Final Practical - Black Box

For the final, we were given one protein, vegetables and a starch and told to create a meal. We ran the idea past Chef and then were allowed to start. The last five people were going to have to stay and clean the kitchen, so we were all motivated to work quickly. I was sixth to last - yes!

I had pork, lentils, and squash and zucchini. The only part I was unsure on was the pork - although it was better than getting chicken because I still hate cooking chicken.
I decided on Sauce Robert, which meant I needed to turn veal stock into espagnole without the demiglace step.
This recipe was actually pretty simple, because it just meant searing the pork and then sauteeing to finish. Meanwhile I reduced the stock down to espagnole and cooked the lentils. Then I sauteed the vegetables in the leftover pork juice and oil.


This turned out pretty tasty. I especially liked how the vegetables tasted with the little bit of pork taste. I did decently on this - the lentils just needed a little more flavor.

For the quizzes in class, I got 13/15 on sauces, 17/20 on fish, 12/15 on stocks & poultry, 13/13 on soup, and 18/18 on meat and game.
We also had to do a blog entry. I got teased a lot by the class because I did not want to put my name on the entry - I don't like to have my name anywhere on the internet. It used to take six pages on google to find me. But as you can see, Chef let me just use my initials.

Final Thoughts:
Although I wouldn't really eat much of this food because of all the cream, I feel like I learned a lot about improving techniques. Chef Z was a nice guy, and a decent instructor. He would show us these slideshows of photos of food from his trips around the world, in particular China.