Day 18

This morning I got to sleep in a bit, which I was very happy to do. I worked my internship hours starting at 9 am. Once again I just started out with dishes. However today I got a welcome change. It was going to be a busy day at the restaurant. They were expecting a group of 90 for lunch and there was also a catering event off site that needed to be done. The catering group was just for 6 people, but all the food would be prepared at the restaurant and then transferred over to the hotel that the group was staying at which is really just a 5 minute walk from the restaurant. Since most of the staff had to stay there to work the huge lunch crowd, I got asked to go with one of the other full time interns to work the event. The guy I am going with is Peter. He's a student that is currently going to Johnson and Wales University in Rhode Island, which is one of the best culinary schools in the country. He's from New York and is here on an 11 week internship for his school, he's only got about 4 weeks left. So I helped him get all the stuff we would need to take with us. You have to think of every contingency when you go off site. We needed serving plates, forks, knives, serving tools, platters...basically everything you can imagine even water and bread baskets. As soon as the hot food was ready we packed it up and took it and everything else we needed in one of the servers car to the hotel. It was much easier than carrying it all. We set up a buffet in the hotel's dining room and just waited around serving the 6 diners. It was over quickly though and we think it went well. It's still interesting to do that without someone there with us that speaks Italian. After we cleaned up and repacked everything I headed back to the restaurant for afternoon class. This class was interesting because we had a group member that was being waited on to leave with a group to go on a trip to the Almalfi Coast in Southern Italy for the weekend. So we had to work quickly and get dinner ready in about 2 hours so we could get cleaned up and everyone could leave to catch their train. It was fast paced, but the Chef and one of the other interns helped out where they could so we could still complete the lesson and get done on time. I made some fresh pasta and then a pumpkin, almond, parmesan, nutmeg, and honey filling. We were going to do tortellini out of them, but it takes a long time to shape that much pasta, so we quickly made raviolis out of the pasta. I served that with a sage butter sauce. The rest of the menu was a beef stew that was way over spiced by our team member. I like spicy stuff, but this was intense, it made a few of our instructors cringe. Dinner overall was good, it was just rushed, by the time we got everything done in that little time period, everyone was too amped up to be hungry. We saved the leftovers though. After dinner we cleaned up and all headed home. Some people are waiting till the morning to leave for other destinations in Italy. Tonight I am going to catch up on some homework, get a lot of sleep and hope that my cold will disappear overnight because I am sick of it. Tomorrow I am going to try to work some more internship hours and then Sunday I am planning a day trip to Rome.