Day 19

Today is Saturday and I'll be spending the day at the restaurant today. All the full time interns work a 10 hour day at least there. They work the lunch shift from 10 am till 3:30 or earlier if they are expecting a party then they close the restaurant and come back at 5 pm and work until close. I told them I would like to do the same today. Its a great way to get some hours and some experience. So I went in at 10, I knew right away there wasn't going to be a whole lot to do. Today was a good opportunity to get some cleaning done around the restaurant. We dusted the tops of shelves, organized things to get to them easier, even flipped over tables to clean the undersides of them. It was enough to keep us busy for the afternoon. We also started prepping for a party that would be coming to the restaurant the next day. It would be a group of 25 so we were making lasagnas for them. The restaurant has a classic asparagus lasagna that they can make easily for large groups. One of the interns just cooked off asparagus until it was very tender and then pureed it. Of course with the asparagus was onions and peppers and some seasonings. Then they made a bechamel using a simple classic recipe. The pureed asparagus was folded into the bechamel to be the sauce for the lasagna. Then we used 3 large sheet pans and put a little of the sauce on the bottom and then used some lasagna pasta sheets that we already had made and put a layer down and then put more asparagus becahmel on top and spread it around. We repeated that for 5 layers in an assembly line fashion. I was in charge of putting down the sauce whenever they got a layer of pasta on. After they were done we baked them for about 25 minutes so they were partially cooked. You want to let the pasta start cooking, but you need to wait to finish it right before you serve it. We also made some roasted chicken breast for the party. We took some chicken breast and pounded it out then and then put an herb mixture on top and some prunes and then rolled it up with the stuffing inside it. They were tied and ready to roast off. They could easily be reheated for service. We got all of this accomplished and a lot of cleaning throughout the full day I put in. It was an interesting experience. They have a family style dinner for all the cooks and waiters for lunch and for dinner. Lunch, Carlo made an awesome gorgonzola cream sauce for some pasta. For dinner the paid interns made some Italian grilled cheese sandwiches with proscuitto on them and some tomato soup to go with it. I ended up staying till 11 pm just getting cleaned up and waiting on the final customers of the night to leave.