Day 9

Today the only thing I have on the schedule is class at 7 am. With almost all of us doing internship hours, its hard to get in everyone to places without it being overcrowded. The maximum that can work at the restaurant is 7 people at a time, morning and night shift. None of us are worried about getting hours though. There are tons of opportunities to get hours all over the place and I believe by the time this week is over I'll have at least 30 hours. We all have to work 130 over 9 weeks, of course we all want to just get it done as fast as possible so we either have the option of working more, or taking the free time to go on day trips, or long weekends. Today's class is Spain again. Today we are doing paella, garlic soup, monkfish with romesco sauce, Asturian bean stew with clams, spinach, catalan syle and pears with a caramel coffee sauce. I kind of got stuck with the dessert as people grabbed up recipes, there were only 6 recipes for 10 people today. Desserts are ok to do, but they require a lot of time and thought in plating and decoration. The recipe is simple enough, just pears, that have been cored and halved, and then baked, flat side down with sugar on top until they are caramelized and tender. Then you serve those with a coffee-caramel sauce and whipped cream. We wanted to do something different of course. We had some extra sweet dough from the strawberry shortcakes the other day. So we rolled that out and put them in tart pans to blind bake them off. The pears we followed the recipe and baked them. For the sauce our idea was to make a coffee flavored pastry cream. We used a standard pastry cream recipe and instead of adding vanilla, we added 6 shots of espresso, it was awesome. So we had our baked sweet tart dough, we piped the espresso whipped cream on top, fanned the pears out over the tart, and then piped more espresso cream on top with some vanilla whipped cream on top. I was real happy with how it looked considering how much I don't like doing pastries. Lunch went well then. We sat outside on the Zeppelin deck and the paella was excellent. The morning class cleaned everything up and then I went home. Since I had the afternoon off, I would take the opportunity to catch up on some homework and perhaps get a little ahead. I didn't have to go back to the restaurant until 6. When I got there we had a group Italian language class. I really don't think I am going to learn a lot, but you'd be surprised how easy it is to get around not knowing the language. We had a group dinner tonight which was good, but we were all ready to get home because tomorrow we have to be up at 3:30 am to meet and get on a bus for our first group trip to Parma and Tuscany.