I’ve mentioned how busy we get here around football season already.  So busy I haven’t posted here.  Fortunately, the team’s playing away for the next few weeks and we’re getting around to catching our breath.  Which is really a way of saying we are about to do everything we haven’t been doing for three weeks.  Most notably, this means cleaning, organizing, paperwork, fitting in all those university events that we simply could not handle during a football weekend, and running taste tests and tours.  We all probably got in another hour or two of sleep a day than during the push weeks. Perhaps the pace is a bit more relaxed, but the job stays interesting. 

     This week, we’ve had several new products come in for testing.  Thursday, a new meat vendor came in with 17 different products to serve at our Production Managers’ meeting, and I cooked them all up.  Unfortunately for us, the vendor was aimed at the cafeteria side of our business, and while decent, wasn’t tremendous.  The most anticipated product for us, an all-natural hamburger, ended up dry and fairly tasteless, and had no ability to hold its quality over any length of time.  We also tasted several new powdered mousse mixes, all failing to have a decent texture.  Our favorite of them all –or rather, I should say most interesting– was the miracle creme brulee / flan powder.  Mix the powder with milk and it’s a creme brulee.  Mix it with water, and it’s a flan!  That was ringing alarm bells right there.  We  opted for the creme brulee recipe, as that perfect level of just-set creaminess is very tough to reach.   Following the recipe perfectly, the creme looked OK, and smelled much like a vanilla brulee.  Then we set it in a pan to cool, and I began walking it over to the walk-in fridge to chill and set up.  I watched with horror when, still steaming hot and no more than five steps from the stove, the stuff (it was no longer a creme brulee) began to actually pull away from the pan’s edges — it was already set harder than it should have.  Advance one hour in time, and I produced the resulting thing to the chef…  the texture was somewhere between an omelet and mozzarella cheese, with a wonderful ability to compress and spring back.  Yes, we created a sugary scrambled egg-flavored exercise mat.

    Not all of our explorations were terrible..  Bobolink Farms, a dairy farm just outside of New York City, provided us some grass-fed cows milk cheeses that were noteworthy.  While they all had a cheddar-based flavor profile, their Drumm had an unusually nice creaminess to the texture, and the frolic was a unique blend of different flavors.  Nothing that will replace our regular stable of high-end cheeses, but certainly something to consider when doing some of our smaller menus that focus on local artisanal products.

     Now, we might be relatively quiet for a few weeks, but the units dealing with the student are, of course, still pounding out 8,000 meals a day.  Every once in awhile, we get a hire or two that don’t quite make it up to expectations and they either quit or get nudged out the door.  This summer, we had an exception — we hired a man who had never worked in a kitchen before, and threw him into one of our smallest units.  Needless to say, this caused some problems quite rapidly;  we had an employee who was a very kind person, had a never give up attitude, and just never could get anything done in the kitchen from lack of experience.  Our chef decided to take him under our wing for our quiet week and go through a crash course or two in production in volume, recipe reading, cutting and chopping, and all the other things a good cook has down by heart.  Remedial cooking classes.  While certainly not the fastest learner, our student has probably learned more in the week we’ve worked with him than the six weeks since school opened and we might just make an employee out of him yet.

    But it’s time to sleep.  As I said… we’re glad football is over, but tomorrow things go up a notch again — we’ve got the men’s ice hockey home opener, and it’s sure to be a grand event.  Two team ranked within the top 4 nationally are going to duke it out, and most of the kitchen’s planning to enjoy the game.  We’re all hockey fanatics rooting for different NHL teams, but we all cheer on our own team when the puck drops.

   Me?  I’ll be joining them just as soon as the luxury boxes are served, the buffet lines closed, and the kitchen buttoned up for another night.