Defeated by the Lemon Tart, and a Scavenger Hunt – Day 77

TODAY’S TIDBITS

• Remove the pin bones from your fillet before removing the skin. The skin will keep the fillet in shape while you slightly mangle it trying to remove the pin bones.
• When having to drink a shot of green chartreuse on a scavenger hunt, the yellow label will not do. The green one has 130 herbs infused in it.
• Even 30g less flour in a shortbread dough will lead to disastrous results.

Even though the chef said “I was proud of the class today”, and “much improved”, this was not the case for me. Today was a complete disaster. I decided to  finish the lemon tart before even starting the fish, but I had written down the flour measurement wrong by 30 grams and when I was going to put my dough in the fridge somehow the chef spotted that my dough was light. We weighed it and it was lighter than Emma’s, and not knowing what I did wrong he told me to do it again. I’m not sure what I did wrong the second time, but my dough still came out too sticky, and then subsequently developed a hole that eventually leaked the lemon curd all over. I got a few points for trying to rescue it, but really, it was a total disaster.

All this left me in a panic state for my fish papillotes. I got them into the oven a little late, and figured I’d rather be a few minutes late than serve the chef’s raw fish. But it was still undercooked. It really was my worst day out of the 75 days. Linda got high marks for having the best tart for two days in a row.

We only have two more day to go, which is sooooooo depressing, we really have all bonded as a great group and I’m going to miss seeing everyone every day.

After school, Dalal organized a scavenger hunt. Ray and I were team red. Dalal had us running all over the city snapping pictures doing crazy things with crazy people drinking a crazy amount of beer (and green chartreuse yuck). One of the pictures we had to snap was doing a snow angel. Unfortunately there isn’t any snow left in New York so we bought a huge bag of flour, spilled it on the ground and Ray made a snow angel. Among the hundreds of pics some other memorable shots include Joe and Chef Ben with the New York skyline, Meagan’s “flexible” picture, Emma’s shot “by the water”, and everyone seducing a business man stranger.Thank you Dalal for an amazing event.

I have my trail (job interview) at JoJo’s tomorrow afternoon, so I’d better get sharpening my knives.