Middle East? if you say so...

I apologize for not updating you about last week. After doing Great Britain, we did Russia (lots of Borscht, caviar, and blinis), and then Middle Eastern, or at least what's middle eastern in Le cordon Bleu's Book. My mom being Israeli and visiting Israel and parts of Egypt, i can tell you they might snub their noses at some of this Middle Eastern recipes we were given. What was cool about this day though was that we did something called an "order fire exercise". For those not in the restaurant biz, this means its basically simulating a restaurant situation. Threes an expediter (in our case, the sous chef) who calls out down the line for orders as tickets keep coming in. So for our "simulation" our chef would give an order to the sous chef, like say, two kabob plates, one moussaka, and three desserts. Then our class (most of which were working in different stations down the line) would have to get those meals out, all looking beautiful, identical, on hot plates (if its a hot dish), and FAST. ten minuets in the kitchen is like a hour to the customer. My friend an I made the desserts which was baklava (this is not that middle eastern if you ask me...). To make look pretty, we decided to make two different colored sauces, a pistachio creme anglaise and a yogurt honey sauce (My friend and i couldn't stop snacking on the yogurt sauce! we dipped all this fruit that we used as garnish in it and it was divine. anyhow, the baklava was a little over baked, so to compensate, we agreed the plate really needed to at least look magnificent. so we made about 16 caramel cages (very time consuming, but we had help thanks to some awesome peers that risked their fingers to work to make these cages (because hot sugar burns are terrible, and lord knows i left with a few battle scars that night). Our chef was impressed and it was overall a fun exercise. The one of the quickest hours of my life. It was stressful, but in a good way, kind of like working out, icky when your actually doing it, but the adrenaline is awesome and you don't regret doing it.