Two days of unamusing amuses bouches

Yesterday I couldn't cook to save my life. Well, that's not exactly true. Let's just say I had some small triumphs, and a few larger humiliations.

For the past two days we'd been working on assembling a variety of amuses bouches, tiny little portions of fancy food that appear at catered functions, cocktail parties and in fine restaurants before the appetizer course. We got a late start on both days and had to scramble to get as much prep done as possible. The class is slowly transitioning into a more autonomous working environment; the chef will yell out assignments and then we execute them without anybody looking over our shoulders. I'm excited about this but it also leaves room for error and confusion, especially when the translator mysteriously disappears and the chef assigns me to make the duck stock. We've had the recipes for chicken, fish and veal stock burned into our brains, but we hadn't yet made duck stock. I did the best I could to clarify my instructions without the translator's aid, but apparently it wasn't quite enough.

Chop up the duck - check. Brown the vegetables - check. Flambe with cognac - check (this was my first flambe, and at least it went swimmingly, without any eyebrow singeing in sight). Deglaze and reduce using Madeira - check. My pot grew full of a luscious brown bubbly gravy that smelled like everything holy.

At this point Chef returned and peered in.
"Looks great! You did the flambe on your own? Very nice, Sinteeahh!"
He paused, then looked again.
"But where is the duck??"

Oops. Apparently I was supposed to have colored the duck with the vegetables way back at the beginning. Due to my inability to understand the finer points of what Chef was saying, I thought we would be adding the raw meat later on. We do a variation of this for chicken stock, so it wasn't entirely improbable. But my erroneous logic was totally lost in translation. Suddenly I became The Girl Who Made Duck Stock and Forgot the Duck.

"Can you PLEASE tell Chef that I didn't forget the duck; I just thought I was supposed to add it later?" I beg the translator, who has now reappeared. It's still a mistake, but a less grievous one.
"You'll be a laughingstock," she says, giggling, as she ignores my pleas to clear my name. (Get it? Laughingstock? Har de har har.)

Later I was assigned to slice a loaf of spice bread and crisp up the pieces in the oven. Easy. I stick the tray in the oven and receive my next task, cutting a lobe of foie gras into bite-sized pieces and searing them.

As I begin on the liver, I check the spice bread obsessively. The oven is roaring hot, so there won't be much lagtime between the "crispy" stage and "burned to a crisp." You can, of course, guess what happens next.

I heat a pan and start searing. Since it's almost pure fat, a slice of foie gras only needs about thirty seconds over high heat before you flip it, count to ten and place it on a towel to drain. Making sure I got each piece to achieve a perfect caramel brown color required a fair amount of concentration. So much concentration, in fact, that I entirely forgot about the spice bread, which someone pulled out of the oven just as it began to smoke.

Ugh. The worst part was owning up to the mistake. Two slices out of twenty were salvaged. Chef kindly didn't yell or anything like that; he just quietly reworked the recipe. Instead of a slice of bread for each portion of foie gras, we'd sprinkle spice bread crumbs over the liver as a kind of garnish.

As I ate my foie gras sans gingerbread slice, I took some comfort in the fact that at least the foie was cooked nicely. And my flambe had kicked ass (even if only I saw it!). So I'm not totally hopeless. But I just hope nobody brings up that damn duck stock again.

Get ready for lots of pictures...

Stuffing scallops with truffle slices.

Scallop presentation: seared, served with endive and crostini.

Prepping tomatoes.

Tomato presentation: stuffed with zucchini and carrots.

Raw tuna with herb marinade.

Seared foie gras with burnt gingerbread crumbs. It's all the rage.

Potato gratin with reblochon cheese. This was just comfort food we made for fun. Mighty tasty.

Preparing to bake violet creams with fresh raspberries.

Violet cream presentation: with strawberry coulis.

Rose creams with red fruits and basil (because we used up all our mint that morning making Moroccan tea!)

Pouring custard into the apple crumbles.

Apple crumble presentation.

Drinking sparkling water and Grenadine (which we would later use to marinate pork): Chef Goulaze, Nina, Nastia.

The groaning table.

Final presentation of everything!