Week 2: May 16th-20th, 2011

Tuesday May 17th, 2011

As I said in my previous blog, I was pretty tired at the end of the day.  This caused me to inadvertently sleep through my original 8am start time.  I instead got to the kitchen at 9am to start my day.  The first thing I got to do was prepare the salsa for the fish- specifically haddock.  The salsa had: chopped tomatoes, diced spring onions, ginger and onion.  These ingredients were topped off with some garlic, salt and pepper.  Shortly after I finished the salsa, I placed the haddock on a couple of trays and left it on the side for a while.  As I was waiting for the time to past by, I learned how to clean the grill and then helped Nancy peel a large bowl of beets for the salad bar.  Around 11:30, I put the haddock into the oven and cooked it for about ten minutes at around 300 degrees!  As it was cooking I had a little taste of my salsa.  I decided I wasn't happy with the taste as I thought it lacked something.  When the fish was done, I also discovered that it was dry as well.  So I figured I had to add something that would make the fish less dry and the salsa somehow tastier.  I decided to add some lemon juice to the fish.  This was a bold move as I could have potentially ruined the entire dish.  I was confident with my decision though and proceeded to squeeze some lemon juice onto each piece of haddock.  It was then topped off with the salsa.  However just because a dish looks good doesn't mean that people will like it or eat it.  I initially had fears that the fish wouldn't be eaten, as it wasn't one of the more popular dishes in the dinning hall.  As lunch progressed though, the number of pieces of haddock grew smaller and smaller until by the time lunch was over, there were only a couple of pieces left.  I was pretty satisfied with my efforts in trying to enhance the dish.

The afternoon was pretty much similar to my previous afternoons.  I helped Nancy and Deb clean the main dinning room (I cleaned the hot line) then I helped Steve do a bit of prep work.  I chopped some zucchini for veggie dish during dinner and diced some red onions.  By the time I was finished with that it was 3:10.  A pretty good day of work.

Last note: Due to my tiredness, I wasn't in the best of moods today.  Barbara wanted me to write in my blog that I didn't smile today (not that I smile any other day).  There you go Barb!!  I hope you're satisfied with that... enough said.