Body Double for the Garnish

Interestingly, not surprisingly, much of garde manger is involved with using up little bits of things. If you have an end of cheese, or a couple of slices of ham, some random bread: make it into a canapé, a tea sandwich, a mousse! Which is what Chef demonstrated this morning: smoked salmon mousse. He combined cream cheese and some whipping cream in the food processor, then added the salmon (which actually wasn't leftover — it was from a brand new wrapped side of smoked salmon. But it could have been leftover.) He seasoned it with white pepper, white wine, dry mustard, lemon zest, minced dill, and a pinch of cayenne. Then he added 3/4 of an ounce of gelatin powder that had been dissolved in vegetable stock, then folded in a cup of whipped cream.

The resulting bowl of luscious fluff was piped onto little rye toasts (quickly, before the gelatin sets up) and the rest was smoothed into a terrine, for slicing tomorrow. You can suspend stuff in the terrine: unlike aspic, it's firm enough to hold an addition (like a row of cooked shrimp, or a checkerboard of cucumber slices) without having to set first.

Andy turned out the fruit aspic he made on Friday. It was really pretty — triangle shapes with three layers — but the white layer in the middle (made of coconut milk) was really rubbery. Too much gelatin. Or gelatine, as Chef Duffy does it...

Monday is sort of slow, production-wise, because you have to order most of your supplies for delivery later in the week. We're the Seafood team this week, and scheduled to make salmon mousse (as per the demo), crab spring rolls, lobster salad barquettes, and two salads: roasted beet with gorgonzola, and mushrooms "a la grecque". So today, I sliced the production (cheese this week — today was two trays of monterey jack and provolone) while Andrea made court bouillon (for cooking the lobsters and crabs, which we should get tomorrow). Travis handled the salmon: from the center cut of one side of fish, he made gravlax. He cured one end for sushi (Chef won't let us make sushi with any raw fish except ahi), and he poached another piece for our salmon mousse for tomorrow.

Then we set about creating a cheese tray. We used a big mirror, about 4 feet long by 18 inches wide, and started out by propping up some baguette pieces against some daikon radish chunks in the middle of the tray. Chef asked if it was our centerpiece, and we said it was a place holder — the body double — for the actual garnish to come later. We ended up with cubes of fontina, oblong slices of dry jack, triangles of gouda, a low crumbling wall of stilton, squares of Wensleydale Cranberry, and some wedges of gruyere. There was also a row of toasted baguettes topped by rosettes of herbed goat cheese and little pieces of walnut. The body double was eventually used as a foundation, so the centerpiece was some chunks of bread, an opened pomegranate, bunches of grapes, and a fan of yellow Delicious apple. We took the whole thing, along with a basket of bread and some more fruit, into Chef Joseph's classroom down the hall. His students were making kasha today — that was probably my least favorite day in all of basic skills, and definitely not one of the better days for eating. Cheese — anything not "miscellaneous grains" — was welcome.

We had a quiz this morning, too: product identification, fifteen items laid out on a table that we had to name. I misidentified the medium-grained rice as "short," and wasn't specific enough on "sesame seeds" — you need to say "white" or Purchasing might send you black ones.