Food of the South

Today we made food from southern cuisine. This included Hollandaise, hoppin John, Smothered pork chops, southern fried chicken with cream gravy, and frogmore stew. I was nervous about today because I still feel like I know less than some of my classmates, so it is harder for me to take a leadership role. I was unable to attend our schedule meeting to discuss the timeline and plan everything out, but my classmates were able to do that for Wed and Thurs. This is the first class we came in knowing what recipes we were doing, and when we needed to start them. Since we knew what knife cuts we needed to do, we were able to prep a lot better. There was a lot more talking in the kitchen. We did not stay exactly on the timeline, but we got out on time, cleaned as we went and did everything in the order they needed done. Chef Brown did a demo of Hollandaise and the four of us made one for him to taste throughout the class. This went really well. All of our sauces turned out. The one big thing that went wrong was we were missing a lot of ingredients. We were given turkey wings instead of chicken, and veal chops instead of pork chops. Chef Brown looked around for the right meat and we had to thaw it out to use. We also didn’t have the right kind of wine. We made it all work there was just a little bit of confusion at the beginning of class. Some things I learned were how to make hollandaise. I have never seen that done or tasted it. I was also nervous about being MOD, but if we work as a team it is not that bad. I need to lead the class, but we are a team and work together.