Nuts

Ugh. Today I chopped nuts by hand for HOURS. Seriously, I chopped 3000 grams of nuts today. I know some of you may not be familiar with grams and exactly what 3000 grams of nuts looks like. 3000 grams is just over 6.5 pounds. The combination of my shortness and the high bench I was working at was bad news for my right arm's deltoid muscle. I had to bringing my arm up too much to maintain a relaxed position. Chef Norman would have cried. I really don't know how I got through it. My chopping was extremely erratic and I was in a bit of a daze during the last hour. (I also only got 2 hours of sleep previously because I was busy making an awesome groom's cake. Lack of sleep probably didn't help that daze any.)

After that, I spent most of the night helping Chef mise en place (French term that basically means to measure out all the ingredients for a recipe) a number of recipes for a class she was teaching the next day. I also got to make some brioche dough that she would be using in the class. I finally was able to use the latest thing in yeast -- SAF yeast. SAF is a new brand of yeast that we heard about in school but never got to use. It is more active that good ol' compressed yeast so you use less. You also don't have to put it in a starter. It is supposedly strong enough that you can just add it directly to the dry ingredients.

The other thing that made me happy today was passion fruit curd! Chef asked me to make a huge ol' batch of curd (think 3/4 of a tall stock pot) and just rattled off the ingredients and really didn't stick around to go over the process. It made me happy that she trusted me and didn't feel like she needed to go over anything with me. How did the curd come out? It was awesome.