60 pounds of cheddar

A personal highlight of working at the restaurant is the cheese. We have such an array of interesting and delicious cheeses. I sometimes get more excited by the cheese than the desserts. Much of the cheese selections get cut in the pastry kitchen before and after evening service. Last night, after service, I got to see what a 60 pound round of English cheddar looked like. It was amazing. It literally looked like a tree stump. It was at least a foot high. It was really cool to watch it get cut. A handled cheese wire (here is an example of said tool: http://www.bakedeco.com/a/cheese-wire-comes-w-1555.htm) is needed to do most of the cutting. I got to sample some as well. Yum.

Family meal was soooo good today. Since the shifts in a restaurant are so long, the restaurant provides your meal. Usually it is made by the cooks (and can sometimes be very disappointing), but today we had a special meal to celebrate the conclusion of Ramadan. Yes, Ramadan ended weeks ago, but I have no idea why we are having the meal now instead of a few weeks ago. Pretty much all the runners in the restaurant are Bengali, so we had a ton of Bengalese food for family meal. I guess the food came from a restaurant owned by a brother of one of our runners. There was a ridiculous amount of food and it was all pretty good. There were also some sweets. The mithai are crazy syrupy sweet, but sooooo good.

I worked dinner service again. This time they tried to get me to scoop or quenelle some of the ice cream and sorbet. Quenelling is usually something that has to be practiced. A quenelle is an oval shape scoop of ice cream typically used in fine dining. The shape is obtained by using an actual spoon, rather than a normal ice cream scoop. Initially, I seemed rather quenelle capable. Of course that would be the case when I was just practicing. When it came time to quenelle some ice cream for an actual dessert, it was a different story. Overall, the night was good.