Monday through Friday, we serve a rotation of either frozen soups from the central kitchen or commercial product. Saturdays we make our own. I've made caldo verde, mulligatawny, and a rich cold borscht with savory dill-horseradish whipped cream. I also ordered a hot and sour soup kit from the veg shop: tofu, chopped bok choy, frozen bamboo shoots, ( Read more... )

The pork butts were in the smoker for about 5 hours, which is the point the coal pan usually fills up with ash and it conks out. True to form, long about 19:30 the smoker started to cool off and wouldn't come back to temp. I pulled the pork out and put it in a 200-degree oven... and went to bed ( Read more... )

I called a Spokane insurance agent (again) today about a piece of mail that keeps coming here. The insured, daughter of the prior owner of the house, is apparently still insuring her car here although she lives west of the Cascades now. I had never gotten anything but a recording from the agent's number, but today he picked up and listened to my ( Read more... )

Wow, many people on the crew REALLY missed me. And still the Supervising Dementor has not had anything demeaning to say, after TWO whole shifts. There was a bunch of leftover beef fajitas and mexi rice from yesterday's catering, which I layered in a pan with diced tomato and tortilla chips and cheese on top. They RAVED, which is a little scary. It ( Read more... )

Night before last I made ma po tofu, which was the dish that got the Chinese kids all excited. Last night's menu was sesame chicken, pepper beef, Thai meatballs (as if!), steamed rice, fried rice, and chow mein. But as I told the kids, I hope to have one thing every night that's not on the menu -- a surprise ( Read more... )

The Taiwanese kids are lining up for my Chinese food. They tell me it's real.

Every time we serve bread bowls with chowder and stew, I have the prep person save the insides they scoop out of the little boules, and the next day I make bread pudding. This time it got compliments from several people. Score another for la cuisine grandmère.

oh yeah, I forgot!

last week (Sunday? Monday?) one of the servers said that a guest ordered the hummus plate and asked if the chef was Lebanese.

*bow* I consider that high praise.

These people (click on "about Paul and Linda") came to eat yesterday. She had the one plate of duck I sold all night and pronounced the sauce (reinvented from cherry compote via vinaigrette) "world-class." He had salmon and liked it. They seat 150 at a time, as opposed to our oh, 45.

Let's see, what's been happening? Our best customer told me on Friday that the salmon chowder was the best he's ever had there. *shrug* It was left over from last week, so he had in fact had it before (he's in every Friday for it). He had tried my new pasta dish and not care for it as "too dry," so I added some wine and butter and he tried it ( Read more... )