I was up early today to finish off the dinner gift a friend was giving to one of the doctor's he works with. I also needed to make meringues for Pavlova for a luncheon I was making. It was a very busy day today!
I went over to Michael's house (I didn't quite make the 10am I said I was going to do, lol). I set the table with the good china and silver, talked for a bit, then made the salad. Mixed spring greens topped with strawberries and orange segments (it was also suppose to have pecans but I forgot those and we decided to leave them off. I still manage to forget things even with a list, although Jay Bushman tells me that happens all the time.) The salad was dressed with Chai Vinaigrette-a very nice combo. I did find some sunflower seeds while rooting around so added those for some crunch. Next I made the sauce for the salmon. A honey-lime-cilantro mixture. Since I made the rice yesterday, all I had to do was sauté some shallots, then removed the pan from the heat, added the rice, topped the rice with two salmon fillets, tucked sprigs of broccolini around the edges and drizzled the honey-lime mixture over everything. Put it in the oven for 8-10 minutes and you have a very elegant meal. When you plate the meal, drizzle the rest of the honey-lime mixture over everything. It was a hit! For dessert, I made Strawberry Pavlovas, meringues topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, whipped cream and strawberries. What's not to like??
After I cleaned up and washed dishes it was off to prepare for the next gig. I went home, repacked my rolling cart, then mixed up a batch of pumpkin cookies dough. Standards of Excellence (SOE) does this demonstration in one of their ovens where they cook a head of garlic with a sheet of cookies to show that the garlic does not affect the taste of the cookies. Then it was off to shop. Raleys ended up not having Boursin cheese or prosciutto so after I bought all I could at Raleys, I headed for Trader Joe's and picked up those two items. It did, however, put me behind in my time line. I arrived at SOE, unloaded the car, and started working. Almost the entire meal was done in their steam oven. Unfortunately, it is rather small and they have only a limited number of pans that work in that oven so things had to be done in stages. That did not help my timeline! I steamed broccoli, but in the middle had to refill the water reservoir inside the steam oven, so that took longer than expected. My rice didn't cook all the way through in the steam oven so I had to finish it in the steam microwave-convection oven (who'd have thought there even was such a thing!!). There was only one non-perforated pan so I had to cook the chicken in stages. And quite a few people cancelled so I had a lot of extra food stuff. Dispute several setbacks, people loved the meal and they all had a good time.
I did learn several things tonight: even though I regularly cook on different appliances, I need to give myself extra time for SOE as things can go wrong very easily. I need to arrive hours earlier than I did today. I learned not to plan two events in one day (although I suppose there would/could be some exceptions). And I need to shop the day before, or at least the morning of, not right before an event like this. Bottom line: people seemed happy with everything, as did Laurie the manager, so that was a good thing.
Now it's time for bed though, I am exhausticated!! Jordan called to say he would be later than he thought, so I probably won't be able to stay awake to greet him. I'll let Ah Choo do that, lol.
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