40 More Hours

Well there's only about 40 hours left to complete my externship. Thyme flies when you're having fun! I would be sad if I had to leave the Griggstown farm when my hours are finished but fortunately that wont happen. I'm pretty excited to be staying on and working for a while longer. Fall time and the holidays seems like it will be a busy and interesting time.

Matt talked to me this week about continuing to work. He said he likes the bread type things I've brought it and wants to give me the opportunity to continue to bake new things to sell in the store. I had told him that I really enjoy baking the most and he wants to sell more baked goods in the store so it seems like the perfect chance for me. It seems there couldn't have been a better place for me to intern at... I wouldn't think most places would give an intern that much freedom to experiment and bring in new things. We'll see how it goes.. :)

Fougasse!

One of my favorite bread recipes is a olive and sun-dried tomato fougasse that I made one night in baking class. I've made it a couple times at home and when I saw we had many olives and sun-dried tomatoes at work I figured it'd be a fun thing to test there. On Thursday morning I baked four loaves and cut two of them up as samples and one I used as a side for the lunches. As usual, the bread went over really well, the staff loved it and customers were asking if we were selling it in loaves. The fourth we sold to a customer at the end of the day. Matt really liked the bread and asked me if I would bake more of it the next day. Unfortunately, all the sun-dried tomatoes were gone so I couldn't but he is ordering more and I will bake a bunch of bread to sell this coming week. I'd like to try another flavor for the fougasse too since some people don't enjoy olives so much. Maybe one with onions and...?

Last Wednesday we were preparing the lunch menu for the next few days and needed a salad for a side dish. I was supposed to make a coleslaw with red and green cabbages but someone had disposed of the green cabbage so Mike told me to make a salad out of tomatoes. I figured I'd make a simple salad with just a few ingredients so I collected a bunch of yellow, orange, and red tomatoes, red onions, and fresh basil. I diced up the tomatoes and onion, chiffonaded the basil and made a viniagrette with olive oil and red wine vinegar. It was pretty simple but very tasty and people bought it up. This week I was asked to make it again so that we could sell it in the store. I wanted to add in some cubed mozzarella but all the mozzarella had gone bad so that will have to happen another week. The salad is almost like a bruschetta so we sliced up and toasted a baguette and will try selling it as bruschetta to see how that goes. Its so much fun to be able to experiment and branch out with something new.

The Meat Packer

So I work on a poultry farm but until today I hadn't really had to deal with the poultry side of things. The farm sells its poultry in various forms. We sell boned out chicken, marinated duck and poussin, chicken and turkey pot pies, chicken sausages, turkey burgers, quail, and more.

I'm a vegetarian but I really support the way the farm raises their birds and I really don't mind handling meat. Its a good thing too because for 4 hours this morning I packaged up somewhere around 200 of the "boned out" chicken. Mike and Irma cut the young chickens into eight pieces: 2 legs, 2 thighs, 2 breasts, and 2 wings. All the pieces were placed in a large plastic bucket (as you can see in the picture.) My job was to take two of each piece (not necessarily from the same bird) and put them into a cryovac bag. There is a special way the pieces get placed in the bag so that it will look neat and uniform. It is kind of mindless work and after four hours of repeating the same thing over and over I felt a bit like a worker on an assembly line. I would like to learn how to cut the chickens just right so maybe one day I'll ask to be taught. The carcasses are saved to make chicken stock. So much chicken stock gets made every week and yesterday I asked Mike how many gallons of stock he thinks he's made in the 3 years he's been working. A low-ball estimate he gave was 5,000 gallons!

Apparently more chickens are killed each week during the summer and so more stock is made. The stock isn't used very much in the summer so much of it gets frozen to be used in the colder months when more pot pies and soups are sold. Stock also gets sold as it is.

It always seems to be something new for me to do and I really enjoy how it gets switched up from day to day. One day I'll be putting crusts on hundreds of pies and the next I'll be putting hundreds of chickens in bags! Wonder what next week will bring...!

Live & Learn

Today I gained a healthy respect for the Hungarian Wax Pepper. Last week I had sliced them up for a sandwich with no problem and they didn't seem very hot when I ate them but this week was a different story. I was seeding the peppers without wearing any gloves and all of a sudden I noticed my eyes were starting to sting. I stopped handling the peppers and gave my eyes a little rub. Needless to say they got worse, soon I couldn't even keep my eyes open and my face and hands were on fire. Luckily one of the other cooks had a contact case and solution in her car and got it for me. When I took my contacts out my eyes started to burn even more, it was one of the most painful things. I kept flushing my eyes and washing my face and hands for about 5 minutes before I could start to see again. My contacts were out of service so I resumed working with very limited vision. Eventually my brother came and dropped off my glasses and I was able to see what I was doing.

When it was time to slice up the jalapeno peppers I was much more cautious wearing gloves and keeping my hands away from my face. I learned my lesson in dealing with peppers and will never make that mistake again! Hot peppers are really great to eat & not so great to have in your eye.

Making the Dough

There is a really good cookie we sell in the store. Its a chocolate cookie made with sea salt in the dough and sea salt sprinkled on the top of each cookie before its baked. Its the salty/sweet combination that everyone loves (or should love.) Today I made 56 lbs of the dough in three batches. The mixer did most of the work so I can't complain but after all the dough was mixed I had to roll it into four pound logs and freeze them. I thought that making cookie dough would be a fun job but it really wasn't that much fun. It certainly isn't the worst job but making 27 x a recipe of cookies is a lot different than making one batch.

I have the large large quantity recipe memorized now and will have to break it down if I want to make it at home from memory. I realize now how helpful a "bakers percentage" would be in this situation. Also if the recipe had been in pounds instead of cups it would have been easier to figure out exactly how to divide the dough evenly into logs.

Health Inspectors

I feel like when it comes to food some of the laws in this state are somewhat silly. We've been selling homemade iced cream out of a little shed on the farm. It has a sink and air conditioning, freezer, and refrigerator. It's really quite nice in there. The ice cream selling was going great and people were loving it. Then all of a sudden last Thursday the local health inspector lady came by to inspect the ice cream shack. She didn't look very pleased and said we really shouldn't be operating. The floor in the shed isn't "finished" and apparently that needed to be done. Because we were serving the iced cream and lunches through the window of the shed there are more rules and regulations than if we were to just scoop ice cream outside under a tent. That seems a little silly to me but for now we've moved the ice cream freezer inside the main building and sell it from there.