Day 24
Yet aother day with a 7pm finish! What luxury.
This week I feel like I’m back to my old self. Having had all my confidence kicked out of me, this week the confidence is being slowly stuffed back in.
As I am set to move onto pastry soon, I am working on training up the new, very sweet, 18 year old, Natalia. I feel like I have learned PROPERLY with full understanding of the principles behind the result – having botched various recipes on various occasions, the proper techniques are now drilled into me and I know exactly how to teach it.
I’ve also been trying to be incredibly nice to the newbies as I had such a rough start. If I see them struggling, I try to step in and help – show them where things are and reassure them when they’re struggling.
I feel like I’ve learned so much so far. Especially in terms of organisation. Stop – think efficiency – think about the whole recipe first, all the steps and the most logical way to do them – execute. If you run into a problem, think long and hard (in your free time) about how you can improve.
Speaking of which, I think I’ve cracked my emulsion – finally! I’m quite sure that I was just putting too much oil. And I’ve worked out the texture that it needs to be at the start which helps. I also sent down 8 tamales this morning and NONE of them were sent back. Get in.
I’ve also been watching and emulating other peoples knife skills. If amazing knife skills was the only thing I could take away from this experience, I would be totally happy with that!
In the morning, Ellian made some yummy chilaquiles (fried tortillas with spicy salsa verde and eggs)!
I really enjoyed today and had one of those moments where I looked around and thought how surreal this whole experience is, how quickly it’s going, how important it is and how lucky I am to be here. It felt like an actual dream. Like I was already sitting in the future peering back at this experience with jealousy at my former self.
Time for sleep!
Night night. xx