Blog #4 - Chicken!

Like yesterday, we dealt with meat again... this time being chicken! First thing first, we practiced our knifework at the start of the day. We cut medium-large diced potatoes, celery, carrots, onions, and herbs and laid them to the side for now. Chef was planning on teaching us how to make oven-roasted chicken, so our knife work had to be on point or we could really hurt ourselves. Now the fun part: breaking down an entire chicken. While some parts seemed scary because of how slippery the chicken was, it was a great experience because it was something I would have to learn eventually, and I am honored to have learned it from a professional chef (also, Hawken should totally reimburse Chef Lyons for buying us each so many ingredients to work with)! After learning the different methods to break down a chicken, we seasoned the cuts with salt, pepper, and herbs and put the chicken on top of a bed of cut vegetables. We let the chicken roast in the oven for 3 and a half hours. For lunch, we did a fun and exciting dish - chicken skewers! While we didn't have to break down an entire chicken for the skewers, we marinated chicken thighs with a bunch of different cool sauces and prepped our peppers, onions, mushrooms, and zucchini. Chef taught us to scrape the gills of the mushroom off or it would leave a bitter taste. We then put everything on skewers and went outside to grill our lunch. After around 25-30 minutes, we went back inside to eat these amazing skewers - it was delicious! Just because we had a bit of extra time to kill, we made a lot of egg omelets just for practice and when it was 2pm, we took our roasted chicken out of the oven. Again, we had dinner for our families! Thanks, Chef Lyons for an amazing day.

Comments

  1. Rachel MullenMay 23, 2019 at 11:44 AM

    George, it sounds like you are having an amazing time learning how to cook with Chef Lyons. I am excited to see you in action this coming Monday at the Rise and Dine charity event. I'm sure that your family appreciates that you bring home some samples to try so that they too can enjoy your Hawken Project and see what you are learning! I love balsamic vinaigrette dressing. That's amazing that you know how to make it without having to measure all of the ingredients. You wrote a great first set of blogs! - Mrs. Mullen

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