Blog #9 - Prep Work for Monday

Last week when Chef Lyons gave us a bag of all the produce we had to cut for Monday, he showed us examples of what they should look like. To ensure the cut vegetables would be the best quality for tomorrow, I waited until Sunday at 10 pm to prepare them. The first vegetable I cut were cucumbers. Chef gave us a total of two cucumbers, one diced and one sliced into sticks. The diced one would be for the couscous, and the sliced one would be for the hummus dip. For both of them, I cut them into segments and quartered them (cutting them vertically 2 times), used the knife to get rid of the seeds, then julienned them. For the dice, I just lined up the julienne and diced them up. The next vegetable was the potato. For the potato, I didn't have to skin it because it would be roasted with the Spanish chicken so there was no need for it. I literally just cut them in half and went through a whole bag of them. The most time-consuming vegetable to work with was parsley. I had to manually go through an entire bag of parsley and picked off all the leaves from the bitter vein. After I picked them, I minced it to little shreds of fresh parsley, which will go on the Spanish chicken. Finally, I minced garlic cloves. First, I used the flat of my blade to smash the clove, breaking its tough skin. Second, I made small incisions in the clove to make my life a lot easier. Thirdly, I minced away and put everything into its respective bags and went to sleep. I started at 10pm and ended at around 1 am, although I had a snack and a few breaks in between the vegetables.

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