"Let's Dish" report.
Feb. 25th, 2005 11:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaThis evening I did Let's Dish, the food prep program which I wrote about a few weeks ago. A few people had asked for a report back, so here it is.
Boy, am I tired. The necessary pace was quicker than I realized at first - I prepared eight recipes (you can do either eight or twelve) and it took me a full hour and forty minutes. I think that, with a little more familiarity with the setup, I could do all twelve in the allotted two hours - but it would definitely be work.
About twenty women and two men attended my session. We were given aprons (and bandannas, for everyone with longer hair than me) and cards marked with our names and the dishes we'd signed up to make. They gave us a lecture about food safety - we had to wash our hands before and after every recipe, after any rest breaks, and if we happened to touch raw meat or our faces with our hands - and turned us loose.
The room was set up with four large double-sided cooking stations, each of which had two recipes set out per side. Each station had a prep surface (about a foot deep), a set of salad bar-type wells for raw ingredients, and a higher back shelf for spices and condiments. Dry ingredients (raw rice and pasta, packets of tortillas) were in large tubs at the endcaps. Ingredients were measured with long-handled measuring scoops color-coded by size (blue for one cup, green for half a cup, etc.), small measuring spoons, or graduated measuring cups. A particularly nifty feature: the measuring spoons for sticky ingredients were like miniature ice cream scoops, the kind you squeeze to release the ice cream. For most ingredients, the right size of measuring scoop was already in the ingredient wells.
Most of the dishes were prepared right inside freezer bags, which were stretched over cookie jar-sized plastic crocks for preparation. Generally speaking, you put raw meat or fish, vegetables, and sauce ingredients into the bag, sealed it, and then massaged it on the counter until the ingredients were mixed. Meal elements requiring separate preparation went in separate bags - for example, my "shrimp fried rice" entree includes a bag of rice-and-seasonings, which cooks for the longest amount of time, and another bag of shrimp and vegetables, which gets added partway through. Both bags are sealed together into a third bag to keep them together in the freezer. Or, for example, my "country French tarragon chicken with noodles" includes a bag of chicken and veggies in sauce, and a separate bag of dry noodles to add just before cooking. At any rate: once you had an entree prepared, you took it to a back table, slapped a label on it with thawing and cooking instructions, marked it with your name, and put it in one of three industrial-sized freezers.
Adjusting the recipes on the fly was easy enough if it involved larger or smaller quantities of the ingredients already called for. It would've taken more thought and planning to adapt the recipes using ingredients from other stations - and honestly, I'm not sure there would've been time. They cautioned us at the beginning that the food was seasoned to child-friendly levels, and I routinely doubled or tripled spices - the Cajun seasoning in the red beans and rice, for example, and the garlic in almost everything. I increased the amount of vegetables in most of the dishes which included veggies, and usually omitted the onions. I also subdivided the food on the fly, making each recipe as two separate "serves 3" entrees instead of one "serves 6" entree. This seemed to be very common practice. There were two I couldn't split - a beef roast and a pork roast - and when I mentioned this at the end, I learned that I could've asked a staffer to take the meat back into the kitchen and cut it up for me. Alas. So we've got 14 meals in the freezer instead of the expected 16, although I'm sure the roasts will give us leftovers.
I enjoyed it, although I'm awfully tired now. I definitely feel good about having a freezer full of dinners. And it was very nice to have someone else do the shopping, prepwork, and cleanup. The food... well, I wouldn't want to eat this stuff every day, especially if I had the time and energy to cook from scratch, but it all looks and smells appealing, and I think it will be much nicer than relying on take-out and convenience foods after the baby is born. I could see myself doing it again. It would have been more fun to go with a friend, though. Maybe next time.
Updated to add:
I forgot that I was going to list the dishes I made:
Country French tarragon chicken with noodles (in a wine sauce, with carrots, mushrooms, and peas).
Fat Tuesday chicken, sausage, rice, and beans (with green peppers, but mercifully no okra).
Mama mia manicotti (cheese and herb-stuffed, with tomato sauce).
Peanut and cilantro marinated chicken breasts (with sugar snap peas).
Pork chops with Italian stuffing (the stuffing has sun-dried tomatoes and roasted red peppers).
Rosemary and mustard beef roast (just a big slab of seasoned meat).
Shrimp fried rice (with corn, carrots, and sugar snap peas).
Tangy barbecued pork wraps (a pork roast seasoned for the slow cooker, and a package of tortillas).
Boy, am I tired. The necessary pace was quicker than I realized at first - I prepared eight recipes (you can do either eight or twelve) and it took me a full hour and forty minutes. I think that, with a little more familiarity with the setup, I could do all twelve in the allotted two hours - but it would definitely be work.
About twenty women and two men attended my session. We were given aprons (and bandannas, for everyone with longer hair than me) and cards marked with our names and the dishes we'd signed up to make. They gave us a lecture about food safety - we had to wash our hands before and after every recipe, after any rest breaks, and if we happened to touch raw meat or our faces with our hands - and turned us loose.
The room was set up with four large double-sided cooking stations, each of which had two recipes set out per side. Each station had a prep surface (about a foot deep), a set of salad bar-type wells for raw ingredients, and a higher back shelf for spices and condiments. Dry ingredients (raw rice and pasta, packets of tortillas) were in large tubs at the endcaps. Ingredients were measured with long-handled measuring scoops color-coded by size (blue for one cup, green for half a cup, etc.), small measuring spoons, or graduated measuring cups. A particularly nifty feature: the measuring spoons for sticky ingredients were like miniature ice cream scoops, the kind you squeeze to release the ice cream. For most ingredients, the right size of measuring scoop was already in the ingredient wells.
Most of the dishes were prepared right inside freezer bags, which were stretched over cookie jar-sized plastic crocks for preparation. Generally speaking, you put raw meat or fish, vegetables, and sauce ingredients into the bag, sealed it, and then massaged it on the counter until the ingredients were mixed. Meal elements requiring separate preparation went in separate bags - for example, my "shrimp fried rice" entree includes a bag of rice-and-seasonings, which cooks for the longest amount of time, and another bag of shrimp and vegetables, which gets added partway through. Both bags are sealed together into a third bag to keep them together in the freezer. Or, for example, my "country French tarragon chicken with noodles" includes a bag of chicken and veggies in sauce, and a separate bag of dry noodles to add just before cooking. At any rate: once you had an entree prepared, you took it to a back table, slapped a label on it with thawing and cooking instructions, marked it with your name, and put it in one of three industrial-sized freezers.
Adjusting the recipes on the fly was easy enough if it involved larger or smaller quantities of the ingredients already called for. It would've taken more thought and planning to adapt the recipes using ingredients from other stations - and honestly, I'm not sure there would've been time. They cautioned us at the beginning that the food was seasoned to child-friendly levels, and I routinely doubled or tripled spices - the Cajun seasoning in the red beans and rice, for example, and the garlic in almost everything. I increased the amount of vegetables in most of the dishes which included veggies, and usually omitted the onions. I also subdivided the food on the fly, making each recipe as two separate "serves 3" entrees instead of one "serves 6" entree. This seemed to be very common practice. There were two I couldn't split - a beef roast and a pork roast - and when I mentioned this at the end, I learned that I could've asked a staffer to take the meat back into the kitchen and cut it up for me. Alas. So we've got 14 meals in the freezer instead of the expected 16, although I'm sure the roasts will give us leftovers.
I enjoyed it, although I'm awfully tired now. I definitely feel good about having a freezer full of dinners. And it was very nice to have someone else do the shopping, prepwork, and cleanup. The food... well, I wouldn't want to eat this stuff every day, especially if I had the time and energy to cook from scratch, but it all looks and smells appealing, and I think it will be much nicer than relying on take-out and convenience foods after the baby is born. I could see myself doing it again. It would have been more fun to go with a friend, though. Maybe next time.
Updated to add:
I forgot that I was going to list the dishes I made:
Country French tarragon chicken with noodles (in a wine sauce, with carrots, mushrooms, and peas).
Fat Tuesday chicken, sausage, rice, and beans (with green peppers, but mercifully no okra).
Mama mia manicotti (cheese and herb-stuffed, with tomato sauce).
Peanut and cilantro marinated chicken breasts (with sugar snap peas).
Pork chops with Italian stuffing (the stuffing has sun-dried tomatoes and roasted red peppers).
Rosemary and mustard beef roast (just a big slab of seasoned meat).
Shrimp fried rice (with corn, carrots, and sugar snap peas).
Tangy barbecued pork wraps (a pork roast seasoned for the slow cooker, and a package of tortillas).
no subject
Date: 2005-02-26 11:43 am (UTC)But this is coming from someone whose ten month old can and does run, so grains of realism salt and all.
Apparently pregnant women shouldn't drink apple juice or maybe it was eat peaches, because it causes hiccups in the baby. It might have been walking widdershins around the graveyard though. I'm a bit hazy on the details. How are the hiccups?
And Let's Dish - would you guesstimate the frantic pace to be compatible with RSI in the hands, wrists and elbows? I have real trouble peeling potatoes, but I can see that many of our recipes could be adapted for advance prep, and doing it that way while L is asleep might work for us if we really could do 8 meals in 1h45m.
A.
Here and there and all over the place, but never mind...
no subject
Date: 2005-02-27 03:12 pm (UTC)Uh oh. I'm supposed to be trying to PREVENT her from having hiccups? Because I think they're adorable.
Let's Dish - would you guesstimate the frantic pace to be compatible with RSI in the hands, wrists and elbows? I have real trouble peeling potatoes, but I can see that many of our recipes could be adapted for advance prep, and doing it that way while L is asleep might work for us if we really could do 8 meals in 1h45m.
I don't think it would be hard on your RSI, because there was no chopping or peeling, and very little stirring.
But I don't think you could replicate the setup at home in anywhere close to the same amount of time. Most of what saves time is that the prepwork and cleanup are someone else's problem, and even if you did prepwork in advance at home you'd still be the ones who had to do it. Home kitchens also aren't generally large enough to allow you to set up all the ingredients for eight dinners at once, so that you can just move along the row. The measuring scoops also helped save time, although probably not as much as the first two things.
So, alas. Hopefully someone will open a business like this near you.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-27 08:41 pm (UTC)I dunno. But someone once told me why it was All My Fault. I thought I'd share :)
My home kitchen isn't large neough to set up the ingredients for anything all at once, so I guess simulating Let's Dish at home isn't going ot happen. But hey, I have a slow cooker and a breadmaker, so who cares? I have just discovered packet mix bread, too, which makes the whole thing even easier.
A.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-02 03:30 am (UTC)