Lessons Learned
So... It’s time now to gather everything together and figure out what I have learned from this particular feast... See each time I have run a feast, I have learned at least ONE important thing, and tried to move forward. My first time at bat running a kitchen I learned that my job was not so much to *make* dishes, but to delegate the making of the dishes. It’s a little counter intuitive when you’re the “Head Cook” but you really don’t do *much* cooking!
The second time I ran the kitchen, I learned I needed to think about the equipment I had on hand, and how I was going to prepare a dish. For example, I had a LOT of dishes that were supposed to be cooked on the stove top. However, we only had 4 burners, and it would have taken forever to do the dish! So we had to cook a few of the dishes in the oven instead, to ensure thorough cooking in the time we had open to us...
This time around, our feast was twice as large as I had ever cooked for before. This led to a number of issues I had not run into before! Luckily, I had thought ahead, and in the 3 ring binder I was using for my feast notes, I added some notebook paper. As things came up during the day, I wrote them down, so I could review them later. So take aways?
1. Have another cook review the recipes. There are 2 things I need to check..
a. Are all the recipes scaled up appropriately?
b. Are redundant ingredients being used efficiently?
So here I find 2 errors that really got magnified by the numbers of the feast.. I scaled up some of the sauce recipes, and ended up with WAY more than I needed. I probably could have cut it by a third... The second boo boo was not thinking about recipes that called for *parts* of an ingredient. Specifically: we had a number of recipes that called for egg yolks, and several that needed whole eggs. Instead of thinking that I could cut the need for eggs by subbing some of the egg whites for the whole eggs, I just bought one whole egg for each time the recipes called for an egg yolk, or egg white or whole egg. I overpurchased eggs by quite a lot, and ended up wasting money.
2. Review the Feast notebook before I leave home to be sure ALL the recipes are printed!
With the Souteniers, we have an excel recipe template we use, that standardizes the recipes into a modern format. What I do (personally) is print off each recipe, place it in a sheet protector, and put them all in a 3 ring notebook. What happened at this event is one of the recipes did not get printed at all, and one *was* printed off, but did not get placed in a sheet protector, and got lost in the paperwork in the notebook. LUCKILY... I did have backup on my tablet and was able to retrieve and hand write the recipes on notebook paper. However, the custard sauce was NOT exactly the same one I’d typed in, so again, there was some waste of purchased ingredients.
3. Create a master list of all ingredients, and cross reference the dish they are in.
We always do an ingredient breakdown for the feast that we post on the door, so if you want to know if a certain dish has something you’re allergic to, you can check, if you have not contacted me prior to the event date. But this list is unwieldy when you are asked: “What dishes do you need the Parmesan cheese for?” At that point you have to scan the list dish by dish, and work out where this one ingredient belongs. That is a pain.
As a corollary: use the master ingredient list as a packing check list, so you know it’s somewhere in the boxes of stuff. Also, when you unpack, write down on the checklist WHERE the stuff has been unloaded to! At this last event, we had a couple of refrigerators, and a multitude of folks unloading groceries. Somehow about 3 or 4 bags of Parsnips ended up in a separate fridge from the others, so we were short on filling for the tarts...
4. Check with the autocrat on who will provide water for the populace at the event.
Since the hall was being used for A&S display, Court, a Baronial Meeting, etc, we had a TON of folks coming into the kitchen to ask for water, or ice. We finally had to lock the doors between the hall and kitchen so we did not have people underfoot. Prior discussions with the Autocrat as to who was providing water coolers, and getting ice for the royals would have helped this IMMENSELY!
5. Get the entire feast crew together in one meeting to review the recipes.
This was a big error on my part. Since everyone was cooking a different dish, and I was coordinating, I could not be everywhere at once, and some dishes, like the Vermicelli, and Parsnip Pye ended up missing things. I mean, we got LOTS of compliments on the feast, but I know things were not 100%.
6. Discuss what garnishes that the decorating minion wants to use, so we don’t have to send folks off site for it.
Nuff said!!
Well all this is in my notebook, and hopefully, next time, I will have better control of the situation. Of course, there will be a new lesson to learn, but there always is....