Nighttime Crave

Night time crave.

Hello band, you so good, but SO loud.

PICKLES WHATS HAPPENING

Look that's the salad I sorted. I'm important. And the apple strudel I tried. YUM

Desert plate. My favorite kind of plate.

Make shift kitchens have make shift cabinets. Where they put muffins.

I'm artistic.

Finished desert plates. I ate some of that. You can't notice. I hope.

People be cooking.

OMG more people are cooking.

Look at that rice. Its purple. Too fancy for this ish.

That's my mentor guys. That's him.

Those are miniature pumpkin things. And they put them on the purple rice.

Pretty good for not a real kitchen.

He was the one who gave me the coffee to pour. Broke Spoke sweater is Wendy. Wendy is cool. (Look at the girl in glasses. She wasn't happy about the classes.)

Plating. Like on the food network. But with out the dramatic music.

Look at them plates.

#stress

Even thought those look like creatures from the deep sea, they are actually mushrooms.

CHEESE, I LOVE YOU

I took a sneaky picture of the menu. Like a spy.

Well it’s happening. With great pain I am facing my procrastination. I’m not kidding about the pain part. I’ve had to take two naps just to face this. Once I put something off I have some deep trouble doing it. It’s been a lifelong struggle.

So. Nighttime crave. That was a while ago. Sorry bout that. Procrastination like this won’t happen again, but mostly because I will start failing my class. Yay. Here’s the story:

After I went to daytime crave and visited the goats, I went home, ate some cheese, put on my boots for the first time this fall and made my mom drive me to Crave again. (This procrastination thing isn’t just with my blog, I promise. It’s also why I’ve had my  permit for a year but only three lessons.) Anyways…I had promised John (my mentor) that I would meet him over where the band was playing so I followed the sound of electric guitar and found him and a bunch of other people in chef outfits. The plan was to watch them make a 15 course meal. It was going to be intense.

The menu was:

·      Amouse Bouche – Holly Hill Inn – Brown Bread Croustade with herbed goat cheese tomato jam and pickled baby okra. (This was super exciting because the cheese was from the goat farm that I had visited that morning. AND at Crave Susan Miller, the goat cheese lady won for best cheese. Yay for yummy cheese. You go, goats.)

·      Small Plate – Laurentia and Sebastian Torrealba – Pan roasted lamb belly stuffed with pears, finished with red wine reduction

·      Soup – Dan Wu’s pork and vegetable ramen

·      Pasta – Lexington Pasta

·      Intermezzo – Wendy Meadors pickled fall vegetables

·      Beef – jerry Broderick – Braised beef short rib with local tomato ragout (now I'm not super sure about this because I think I missed it or they didn’t include it because it was crossed out)

·      Lamb – Shannon Wampler – Collins

·      Pork – Jonathan Lundy – pork three ways

·      Greens – John Foster – Roasted wild mushrooms tossed with shallot sorghum dressing and baby fall greens (MY MENTOR AH)

·      Cheese – Pat Wylie

·      Ice creams – Crank and Boom, Pedal Sassy (remember them? Farmers market goodness)

·      Assorted Pastry – Jim Betts – apple strudel, Fatima Shamash – baklava, Sofia Wu – olive oil financiers

·      Coffee – A Cup of Commonwealth

·      Bread supplied by Bluegrass Bakery

I mean, wow. Really.

So I get there and there are a bunch of people running around battling this impressive menu, and I like, “Ummmm, hi, John what can I do? Um”. I am articulate. He assigned me to follow his friend Wendy (the one who made the pickles.) She was so nice. She works at my all time favorite restaurant in Lexington, Stella’s. Her girlfriend’s daughter was with her too so we both followed her. The daughter went to my old middle school and is currently taking a class wit my all time favorite teacher, Mrs. Jones. It was a good night. They kept giving us scraps to try. It was equally as delicious as it was fancy. And it was pretty fancy. My favorite was the apple strudel and the pork, and the rest of the menu. I was a proud pan holder during plating and lettuce sorter for the salad greens. I mean, such an integral part of the process.

It was an amazing night. So many cool things. And it was a lot of fun being behind the scenes. Except for the part where I was emptying coffee packets into a container and I accidentally shook it too hard and it went into my shirt. I smelled like coffee for like three days. Other than smelling like coffee and pickles, It was fabulous. (I got pickle juice on me. I'm clumsy like that.) I mean, who wouldn’t love watching delicious, organic, local food being made into magazine worthy plates. I mean, really.