Buffet v5.0

Pretty up and down day in Catering and Buffet. Here's the highlights:

**Seafood sausage (especially the baked version) was delicious. People were skeptical of this dish from the start, but I couldn't wait to get down on it. I think I was ruined by What's-His-Face from a few seasons back on Top Chef, who made seafood sausage all the time. The sausage is plated next to creamed Napa cabbage (pretty good) and saffron potatoes (the saffron being what gives the potatoes their neon orange color).

Saffron is kind of ridiculous. Paraphrased from Wikipedia--

"Saffron is a spice derived from the flower of the saffron crocus (Crocus sativus). A Crocus sativus flower bears three stigmas. Together with their styles—stalks connecting stigmas to their host plant—stigmas are dried and used in cooking as a seasoning and colouring agent. Saffron, long the world's most expensive spice by weight, is native to Southwest Asia.

The point I'm trying to make here is the spice we used to color/flavor these potatoes goes from anywhere around $30/three grams to $20/half gram. It sounds crazy, sure, but those three stigmas are hand-picked so you can imagine the labor cost that goes into commercially producing this spice.

**The salmon mousse wrapped in nori was a lot of fun to make. If you can get past the texture, and you enjoy sushi, then you would enjoy this immensely. It was fun to do some rolling with the nori and subsequent slicing to get the resulting presentation wow-factor (kinda' looks like fish doesn't it?).

** Pastrami sandwiches were good. They were even better knowing we made the pastrami.

*The "Wing-Ding" sausage was my least favorite thus far. It uses turkey as the primary protein, with bleu cheese and Frank's Red Hot included to give it that chicken wing zip. Personally, I think it fell flat. It's not that it tasted bad, I just expected more I guess.

A couple pictures of the fruit tarts we made in Breads kitchen this morning. I would say my presentation was pretty boring compared to most...but I know what I like on my fruit tarts (i.e. raspberries, strawberries, kiwi and blueberries-- and plenty of them).

The tart is a thin pie dough, and the cream is similar to the cream we filled our pies with. At this point I'm pretty sick of this cream...bring on something new.