GARDE-MANGER : SALADS FOR L'ECOLE

Tonight is our first night at the salad station. There seems to be some work to do early on but a lot of down-time. Our dish for this evening is the Leek and Mushroom Flan with Spring Pea Sauce (Vielle France), Royale De Poireaux Et Champignons, Coulis De Pois Frais. I haven't done a savory flan yet so I'm interested in tonight's recipe. More to come after class...

Before I describe what the dish was like or how we prepared it, let me tell you what happened a few minutes into the beginning of preparation.

Chef Lee Anne Wong came to Garde Manger to ask one of the Level Four students (who was also in the new FCI commercial) if he could come to cook for the winner of Top Chef, Chef Harold Dieterle, and Chef Stephen Asprinio at the Tribeca Grill tomorrow. If you've never worked in a professional restaurant (outside of school) and you're going to pop your cherry you might as well do it at Robert DeNiro's restaurant for the most recent celebrity chef, right? I volunteered and have to show up at the restaurant at 10 a.m. with my whitest whites wearing a baseball cap. I'm just supposed to say I'm there to cook for Harold and Stephen. As to whether this means I'll be cooking for them or cooking with them or what this is exactly for, I have no idea.

It is kind of funny that a friend called me today because she'd seen Stephen in midtown telling someone on the phone that all they needed to do was to pick up some bags. I tell you, in a city of 8 million stories that's a pretty funny coincidence.

DISH: Leek and Mushroom Flan with Spring Pea Sauce (Vielle France), Royale De Poireaux Et Champignons, Coulis De Pois Frais

RECIPE: Boil 250 ml chicken stock and cook 340g frozen peas til tender. Drain peas, reserve stock, shock them under cold water but don't soak them. Let stock cool off. (Left, Level Four Salad Station, Garde Manger)

Emincées two shallots, melt one tablespoon butter and sweat shallots. Add ½ teaspoon curry powder, 250ml heavy cream bring to a boil, simmer and cool. Place in a blender with the stock and peas, purée, strain, season with salt and pepper and reserve.

Preheat oven to 350°F. Emincées mushrooms and sweat them in 50g butter. Add lemon juice and 225g leeks. When mushrooms and leeks are soft, add 125 ml dry vermouth. Reduce the liquid by ½ and add 250ml heavy cream and one tablespoon of cornstarch, then reduce by half and cool. Add 250 ml cream, three eggs, three yolks, the vegetable mixture, then season with salt, pepper and nutmeg and fill pam-sprayed ramekins with custard. Place ramekins in a hotel pan filled ½ up ramekins with hot water and put royales (the flan in the ramekins)in oven for about an hour or until they are set and don't jiggle.

Prepare garnish: three tablespoons of cooked peas, three tablespoons diced tomatoes, émondées and two tablespoons of chives cut on bias 3/8 long. For service, remove royales from ramekins, serve in center of the plate surrounded by sauce and fingerfuls of peas and tomatoes. (Recipe above is for up to eight servings.)

BREAKDOWN: At right, the Level Three Salad Station (Garde Manger, below the table to the right is a refrigerator filled with stocks: veal, chicken, and marmite) ready for service. There were a few changes in the recipe. First, for restaurant service we multiplied everything by three. For the coulis (the sauce desribed above first) we added the peas at the last second before it was puréed. For the royale (the custard) we sweated the leeks first (emincée then soaked in a bain-marie to remove the grit) and then added the mushrooms and as per Chef W.'s instruction, we allowed them to get a little color before adding the vermouth.

For service we pulled the flan gently away from the sides and put it in the center of the plate. If you sauce the plate first the flan slides around on it so we sauced afterwards; you just have to be careful not to make a mess with the sauce. We garnished around the flan with three fingerfuls of peas alternating with three fingerfuls of tomatoes, sprinkling chives all around.

Aside from making the leek and mushroom flan, we were also responsible for making the digestive salads (right), the dish served after the entrees and just before dessert. It's a light salad, some brisee and romaine lettuces and watercress in a citrus dressing (lemons, limes and oranges with oil, salt, pepper and mustard) just to cleanse the diners' palates.

One of our group wasn't here tonight and another expedited for the fish station. That left three of us for service. Two of us focused on making marmite stocks leaving only one of us to plate during much of service. There were a few hurried moments where we had to make ten salads at a time and even twenty but really it was low-key, especially after working the line at fish (Poissonier) and meat (Saucier). While Chef W., was our station chef, Chef R. (right, who was one of our other instructors in Level One), was also working with us tonight. Mostly he gave everyone a hard time.

This was one of the more time-sensitive Salad Station (Garde Manger) dishes to do because the flan takes about an hour to cook and Garde Manger is the first dish of the prix fixe menu. Even so, it was pretty easy (there was time for some fun, left, Meg, Chad and Tim hamming it up) and we may want to see if Chef W., wouldn't mind us making the Tuesday and Thursday salads during our down time.

Speaking of menus, the restaurant will be changing to their Summer menu and we'll be getting new recipe books. That means our second time around on Level Three we'll get to learn new dishes. Woohoo!