What a chef should see

Today's blog is about my canteen experience earlier on. At eleven o' clock I was feeling a little bit hungry, so I decided I would go over to the canteen to get a bite to eat. The breakfast section was on it's last legs so I decided I would have a sandwich instead. I stood in the queue for about 10 minutes while the lady behind the counter chatted to the other people in the queue. What's the problem I hear you ask , well the problem wasn't about her chatting, it was with the fact that two more girls who were with the girl she was chatting to skipped the queue (that's another blog . . I hate queue skippers). Finally it was my turn, I ordered a chicken salad roll. When I sat down to eat it a piece of chicken fell out. To my absolute disgust the chicken was really pink, now not the pink you get sometimes when you order chicken wrapped in bacon. That pink is absolutely normal as it is the dye that comes from the bacon. This pink was raw pink as in not cooked properly. I couldn't believe it the more I poked through the roll the more pink bits I found. I cannot believe that any chef even a commis chef would cut that chicken up and NOT realise it wasn't cooked !Any fool could see it wasn't cooked. I went back to the counter and explained this to the lady, I told her I was way to busy to get sick, she was ever so apologetic about it, but to my disgust the other lady said "I knew that wasn't cooked right", but yet and all she still served it and put people's health at risk. I really think she should have sent it back to the chef and said she wasn't serving it. Why are so many waitresses so afraid of chefs. As I'm a qualified chef myself I understand that people can be intimidated by our race, but really, should you be that afraid that you risk people's health?. I don't think so!. My point is why are so many so called chefs not even able to get the basic principles of cookery right, such as cooking things to the correct level i.e chicken and making nice soup. Horrible soup is something that drives me absolutely crazy. I cannot understand how a chef can't make nice soup, it's really easy to make so how can they get it so wrong. I have to say one of my biggest pet hates is ordering a bowl of soup and what I get is a bowl of watery tasteless muck. Have any of you out there had a really bad experience with food that you just have to get off your chest?

Is college worth it?

Hello there everyone. Well I haven't been blogging in a while. This is mainly due to the fact that I have a mountain of work to do in college and plus the fact that work has been really, really busy so in essence I just haven't had the time. Back to my topic, Is college worth it? You see I'm asking myself this on a daily basis for the last few weeks. The first time I went to college I studied professional cookery. I loved it and the career path was very simple. You were a commis chef for the first few years until you got some experience under your belt and then gradually with time you moved up the ranks and you knew your goal was to be a head chef. Hey presto career path. All was going well with my career path until I suddenly realised that I didn't really want to be a chef for the rest of my life. I thought I'd quite like to lecture in hospitality. So therefore I started my degree in hospitality management. Here I am 28 years of age, I've spent the last three years studying, the end is very near. Everything should be very clear at this stage, I should have a definite plan, but I don't. I have no idea where this degree can take me, and from asking advise from other people there are way too many options to decide from. So basically I will have to go back out into the industry and start from scratch just like everyone else. My point is that from my experience I know that this can be done without a degree. If you start in a good hotel you can work hard and move up the ranks gradually. So did I just waste the last four years of my life studying very hard to start at the bottom?. This question troubles me. So to finish off, if I don't get offered a really good position with a comfortable salary somewhere once I finish my honours degree I will be extremely distraught and will definitely arrive at the conclusion that maybe college wasn't worth it after all.

Weddings

In general I have to say I like weddings, they are usually a good day out especially if it's a family wedding or that of a close friend. I don't like weddings today at all and I don't care whose it is.
You see i work in the Ballymascanlon House Hotel and today was our wedding fayre. It's now 8.00pm and I have spent the entire day talking to brides. Don't get me wrong I like being nice to people after all I'm a receptionist, it's my job to be nice and polite, but after you hear the words, " I'm getting married here" a thousand times in one day it is pretty hard not to say " I don't care, I don't care who your band is , what flowers you are having or especially that you have lots of friends coming up from Galway , Sligo or wherever and that you need more rooms. The fact is we only sell rooms on a two night basis at the weekend and you have already got your twenty five rooms for one night, so your not getting any more!. Sadly I cant do that, well I could but the probability of me getting fired would be pretty high. Therefore I just sat and listened to them giving out and then once again tried to explain why I couldn't give them any more rooms.
Thankfully we only have a wedding fayre once a year and I'll never have that many brides in one day again, at least not until the next one.