Hume Lake Firefighter Couples Conference 2011

After a dinner shift, a dinner shift plus snack shift, immediately followed by a 5:30am breakfast shift, our firefighter's conference is finished.  This week I was able to raise the bar a notch on my garde manger.  I'm actually starting to get the hang of this!  Next step is to get those special knives because there's quite a few things I'd like to try, but can't without the proper tools.  A paring knife and razor blade can only go so far...

Hopefully next week I'll have the knives and some more cool stuff to pull out of my trick bag!

Friday night dinner's carving board.  I kicked off the weekend by doing a fancy squash bird on a fruit basket on a kale-lined board.  I added dill and asparagus to the grapes to blend it into the kale and draw the attention to the bird.

Saturday night dinner.  A swan carved into a single cantaloupe, with beet flowers.  I really enjoyed using the beets in this piece.  Although they were hard to cut (and I feared for my fingers the whole time), they were a glossy, deep red when freshly cut with rings of dark brown running through the flower.  A new favorite.

Sunday lunch.  Fruit basket reincarnation.  This one didn't come out nearly as well as I was hoping it would.  I had originally intended to do a pineapple something display, but last night we used up the last of the pineapples to serve the cheesecake lollipops, so I was forced to begin plan B.  Then, (back story warning: beginning tomorrow all meals will be in the second dining hall while Pondy is shut down for a month to install a new dishwasher) when I went to see what fruit I actually did have, I found that everything had already been transfered to Cedar Hall for the upcoming week, so I only had a couple lemons and zucchini I'd pulled but hadn't used from the previous night.  In a near panic (not really), I scraped together enough usable fruits and veggies to make this, and throw it together with 5 minutes to spare!