A New "Stage"

I've also been busy the last few weeks doing a new stage (essentially, working for free, for experience).

I finished off at the old place (which was way far away) and now have a gig in a restaurante in Madrid. I'm doing only the nightly service (open hours are the typical Madrid hours of 9:00 to 12:00). So it's 3 hours or so, six nights a week.

The regular mix in the kitchen is the Sous, Salsero, Entremetier and a Garde Manger; plus me.
Thursday to Saturday (closed Sunday) they add 2 more for the cold station and an assistant for the fires. That's 8 (plus the dishwasher) in a small, center of the city, kitchen. It's shoulder to shoulder in there.

Baked Trout with Pisto

Made a couple one of these the other week. Packed one up in a vacuum food bag and froze it. Then thawed it the other day and did the boil-in-a-bag thing (bain marie); just 10 minutes and it was ready! And still delicious after freezing. The pisto was a tad watery around the edges and ¡the seam of the bag failed! At exactly the moment that I got the bag out of the water, placed it on the counter, then was picking it up again to cut it open - - the bottom edge of the bag opened spontaneously. The fish & salsa exited gracefully all on its own (although not onto the plate).

Trout: Clean, dehead, trim tail, butterfly it open, remove the spine & bones from the inside. Leaving you a complete looking fish with 2 filets still attached to the skin and each other.

Pisto: large brunoisse: 1 red pepper, 1 green pepper, 1 yellow pepper, 1 onion, 3 cloves garlic, 3 shallots, olive oil (x-virg)
You want to have distinguishable pieces of everything once the pisto is cooked so cut the pieces evenly, equally sized, about 1cm [1/2"] is what I did.

Preheat oven: 180C

Instructions:
Oil into the pan
Cook onions slowly (do not brown) until starting to get soft
Add shallots & garlic once onions have started releasing some juices.
Add the various peppers and cook over medium heat; stirring from time to time
At some mysterious moment the volume will suddenly start to shrink in the pan. This indicates that things are getting cooked. Maybe after 10 minutes or so.

Remove from heat; the pisto will not be quite finished yet. It will finish in the oven.

Put the trout in an oiled ovenproof pan and fill with some pisto, fold closed; place excess pisto around fish.
Oven it for 10/15 minutes; until fish is cooked (internal temp of 60)

If, like me, you are preparing this for reheating later, leave the fish under-done (internal temp of 50) so it can be "finished" when it's reheated.

Back in Business

The machines are working again. I have some catching up to do.

ThinkPad Now Working; So the Maxtor External Drive Broke

So I put the new 100GB drive in the ThinkPad; load Windows, Office, Firefox and so on; do a whole mess of updates.
And while reorganizing what litte I had saved the Maxtor 200GB external drive takes a dive. No, not on the ThinkPad; it's connected to the home desktop computer. No, it's not a virus; these machines are well protected. It's just dumb bad luck.

Thus I have spent that last 2 days debugging the problem and basically the drive is trash. Low level formats/erases don't help (not for long anyway - the drive errors again after an hour or 2 of activity).

Tomorrow I'm off to the shop for a new one. Hopefully I've managed to backup the whole drive and won't lose too much.

So, I won't be writing about the suckling pig I'm also cooking.

Hard Drive Recovery in Process

So the (replacement) drive arrives yesterday at noon. I had the recovery disks (from the time before last when this happened). Install, install, install; update, backup, update.
All in all, about 1 Gigabyte of updates so far! Now I'm installing the 2 version of Office that I use. Which means more updates shortly. Then it will be time to start installing actual applications!
I'll be at this for a while. Wish me luck.