A Super Scrumptious Salad Store!
There's a first time for everything, and this time it was having a food store and putting together a mass production of 130 servings of salad! Paul and i were preparing for his church's annual Christmas Carols fete at St. Barnabas, Bossley Park! It's a beautiful evening with live music, a jumping castle, games for the kids, sausage sizzle, food and dessert stores, gelato cart followed by carols at night! Lovely way to spend a December evening!
Our cooking adventure started at noon on Friday as we set out to Flemington markets to bulk buy ingredients. It has been a long time since i've been here and i had forgotten what a crazy place it is - mass amount of cheap vegetables, big hefty men yelling "$5 a box, only $5! You! Yes, you, $4, i'll give it to you for $4!" Little bit crazy but somewhat exciting too!
1 case of cherry tomatoes, 1 case of cos lettuce, whole lot of herbs, a few kilos of carrots, cucumbers, sweet potato, 3 dozen free range eggs (only $11!) all fit into our industrial-sized trolley...
From there, we set off to Ashfield to clear out the asian meat store of chicken (8kg later) and had some delicious dumplings to re-energize!
As a total side note, i was shocked that we were not able to find ANY takeaway boxes for sale in the whole of Ashfield... luckily Paul had cleaned out Randwick shops the day before!
Then the cooking started.
A lot of chopping, slicing, baking, poaching, a short sleep in between. I think all up, we both put in about 13 solid hours before the deadline of 3pm the next day.
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| 3 dozen boiled eggs, to peel with the 'spoon' method |
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| 8kg of chicken to poach, 2kg of bacon to slice and fry up, 2 loaves of bread to turn into oregano croutons! |
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| 2.5kg of beef to cut into strips and marinate with fish sauce and lemongrass |
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| The run sheet :) |
The fun part was the packing actually, really felt like we were in some mass production with 30 takeaway boxes lined up at one time, methodical fill-up, garnish and box!
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| Mustard mayo chicken for the pasta salad |
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| Salad #1: Pasta salad with poached chicken, sweet potato, roasted leek, cherry tomatoes and basil |
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| Salad #2: Vermicelli salad with carrot, cucumber, bean sprouts, mint and corainder (and a token tomato) |
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| The Fridge: Friday night (left), Saturday midday (right) |
Finally, by 3:30pm we had packed about 110 boxes and all the extra ingredients into the car and off to the fete we went! Set-up was simple:
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| Live cooking stand for lemongrass beef |
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| Chefs in action to put the finishing touches on the vermicelli salad |
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| Large salad bowls for display, Salad #3: Classic Caesar with home-made dressing! |
All in all, it was a really fun 30+hrs, the best part was realising Paul & I work great as a team in the kitchen... so potentially more creative cooking adventures to come!
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