Day 24 of PCA II – Oh My Cod! – The Revenge

Tonight was bad. Oh lordy that’s an understatement if there ever was one. First off we only had 10 people show up for class. So we broke ourselves into 2 groups of 5. Odd numbers in groups always tends to throw people off. This is because some things are done in the group of 5 and others were to be in groups of 2 so there’s that odd man out. We managed pretty good with out group. 2 of our strong students that would have been on our line were gone. So Eddie and I stepped up. He kept the food prep going and I checked up on all the team players.

We cooked (if you can call it that) up Salt Cod. Let’s start with the preparation of this fish. It has to be soaked for a minimum of 48 hours in water that is changed every 12 hours. When you open the lid to change the water you are instantly greeted with a wave of odor and not a pleasant one. I like fish, but this about made me gag.

But wait there’s more. It’s like leather. We had to boil the first batch in milk to help draw more of the impurities out. If something has impurities that need to come out before eating it, it shouldn’t be eaten.

The other problem we ran in to was the mixer issue. Ours was broken and unfortunately during the mixing process the paddle kept scraping the bottom on the bowl. Our dish was more gray than a US Navy battleship. We got high marks on presentation, but since they wouldn’t taste it much because of the concern for metal shavings lower marks on that. (We live in S. Calif Los Angeles area…don’t we inhale more metal shavings than eat?)

Then we cooked up yet more and made fried fish balls. I wish I could think of a good reason to do this. I would have a really hard time cooking anything like this for anyone. I would feel it is my moral obligation to keep their palate away from such things. Oh I know what you’re thinking…it might be a delicacy for them, an old family favorite. Time to educate them on new delicacies.

The only 2 things we made that I like were the black olive tapenade and the green olive one. These were served on baguettes that were toasted and rubbed with fresh garlic.

We were done pretty early 9pm. So we cleaned some stuff and talked about our finals.

Mid-Terms coming! Heaven help me!

Until Then…