Kitchen Adventures with My Friends

Nicki is a kitchen volunteer who has gone home now. Happily we overlapped for five weeks. You can see her here with the five savory dinner squash cheesecakes she made. Usually the volunteer scheduled for the early shift is the one who makes the main for the evening. Nicki has done that several times. She’s the one who cracked 120 eggs for 7 enormous omelette. She’s the one who fried 100 eggs for fried rice. And she’s the one who made those very tasty cheesecakes. She’s also shown here using the GIANT immersion blender we use for making the soup every lunch time.

Planning food for dozens of guests and nearly 20 staff members is a challenge. Anja is up to it. There is a trick. She factors in leftovers. And who eats the leftovers? Volunteers. Tuesday and Friday lunches are leftovers for the staff. Sometimes the guests eat so much of what is on offer that there are few leftovers. That happened the other week. So Declan had a trick under his chef’s hat. He had a very English solution: we made cheese on toast. Not a big deal you say. HA! You are wrong. Lea, in the photo above, is pictured with the trays of cheese toast. Declan made a bechamel sauce to go on the the toast first and then I covered them with cheddar cheese. YES PLEASE! The English are also very happy to have beans on toast too. That was another funny thing to me. But when you make the beans from scratch and season them like barbecue they are quite amazing.