so, at work we do these weekly "peer to peer" training sessions. basically, an employee is given a food/wine/beverage topic and our job, if picked, is to prepare a five-ten minute oral dissertation on that topic (typical topics might be "cognac vs. armagnac" or "willamette valley wine region" or "history of kobe/wagyu beef") tomorrow i've got "compare/contrast 4 different varieties of blue(eu) cheese/what would you pair them with? i've chosen maytag(iowa), gorganzola(italy), and windsor(new zealand) because we use all 3 prominently in our restaurant and it's nice to keep things relevant, and either stilton or roquefort (both UK) because so many confuse those two as generic terms for any old blue cheese. i plan to discuss origin, production, cow/sheep/goat/etc... and basic flavor profiles, but also want to have little (simple) tastings of each. with the gorganzola, i'm gonna take little melbas and put some horseradish mayo and my famous red onion marmalade on top with a little gorganzola, for the maytag, i'm gonna put some hot pepper jelly on a cracker and then the maytag. for the windsor, im gonna do a pepper crusted seared steak of some sort sliced thin, served cold and rare. i also want to illustrate the importance of proper pairing by giving everyone a little bit of white zinfandel (chosen specifically for it's horridness, but somehow tastes amazingly good with a bit of blue cheese in your mouth. try it.) but i need one more quick recipe. kurt? you got any blue cheese snack type deliciousness that might be easy to make for about a dozen people to get a taste of? anybody else? bueller?
I wanna be in your class. I also regret that I didn't have time to chime in the asshole customers in a nice restaurant thing. I felt your pain there. Somehow some people's urge to have a top shelf dining experience doesn't extend to behaving like a top shelf human being. Rather, they seize the opportunity to put "The Help" in their place. It truly sucks.
Some complaints I wrote down once. Possibly funny to another fine dining server.
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