Week 7, 8, & 9: Eggs and Dairy, Short Order Sandwiches, Convenience Food

Week 7 we were responsible for egg cookery, a rather deceptively hard yet simple task in the kitchen.  While eggs have very simple and quick cooking processes, they are really easy to fuck up and fairly time consuming to master. 
Eggs cook very quickly, and usually call for relatively low heat.  They are complex bundles or protein and fat, with the white, protein-rich part of the egg cooking/coagulating at a lower temperature than the yellow yolk - high in both protein, vitamins, and fat and often used for its emulsifying and/or enriching qualities.
 Rather than bore you with all the technical details, I will instead boast about my successful first attempt at a french omelet.  Not only was I the first to get it right, but on my first goddamn try! I must have had good luck, or maybe I'm just a natural omelet-pro (the latter being doubtful considering my second and third attempts were no better than my first!).  Either way, I was certainly pleased, and so was our Chef.
Short Order Sandwiches, were, as one would presume, pretty straightforward.  Fortunately, part of our lab included roasting a half chicken (breasts), which is something I've never done - I've only ever roasted full chickens.  It's a pretty simple procedure: cover the chicken breasts in oil, season with salt and white pepper, place on hot roasting pan and place in oven at 450F for ten minutes.  This will kind of sear the chicken and will help jump start the browning of the skin.  After ten to fifteen minutes, turn the heat down to 350-75F, and bake for about half an hour, or until it reaches an internal temperature of at least 165F.
We also got to use a lot of new Asian ingredients I have never used before.  We made an oriental coleslaw with Savoy cabbage, daikon, sesame oil, ginger, snow peas, peppers and a few other seasonings I can't seem to remember.
We made egg salad sandwiches, with our own homemade mayonnaise.  The mayonnaise recipe was totally off, and stupidly following it without thinking twice, I added far too much lemon juice, meaning my mayo turned out a bit runny.  By extension, therefore, my egg salad was slightly runny as well.

Convenience Foods (not totally sure why these dishes were categorized as such) included poached frenched chicken breast stuffed with spinach, goat cheese, and pine nuts and roasted chicken legs with a demi glace.  I had not gotten much sleep the night before lab, as I was volunteering at a media dinner (more to come later).  I was totally off my game, and, what seemed like a pretty standard set of recipes, turned into me frantically trying to rectify little mistakes I had made along the way.  Firstly, I forgot to brown tomato paste with the bones and mirepoix that I was to use for my demi glace.  This meant, inevitably, that my demi glace was not as dark of a colour as I would have liked.  On the same note, I cut the carrots into pieces that were far too small for such a long cooking process (at least an hour and a half).  An hour in, the carrots had already broken down, making my sauce an orange colour. 
Other than my mistakes with the sauce, which put me in a rather frantic mood, I stuffed, roasted, and poached my chicken quite nicely.  The one thing I took from this class, one of the most important thing I've learned as of yet, is that getting frantic in the kitchen is extremely costly.  Not only did I lose focus, perpetuating feelings of stress that were completely unnecessary, but I lost marks because of it.  Chef Mac gave me a really hard time about losing my composure, claiming that if I lose it in a kitchen during service, all hell will break lose!