The Great Spinach Hustle- was Re: [Sca-cooks] EK Coronation feast analysis (LONG)

[Phlip]

Brighid posted an accurate assessment of her feast, and I figured I'd
contribute a bit about my involvement, mostly because it was so much fun ;-)

Ene bichizh ogsen baina shuu...

> Sauteed spinach.  This was a lot of work, and had Phlip not been there
with
> a humongous wok, it would not have been feasible to cook the spinach just
> before serving.

We discussed that after the feast. A feast on this scale requires many
contributions, and I'm certainly not considering mine the most important, or
even very important, but it does have some information that other cooks
might find useful down the road.

Now, I told Brighid, that as a general rule, the best way to use my services
is to give me a task, and leave me to do it. When planning the feast, I
think it didn't occur to her that, while sauteeing a pound or two of spinach
is a quick and easy vegetable for even a dozen people, when you have bales
of it, to serve 200 pepople, it's a difficult thing to cook properly,
because spinach, being a very delicate vegetable, doesn't have a long
holding time, unless you want it to turn into a grey slimy mess like many of
us are used to from cafeterias.

When it started getting close(r) to time to prep it, Berelinde realized,
looking at those bales of green on the serving cart, that they just didn't
have enough frying pans to cook it conventionally, and was suggesting that
they cook it ahead and hold it- which is precisely the technique that leads
to a soggy grey mess. I objected, and told them that I had my Omigosh wok, a
32 inch wok given me by one of my smithing students, and volunteered to do
the job. They were hesitant- even with a big wok, did I realize how much
spinach there was? I went and looked at the cart (yes, folks, we had 40 lbs
or thereabouts of spinach in various containers, on a serving cart
completely dedicated to spinach- and overflowing, I might add).

Told them I could do it if I started when the German course (second course)
was going out, I'd have it done in time to be plated and served with the
French course. I needed a burner on the stove, and an assistant, and before
the enterprise started, I set up the equipment, with the everflowing bales
of spinach to my left, the wok on a burner, the shelf over the stove used to
hold my metal spatula when I wasn't using it, and my olive oil on the
counter behind me (didn't want something flammable like oil near the heat
where it could spill and catch fire).

I turned up the burner to full blast (lovely, big commercial gas burners)
swooshed the first batch of oil in, added spinach, and I was off.Once the
oil was heated (the first time- the wok had to heat up first- steel is slow
to heat, but then retains heat without it spreading very much beyond where
the direct flame is) added the spinach, and was off, basicly constantly
turning the spinach over so that it heated evenly. I had to hold onto one
handle of the wok throughout, since I didn't have a collar to stabilize it-
don't need one when I cook on the forge- and I think I convinced my
assistant that I had asbestos hands because he had to grab a towel to touch
the other handle without being burned when we emptied it.

Now, about that spinach. When I first looked at the bales, it looked like
about 6 wok loads. I had forgotten that it compresses when you put it in a
big container like a humongous stock pot. The first couple of trays took
three batches, but when I got to the stock pot, it seemed like more and more
and more spinach sprouted from the bottom of that pot- thought it would
never end. And, I got to the bottom of that heap, and discovered another
large pan of spinach on the bottom of the cart, and it too was compressed...
from my point of view, it looked like that cart was doing nothing but
sprouting more spinach....

My assistant was wonderful- he was there whenever I needed him, and while I
was busy, managed to help do Other Things behind me- including, at one
point, getting me some cold drinking water. All I had to do was deal with
the wok.

Did have a couple of minor glitches- there was stuff in the oven below me
that needed removed in the middle of things, as well as in the oven behind
the spinach cart, and Someone kept moving my olive oil until I had to yell
to leave my olive oil alone, because I was needing to do some things with a
window of seconds, and figuring out where the olive oil got moved THIS time
was not on my schedule, and I shoved someone else out of the way, but
overall, everthing went ideally.

While I enjoyed the other projects I helped with all day, this was GREAT
fun, and I'll be happy to do it, or something similar, again ;-) Put a
blacksmith/ cook with food, a fire, and a great whonking hunk of steel, and
you've got a recipe for great enjoyment- go figure ;-)

Saint Phlip,
CoDoLDS

"When in doubt, heat it up and hit it with a hammer."
 Blacksmith's credo.

 If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is probably not a
cat.

Never a horse that cain't be rode,
And never a rider who cain't be throwed....