yummy yummy

Without further ado, a quick rundown of the bank food - I'd share a couple of pics as well, but I'm not sure how the bank would feel about that if I did, so I suppose I'll just say that if you know me and want to see some you can drop me a line:

2 hot buffet lines consisting of:
- Duck spring rolls
- Bacon-wrapped scallops
- Spicy meat empanadas
- Phyllo cups filled with prosciutto, chicken, and boursin cheese
- Lamb chops with rosemary demiglace
- Carving station serving beef tenderloin and ham

1 giant ice carving surrounded by cold boiled shrimp, cocktail sauce, and lemons.

1 cold table piked high with an enormous variety of fresh fruits, cheeses, vegetables, crackers, and dips.

1 crabcake station pan-frying crabcakes basically to order and serving them with a roasted red pepper aioli.

1 lobster fritter station deep-frying lobster fritters (rather like hush puppies but with diced lobster meat inside) the same way and serving them with a tequila-lime aioli. Also a platter of smoked salmon with all the traditional accompaniments.

1 Chinese dumpling station steaming pork and shrimp dumplings, again to order. (The dumplings rawked, and I'm not saying that just because I made the filling myself. They were total yum.) Also a huge platter of a surprisingly decent pork pate.

1 sushi bar serving up the reeeeeeeeeeeally good stuff. I so wish I hadn't been working and could have hung out there all night eating free sushi. A local place called "In the Raw" took care of this part of it for us, and if you're ever in Tulsa I seriously recommend you give them a try.

1 dessert table piled high with lemon squares, pecan squares, bourbon balls, and assorted other deliciousness.

1 truffle station hand-rolling truffle centers (white chocolate, Grand Marnier, or espresso) in any of five different coatings (crushed peanut, crushed macadamia, crushed gingersnap with added ginger, powdered sugar, or a spicy cayenne cinnamon sugar).

Beer and wine and liquor! Oh my!

Good times, good times. I don't miss cooking as a full-time job, because the hours are suck and it's high-stress and working in kitchens comes to dominate your whole life. I do miss it in other ways, though, and I'm so glad that I have the bank to scratch that itch. It's really the perfect second job - the food is great, the company is even better, and we always have a really good time whether we're serving 20 people or 720. Marcus and Ling are a couple of great cooks and it's always great to share a kitchen with them, all of the girls on the floor are really cool to work with, and the bartenders are fun people who mix the strongest drinks you've ever had. And there's just an indescribably great feeling that comes from busting your ass for two weeks straight and pulling it off without a hitch to rave reviews. Ah, the world of food.

Christmas at the bank

Whee! We've rolled egg rolls and trimmed lamb racks and made crab cakes and seasoned tenderloins and folded Chinese dumplings and trimmed and studded hams and made lobster fritter batter and ordered truffles and boiled shrimp and made sauces and stocked the bars and cut fruit and cheese and veggies and and and... tomorrow and Thursday the parties hit, Friday morning we work a short shift and do the Xmas thing and so on, and then I get my life back. Awesome. Although it's not like I mind, because the bank people are a lot of fun and high-pressure high-volume cooking is also a lot of fun, so we really do have a great time with it.

I'll post a full "menu" for those of you who're interested in this kinda stuff Friday night or Saturday, after I get some sleep. ^_^