Mac and Cheese

Dressed Cooked Vegetable Salad

We had a lot of odds and ends of veggies that needed using soon, so we served a first course consisting of small piles of a lot of different things.  There were sauteed yellow squash and zucchini, oven-roasted carrots and green beans, and boiled and dressed edamame.  Because we wanted to plate them all at once (to make sure everyone got a similar amount of stuff), and because plating at serving time is often really hectic, we plated them early and kept them covered in the fridge til serving time.

Macaroni and Cheese
More or less following Alton Brown's recipe, except that we got scared of not having enough and made a higher pasta-to-sauce ratio -- 5 lbs of pasta and about 6-7x the sauce recipe.  It came out great.

Heirloom Tomato Salad
Based on this recipe.  We had less than the recommended amount of basil, and dressed them on the plate by drizzling balsamic and olive oil, rather than measuring and mixing those things.  It was beautiful and tasty.









Chard
Just sauteed with garlic and olive oil and butter.







Fruit Tart

Following this recipe.  I was surprised by how much the crusts swelled during cooking.

American Classics

Tomato Soup
From this recipe. We made one pot strictly veggie, and made our own veggie stock with onions, carrots, and celery. This pot came out very nice! The pot using premade chicken stock and staying truer to the recipe came out too salty and less textured/exciting.

Potato Rolls
Homemade, from this recipe. We used half yellow and half sweet potato, which made for a nice golden color in the final product. They turned out beautiful.

Pulled Pork
From a secret Stetson family recipe. The pork butt slow roasted in the oven all day, and came out great.

Cole Slaw
This recipe was delicious, but served about twice as many as it claimed to.

Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Frosting
Made from this recipe.  This was a big hit, and was reported by more than one diner to be the best chocolate cake they'd ever had.  


There were a lot of changes for the icing. We were out of eggs (and suspicious of serving raw egg anyway), so we substituted a couple tablespoons of cream for the egg yolk in the icing. We also skipped the instant coffee in the icing, since some commenters said the result was too coffee-tasting. Finally, we were out of semisweet chocolate, and so used 6 oz. unsweetened chocolate plus 6 tbsp granulated sugar per recipe of icing.

Getting up to date - Saturday, Italian, Salmon

So, on Saturday we had roast beef dinner again.  Salad, peas, potatoes, beef, gravy, Yorkshire puddings (or, in fact, Kansas puddings, since they didn't qualify), and ice cream with chocolate and maple sauce.  It was a dinner.

Sunday was caprese on a stick, homemade focaccia, pesto pasta, green beans with walnut, and tiramisu.  Despite spending all afternoon in the kitchen, we were late getting the beans prepped and had trouble with pasta temperature.  It was a frustrating, but generally successful-enough dinner.

Monday was cookout.

Tuesday was a repeat of last week's salmon night, with potato soup, salmon, asparagus, rice, and apple pie.  (The apple pie needed just over half the number of apples in the recipe.  The pastry was the first recipe here, and I wish I used a touch more water than I did.)

Enchiladas again

Friday's whole menu was a repeat, except for the carrots.  We had cucumber avocado gazpacho, chips and salsa (both store-bought, passed alongside the soup as a first course), glazed baby carrots,  chicken and bean enchiladas, and flan.

A few different young guests visited the kitchen during the course of the afternoon, so we didn't add cayenne to anything, and just passed medium salsa at dinner for people who wanted more kick.

Lasagna

Thursday's dinner was rich and classic Italian.  We had:


Caesar salad
This was my least favorite of the salads we've served so far.  Caesar isn't very exciting to start with.  The croutons we'd made out of the homemade focaccia were a little stale -- if we'd tested them earlier we could've crisped them in the oven, but we were doing the salad last-minute.  We dressed it with roughly equal parts lemon and olive oil, with a lot of smashed garlic and salt and pepper in there.

Broccoli
A repeat from earlier this week, since the guests had all rotated out.

Lasagna - One meaty, one veggie
From this recipe.  We also made a veggie version of the sauce by adding olive oil for sauteeing and not putting any meat.  Then we sauteed some zucchini and yellow summer squash with olive oil and wilted onion and garlic, and layered that in to the veggie lasagna.  It was a big hit!

Garlic bread
This was not my proudest bread.  I followed the recipe for French bread from the Reinhart book.  I even started the day before to make a paté de whatever, and refrigerated it overnight.  Although I had to hurry along the rising time a bit on Thursday itself, things were still going fine.  I prepared the oven with baking tiles and a pan for water, so that I could get really nice crusts.  Then I slid in the loaves and splashed water all over the place, figuring that if a little water every 30 seconds was good, then a hearty amount of water every 30 seconds would be even better.  Unfortunately, as we learned in our post-game analysis, my water splashing managed to extinguish the pilot light, and make the oven stop heating.  So the bread baked very slowly, and not very well.  Lesson learned!  I will go easier on the water-splashing next time.  It still worked out and came out to be an all right garlic bread.

Chocolate mousse

From this recipe.  This was delicious!  We served them up fancy, with whipped cream, strawberries, and grated chocolate.  The mousse itself was very rich and chocolatey.

Thanksgiving Updated

We planned a menu with Thanksgiving-y foods, and then realized that we'd planned it for the 5th of July, and something Italian for the 4th. So we swapped things around and had Thanksgiving stuff for the 4th.

Creamy Corn Soup
The same one we had for Mexican night during staff week.  We used 4x this recipe, but had way too much soup for 23 diners.  We froze about half of it, figuring we can serve it again, maybe with a little embellishment/extension, on another night where we don't have too many diners.

Pull-Apart Dinner Rolls
From Reinhardt's Bread Baker's Apprentice.  I didn't have powdered milk, so just omitted it altogether. I probably ended up adding more flour to get the right texture than I otherwise would've.  They rose up huge, and were delicious.  I learned that the back of the left oven is much hotter than the front (maybe because we were opening the door a lot in order to shake the brussels sprouts around), and so I rotated the pan before calling the rolls done.  We served these alongside the soup, with butter to pass around.

Turkey Meatloaf
From this recipe.  We used a little less than 2x the recipe, and made it into two loaves.  We were a little scared of what we had created when it went in the oven, but when it came out it was tasty and nice enough looking, especially after we threw a bunch of fresh chopped parsley all over it.

Twice Baked Sweet Potatoes
From this recipe.  Unfortunately, we had already used up all of the cream cheese in the dessert, so we substituted half sour cream and half grated mozzarella, and then topped them with more mozzarella so that they'd look cooler.  They were nice.

Brussels Sprouts
These were delicious.  They also gave us an idea to make brussels sprouts chips.  A few leaves fell off and got extra golden-brown and crispy, and they were delicious.  So we want to try tearing the brussels sprouts apart completely, and just making chips out of them.  Probably at home, rather than at camp, since it'll be pretty experimental.

Pumpkin Cheesecake
We had this pie in this crust.  Probably because our pie tins were kinda big, and also because we only had 7/8 of the required cream cheese, we ended up making 4x the filling recipe but putting it into only 3 crusts.  We served it with freshly whipped cream with a little powdered sugar, vanilla, and cinnamon.

Salmon and Simple Sides

Our trip to Burlington was awesome, but we stayed up past our usual bedtime and didn't sleep in very late.  We got to camp in plenty of time to cook, but without any excess of energy.  Fortunately our meal today was a simple one, and everything except the dessert came together just how we hoped.

Baked Potato Soup

I improvised this one, based on a similar soup I made a couple months ago.  I used two pots, to make it easier to blend in the pot.  I caramelized 4 yellow onions in olive oil, and toward the end added about 4 stalks of celery.  Then I added a bunch of oven-roasted potatoes that were leftover from Beast night, which came with their own herbs and fat.  I also added a quart or so of rich veggie broth that was squeezed our of the cooked greens and onions for spanakopita night.  All that got cooked for an hour or so, then blended up, and served with sour cream, grated cheese, and chopped green onions.

Salmon

From this recipe.   We also took a tip from a family friend of Dave's, and poured a splash of orange juice on the fish while it was cooking.  It came out delicious and beautiful -- it sounded like it got applauded when it came out to the table. 

Quinoa

Straight up.

Oven-roasted Broccoli

From this recipe.  This came out awesome, and was very easy to make.

Fruit Sherbet and Lacy Oatmeal Cookies

From this recipe.  The flavor was great, but despite our giving it 5 hours in the freezer when the recipe called for 4, it still had the consistency of a three-fourths-melted Icee, instead of a legitimate frozen dessert.  So we decided to serve it over vanilla ice cream, as a kind of cold sauce.  That worked out pretty well.  I'm not sure how we could've planned it better, and I might be ready to give up on serving ice-cream-like desserts at camp.  Without an ice cream maker, we have to rely on timing to control crystal size and resulting dessert hardness.  If we had made this last night, I think it would've been unpleasant to eat tonight.  I guess soon we'll know more about that, since we'll have plenty of sherbet leftover.

The cookies were from this recipe.  I had some hopes that I would roll them into tubes, but they were easy to break when pulled from the pan, and so I gave up on that idea.  They were pretty tasty, even flat.

Monday = Cookout

Monday is our day off, when the manager and breakfast cook coordinate a cookout for dinner.  We're heading to Burlington, and will be back in time to make dinner on Tuesday.

Greek Summer

Today was a breeze compared to yesterday.  Dinner was delicious, and the kitchen was nearly clean before the dessert even went out, thanks to calmer chefs and industrious choreps.  Here's what we had:

Balled Melon Salad

From this recipe. We weren't sure we'd have enough volume of fruit, so we added some cucumbers.  We used fresh basil and mint from the Putnam Camp garden.  And, we skimped a bit on lemon juice and simple syrup, and used a capful of almond extract for a 6x recipe because we didn't have amaretto.

Spanakopita

From this recipe.  Some campers brought beet greens and chard, which we incorporated alongside the spinach.  We also took some tips from the comments on the recipe, and squeezed the cooked onion-spinach mix between two strainers to take some water out of it; prepped the filling early and let it rest in the fridge for an hour or so before filling the pies; and used 6 sheets of phyllo on the base, and 4 on the top.

We learned that onions in the food processor turn into an oniony mush resembling applesauce, and probably shouldn't be used when we want the onions to be browned or intact.  The machine rocks at garlic, though.

Corn Side

From this recipe.  After realizing that there were no kids among the campers, we decided to make it a little spicier by upping the cayenne.  Scaling to the serving requirements, we had about 30% extra leftover.  We also put in way fewer onions and bells than the recipe suggested (~1/3 the stated), since we were thinking of the dish more as "done up" corn, than as a veggie stew.

Dressed Field Greens

This was also supplemented by gifts from a camper's garden.  We dressed it with a white wine goat cheese vinaigrette and sliced kalamata olives.

Baklava

From this recipe.  We followed commentators' advice again, and made the syrup first and let it cool while we baked the treat.  We also toasted the nuts before chopping them.  The food processor handled the chopping nicely.

The end!  We didn't have time to take pictures or draw a pretty menu, but we weren't late on anything or overly stressed getting it out.