Culinary Diary: Week 14

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Today’s the last culinary diary. Last night’s class was the de facto final. It was the practical exam that, unlike our written exams, was based on our individual skills in the kitchen. Top Chef without the cameras — or drama.

The menu wasn’t difficult: arroz con pollo with a Waldorf salad and roasted zucchini. The toughest part was making everything within the hour time frame.

Arroz con pollo is a Spanish chicken dish that’s virtually error-proof and contains a full meal’s worth of ingredients with rice, vegetables and the chicken. You can look elsewhere online for a recipe (here’s a good one), but basically it’s just chicken you brown in a pan and then put in a braising dish. Throw a little rice into the same pan and add chicken stock, diced tomatoes and peppers and get that mixture bubbling. Once it’s bubbling, dump it over the chicken in the braising pan, wrap foil tightly over the top to seal in the moisture, and stick it in the oven for 20 minutes or as long as it takes the rice to absorb all the stock and tomato juice. None of those steps are technically difficult.

It does take some prep work, though. There’s the dicing of the peppers, onion and garlic; the browning of the chicken; the gathering of the seasonings, etc. With only an hour to plate everything, I had to work efficiently but fast.