Preparing a Reception for an Event

Greetings to you my dear hivers! Have you been well? It is our finals week and next semester will be our face-to-face on-the-job training, finally! Before that, today I am going to share with you our final activity back before the pandemic hit.

For our subjects of cookery and food and beverage, our teacher decided that our class would be divided into two batches and prepare a reception for an event. I am part of the first batch.

The day before our final activity, we went home late to buy the ingredients needed and the materials too. We discussed who will be assigned to the kitchen, the chefs and the stewards, and who will be on the dining staff.

I was assigned to be a commis chef.

A Commis chef or junior chef assists in the food preparation process, cooks and prepares elements of high-quality dishes, assists other chefs, and contributes to maintaining kitchen and food safety standards.

We have also assigned what food a particular chef should cook. I am to help cook the chicken ala king and make mango crepes. So on the day of the activity, we arrived early in the morning, even though the reception is for dinner, because there are dishes that need a long time to cook.

We started decorating the venue, which is also our cookery laboratory and a classroom. We decided to go for a blue winter theme that time.

To give the venue a new feel, on the fluorescent lights, we put some blue clear wrappers. We hung balloons from the ceiling and hung snowflakes from it too. We used blue cloths for the food counter, and we also had a mini Christmas tree on it.

Here's me and my partner, looking tired but also excited at the same time.

We went for a buffet style and we actually cooked a lot of food, but I was not able to take pictures of it as I got busy in the kitchen.

Everybody started getting nervous here. Will our guests like the food and service?

Here's our head chef battling with the smoke from the grilled pork. I already knew him before college since we got trained at the same hotel when I was in senior high school.

Our social butterfly, our host and singer of the night, Aside from being the most friendly person I know, he is also very talented.

The beautiful servers waiting for our guests may smile, but they keep saying they are very nervous.

This is the final look of the venue. We had four dining tables. At each table, seven people could dine.

Our guests complemented the motif and how the venue was well organized. It made us so happy.

Here's some of the desserts we made. I have lots of food to show you, but unfortunately everyone got very busy and forgot to take some photos of the food.

Our mango crepe is here.

And our blueberry panacotta is waving. You can also see at the back our salad with its sauces.

We were to invite seven teachers that are not in our department to be our guests.

As they were still lining up, they kept complementing us, from the looks of our food to our service.

The rest of the class is here too, the 2nd batch. As they are also our guests, we will be serving them.

And because we were so busy, we had to eat at the back quickly and quietly. We took turns eating and resting.

As we had many guests, we had many plates that needed to be washed. They outnumbered our steward, so we had to help them wash as much as we could. That's a photo of me washing the utensils, saying my hands were sore because they were red. My classmates said maybe it was because my hands were hot from cooking and then I washed plates with cold water, or maybe it was because it was overused. It was gone the day after.

It was a really tiring day, but we kept hearing our guests' compliments at the back. They kept saying how good our food was and it made us really happy. Most of them rated us a total of 10, from our food to our service.

My whole body ached the next day, but it was all worth it as we got the highest grades out of the 4 sections. It was a great experience! Thank you for stopping by. See you in my next post.

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