The Pastry Pirate Sails Forth: Exit Stage Left, Part One

I’m back in Cookin’ School Environs after staging at two places out west. First, I went to a place in the Rockies, as intimated in an earlier post with my reference to a high altitude headache.

I started the trip with much trepidation: a blizzard that had just walloped the Sierra Nevada was rolling in, I was in a periwinkle PT Cruiser rental (good God!) and the only way in or out of the valley where this place was located was over a 13,000 foot pass with more hairpins than a beautician’s tool box. On top of that, I’d never staged before as a, you know, graduate (I had gone out to Vegas to stage before my externship), and wasn’t sure what would be expected of me.

Well, I had a great time. I really like the property, the chef, his ideas about food and how he runs his kitchen. There were a couple grill monkeys in the kitchen, all attitude, but most of the guys (and yes, they were all guys) were friendly and helpful, including an old Swiss chef who retired from running his own restaurant but comes in a couple times a week because he can’t bear to be idle at home.

Nearly all the back of house staff worked for the chef before, at other places back East, and followed him here, which I think is always a good sign.

Interesting note: both of the dishwashers are from Chile and have German names and blue eyes. Discuss.

The surroundings are, as you might expect in the middle of the freakin’ Rockies, gorgeous. Here’s a shot of the parking lot as the storm was rolling in; it might not look like much, but I hope it conveys the specific property and area around it is so not about designer stores and celebrity photo ops... this is a year-round resort for people who like to ski, fly fish and hike and just happen to be rich.

Some of the stuff I did, both my seat-of-the-pants experimentation (juniper and lemon granita) and a chef-directed conconction ("I want you to make a chocolate-jalapeno mousse and pipe it into a tuille shaped like a box..." uhm, okay) wound up on a tasting menu he was doing for a group booked into the private dining room after "purchasing" him at a charity auction. I figure the fact that he served the stuff I made was a promising sign.

Some of the other stuff I did, including tragically flat cranberry-almond scones (still tasty! just a bit leaden) and less than stellar cheese puffs suffered from the high altitude, but the chef didn’t seem surprised or annoyed. Apparently, when he’d come out to stage for the exec chef position himself, he also had run in to the whims of creating food in thin air.

I also did a caradmom creme brulee with roasted oranges that looked and tasted beautiful going in to the ramekins, but alas, though I put it in the oven at 200F, when I took it out the oven dial had magically moved to 325F and I had cardamom scrambled eggs on my hands. No one would fess up to changing the temp, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the chef or one of his minions did it just to see how I would react to ruined product. Well, there’s no crying in pastry, so I soldiered on.

The snowstorm came barreling in the evening the day before I was supposed to fly out of Denver. I was in the kitchen until about midnight, then got in my ridiculous rental (I mean, periwinkle, honestly?) for the drive back to my hotel. I slept for a little over an hour but, anxious about the roads and the forecast of four feet of snow, I threw my stuff in my car and set out around 0400.

The snow was heavy but fine and powdery, and I’ll say this for the Colorado folks: even on a fairly remote road in the wee hours of a Sunday morning, they were ready for it. I passed dozens of plows on the road between my hotel and the pass, one every couple of miles.

The pass itself was a nightmare partly because I had an idiot in a red van ahead of me whose driving-in-snow strategy seemed to be: careful, careful, ooh! going uphill! better slam on the brakes!

What galled me to no end was that the van had Wisconsin plates. Hang your head in shame, cheesehead, for driving in snow like you’re from Florida.

To make matters worse, I had another guy tailgating me the whole time I was stuck behind the red van, as neither of us could pass.

And, for the record, there is a reason you never see PT Cruiser commercials featuring the vehicle negotiating hairpin inclines (and descents) in heavy snow. It doesn’t really work well.

So, yeah, it was stressful, but thankfully I apparently had my guardian angel, Allah, Buddha, Krishna, Fortuna or Darth Vader riding shotgun because I made it. Though I never, ever, ever want to do that again. Ever.

Once out of the mountains, the weather was nearly clear so I was able to take a couple photos of my favorite Interstate signs ever. I saw them driving back East after Vegas earlier this year, but was unprepared. This time, as I descended onto the front range, I had my camera ready: