day of activities

On heritage day my friends and I had an awesome day out doing a few activities on the farm. First we did the tour at the wild life centre and it was so much fun except there was a few stupid questions like do giraffes have two hearts which was very funny. That was just an hour long and was so happy to do a professional tour and not just a joke. Then after we went to the wild life center we went on a game drive for two hours and honestly were so boring. It just dragged on and on and on. We leant a lot of stuff about the wild life, trees and grass and was interesting but the delivery wasn’t very well done. after all of this was finally over we went to the stables and went on an hour horse ride which was fun but after my bum was so sore but had all the fun in world. It’s good to be home but it finally feels like I’m leaving my home to come home but getting used to it quickly.

my awesome reception skills

This last week was the first week in my new world as a receptionist. The first thing we learnt to do was to answer the phone in a professional manor. As they were explaining to us how to answer the phone, the phone rang and my heart just dropped. Immediately I grabbed the phone and answered as follows-“Sondela nature reserve, Matthew speaking how may I help you today”. This is how we had to answer the phone every single time the phone rings and after the 100^th time it gets very boring, but for some odd reason I love answering the phone and helping strangers. The hardest thing in reception is the training manager’s name is Matthew so when anybody calls the name then we both look but half the time we get it right. So far I love my work  and it was been a very different  experience dealing with all different types of people but nothing I can’t handle.

01/03/2012

Today was the best day for me in the kitchen because instead of washing dishes or preparing or the food we actually got showed step by step how to cook a beef stew by Chef William. He went through all the steps and thought us how to make the most amazing beef stew that I have ever tasted. So far it has been an incredible journey through the kitchen and I have learnt so much (chef’s are all bipolar) and that it is easy to cook anything because you can use whatever ingredients you like and if it tastes disgusting just start again in till you get the satisfaction you deserve. Enjoying myself so far just wish to be taken more seriously.

25/02/2012

pancakes

And so the beginning of the pancakes commence.  First thing in the morning the chef tells us that before we go on leave at 13.00 he wants 500 pancakes. I was so shocked at this thinking how the hell am I going to cook 500 pancakes in just a few hours this is near to impossible. So the second years showed us the proper way to cook a pancake and I was so sad because they said to us that we were not allowed to flip the pancake in the pan because it is unprofessional which I didn’t think was true. So after we had made about 100 flops of pancakes and we were finally getting into things they gave us another pan so that we could cook 2 at a time which just made everything worse again. By the time it was lunch the chef said that we had made good progress and let us go home, little did we know that it was only the beginning of the end for us

24/02/2012



custard



declairs

Today was a crazy day in hell’s kitchen. As soon as I got to work at 7.30 in the morning I was placed at work in the training kitchen. This is actually where we were supposed to train how to cook but instead we used it to cook all the pastry. First thing we did was to learn how to cook short pastry which seemed fairly simple. We cooked chaux’s which is basically like a declair. This was very simple to mix but the actual way of making this was too complicated for a skills learner to do. Then we cook tartlet shells which taste kind of like cheddar’s without flavor which wasn’t very nice. But this was the easiest thing I have ever made in the kitchen and there was nothing to it at all. After all of this I had to whisk the custard through a sive to get rid of all the chunks of gelatin which really took forever and after 20minutes left my hand feeling numb but was such fun and a very eventful day and enjoying it more and more.