Food Day October 24th!

"Food Day is a nationwide celebration
and a movement for healthy,
affordable, and sustainable food."

 Johnson & Wales is hosting an event for Food Day on October 24th 2013. We will have vendors from around the area come and share some samples and educate guests on healthy living. As a school, we will be giving tours of our edible garden which includes all types of plants that can be utilized in the kitchen such as fresh herbs, fruits, and vegetables rare and common.
My contribution to Food Day will be a YouTube video to promote Johnson & Wales, the students, and our commitment to a healthier and more sustainable food culture.

In my video I will be making a healthy seasonal salad and discussing the health benefits of each ingredient that comes from our edible garden.

For everyone here, you get a sneak peak of what the plate will look like at the end of my video.

This is a Radicchio Salad with Fresh Black Turkey Figs, Roasted Fennel Bulb and Macadamia Nuts, Creme Fraiche, Grapeseed Oil, Cracked Black Pepper and Fresh Fennel Sprigs.

















If you would like to find out more information on Food Day or find an event happening near you, go to foodday.org or click the link in my friendly mentions to bring you to the official website.

Long Time Coming

My junior year of college started a short month ago, and it has certainly been a busy month! To update all on what has been going on in my life, here is a detailed list.

Classes started for my Bachelor's degree in Food Service Management.
This trimester I am taking Food Service Management Systems and human Resource Applications, Hospitality Law, Macro Economics, and Psychology. So far, I enjoy all the classes.

I was hired as one of the new College of Culinary Arts Teaching Assistants. The job comes with great responsibility, and I am honored to be hired and work with a select few.

As a Teaching Assistant I am responsible for what is called Action plans, or demos and competitions that I design for the students in Culinary Arts and Baking and Pastry.

There are also many different types of events that happen around campus that we are in some way responsible for.  It has been a couple of weeks on the job, and I love it.

When typed out, it does not seem like I have been busy, but these days and weeks are just flying by. Soon it will be thanksgiving break and a whole new trimester of classes.

Final Internship Reflection

My internship is coming to a fast end. Only a couple of days remain before Emma and I bid our farewells to our co-workers, the Burg Staufeneck, and Salach Germany. Unlike most of the interns that the Burg Staufeneck receives from the states, Emma and I chose to continue working in the kitchen until hours before our train to the airport left. It was not just commitment, but we did not want to leave.

Overall, this internship was one of my best working experiences in my life so far. I learned a multitude of new skills, concepts, and have been able to change my perception of plates and food concepts. I learned fundamental basics such as new product identification, meat fabrication, and advanced knife skills. I was taught advanced sushi rolling techniques and had the opportunity to master this skill and work towards speed and accuracy. I learned management skills and team leader proficiencies in working with a group on one station, communication, and team cleaning assignments. I strive to increase my speed in everything that I attempted, which includes knife skills, completion of recipes, and even running from banquet to banquet helping as many different people as possible. I continuously practiced these new skills every day that I worked at the Burg Staufeneck. 880 hours of pure learning experience in total during my internship.

Executive Chef Rolf Straubinger offered me a position at the Burg Staufeneck and expressed how much he wants me to return and work with him. I excitingly accepted and asked him to give me two years to finish my education at Johnson and Wales University and to learn German as a second language. These are my newest short term goals.

I received an A for my internship trimester, completing my sophomore year with a 4.0 GPA, my Associate's Degree in Culinary Arts with a 3.90 cumulative GPA and graduation with Summa Cum Laude.

Thank you for the wonderful life experience and opportunity Burg Staufeneck employees!

Ich bin ein Berliner 6

After the amazing walk through the Olympic stadium, Emma and I headed towards Potsdamer Platz for some lunch and to be in the correct location of our next stop, the Salvador Dali Museum. Potsdamer Platz was very different from the other parts of Berlin we had already visited. It was more modern, and had a big city feel like New York City. There is a shopping plaza in Potsdamer that is in the middle of 4 giant hotels. The shopping plaza is covered and protected from rain by a metal sculpture that hangs from all 4 hotel roofs. It is a giant piece of art. Walking through Potsdamer Platz, probably my favorite thing was the pink pipes that ran through all of the intersections. It gave the area of town a unique little characteristic. Here were also sections of the Berlin wall that had informational tabs on the side that showed "now and then" photos of Potsdamer platz.

Thought this was very funny. Its a piece of the Berlin Wall

< This is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, or also called the Holocaust Mahnmal. It is 4.7 acres of 2,711 concrete slabs that are placed on a sloping ground. In the beginning, they are very small, about 8 inches tall, which is how I could so easily sit on this one. As you walked through, the slabs got taller as the ground sloped downward, the tallest reaching 15 ft 9 inches tall. As you walk through, the memorial is designed to produce an uneasy and confusing feeling, and the grid pattern is to represent the ordered system that lost touch with humanity. From the inside you can lo longer see the city, or tell where you are as you walk through. The view of the memorial from an outside view resembles a cemetery. The entire memorial took 2 years to build and cost approximately 25 million euros.

The Next part of our journey brings us to the Salvador Dali museum. The main entrance was located down a strange alley way that was very dark and uninviting, but we could see the door so we walked fast. The museum was very small in comparison to the Dali museum in St. Petersburg. No photos were allowed, so I can only say what I saw. But the museum had many full collections of art from certain years when Dali did themes to his art work. Many pieces of art in pen and most look like scribbles that maybe he did when he first awoke from a bad dream. One thing I did enjoy is there was a small movie theater that was showing some of the movies Salvador Dali created, including the short film of the barber cutting the woman's eye, which I had never seen the full film of. There was also a longer black and white love story film, and an animated Disney short that I never knew Dali did. My next favorite part was the entire collection of Salvador Dali's Alice in Wonderland. It is probably one of my favorite themed collections Dali ever did.

I could not leave the museum without just one sneaky photo of my favorite page of Alice in Wonderland. This is "Advice from a Caterpillar" Something that I loved as I looked at all the pages hanging on the wall is that you can see Alice in every scene.
< Here she is <














The last two parts of our day included a short visit to the world famous Madam Tussaud's Wax Museum. I have never been to one before, but thought this one was slightly important. For many years there has been a conflict with the City of Berlin and Madam Tussaud's museum. Inside the first theme of wax figures are important historical figures in Berlin history. This includes Adolf Hitler. The city of Berlin did not want a life like replica of the man, but the museum argued that it was necessary to include because of the historical impact he had on the City of Berlin. Nevertheless, the City agreed on one condition. Unlike the rest of the wax figures that freely stand so guests can pose with their favorite figures, Adolf Hitler is sitting at a desk, behind a wall with two windows, and is constantly monitored by cameras. This is to prevent people from posing with him, and photos are prohibited. If you are in one of the windows taking a photo, you will immediately be removed from the museum. It was very strange to look at a life like replica of this man. Doing some research, I found that the museum had also chosen to create the replica of Hitler during his last days of dictatorship. He is concerned looking, sitting in his bunker as the sound effects of bombs raining on Berlin play. They did not want to create a replica of Hitler during the beginning of his wrath.

After Madam Tussaud's, Emma and I got on another S train to our last visit of the day, the East Side Gallery. This is the longest remaining section of the Berlin Wall that was sectioned off for freelance artists to speak their minds on.  It is 1.2Km long and runs along side the Spree River. Many people walk along this section of the wall and take photos of the sections of art. It was painted in 1990, but i feel it may be time for new artists to leave their work due to the amount of amateur graffiti that has ruined some the sections.

Translation: He who wants the world to remain as it is does not want it to remain at all.

Ich bin ein Berliner 5

The following day we took a train to the far west side of Berlin to visit the Olympic stadium. The olympic stadium was built in 1936. It has a roman Colosseum motif, and is dawned with stone gods and goddesses of strength, victory and war. The stadium can seat 100,000 people. It is still used today for different sporting events in Berlin including its football team.

Ich bin ein Berliner 4

 The only logical explanation of where our adventure took us next, was down the famous road Unter Den Linden where you pass some of the most historical and magnificent buildings on Earth. All travel sights and books recommend a stroll down this road starting at Alexanderplatz and ending at the Brandenburger Tor. These are the sights as you walk down. Sadly there was a lot of construction through the city so there are many photos that are not as beautiful as it could be.

Ich bin ein Berliner 3

After the zoo, it was time for lunch. We were no longer in schwabien country, so finding some of our local favorites was not an option. We walked and passed many good looking asian restaurants, but it was not quite what we were in the mood for. We continued walking until we found the large market place in the tiergarten. Illuminated as if it was meant to be, was Hard Rock Cafe Berlin. Yes there are Hard Rock Cafes everywhere in the world, but we were so hungry, and the nachos appetizer with a 10 oz mushroom and swiss burger was calling our names. All we needed was something not so Germanish. Plus it was a good time to maybe pick up a souvenir for a certain someone who likes guitars.

After lunch, we headed back onto the U-Bahn which is the very convenient subway train system that runs through all major cities in Germany. Especially since we bought an all day pass, we could take it as many times as we want to all the different edges of the city. But we were just going to Alexanderplatz.

Alexanderplatz is where the TV tower is, the best view of Berlin some 203 meters above the city. It has a lift that only takes 40 seconds to get from the bottom to the top. At the observation deck, there is a 360 degree view of Berlin. As well as a bar. The next floor up is the TV tower restaurant with a rotating floor that makes one full rotation in 30 minutes. But reservations were full.
Here are some photos.

                                                                  Berliner Dom

 < This is the Reichstag
(The bright flash of light)
Directly to the left you can see Brandenburg Gate in the middle of the road.

 Above is the Berliner Dom

Probably what was the funniest part of the whole visit, was the amount of English speakers were all at one place at the same time. In fact, our entire elevator was filled with 3 different families that all only spoke English. I nearly forget where we were. Just kidding! I could never do that.

Ich bin ein Berliner 2

Our journey to Berlin began on Tuesday, 10 in the morning. We hopped on a train heading towards Augsburg. In Augsburg we caught our ICE train. The ICE train makes less stops and goes faster than the regular R trains. But the journey from Augsburg to Berlin still took 6 hours. Thank goodness I am so used to long trips. It is quite funny though that it takes us 6 hours to go from a city in southern Germany to a city in northern Germany in less time than it takes to go from southern to northern Florida. But the trip was nice. Our train was mostly empty, so no issues with finding two seats together for Emma and I. Getting to see Germany by train was very exciting. It was nice to see all the little towns and villages. We passed many wind turbine fields and many solar panel fields. This was awesome! Some of the Solar fields went on forever it seemed like. It is amazing to see something like that, only because I’ve never seen anything like it in America. 6 hours and a couple of naps we arrived in Berlin Hauptbahnhof, an extremely large, multi-floored train depot that confused us a little at first. From the glass front you can see the Reichstag and the expanse of the city that continued to stretch past my view. Once we got our bearings, and asked for some help, we found where we needed to go and headed towards the hotel.There was a small issue once we arrived at the hotel, our online reservation did not go through correctly even though we had a confirmation. The hotel was very sorry that they did not have an extra room for us, but were nice enough to put us in the hotel down the street free of charge. Not making a very big deal of it, we planned for the next day and went to sleep.

Bright and early the next day we headed off towards Tiergarten and the Berlin Zoo! This was something Emma really wanted to do. Not going to lie, it was incredible! What a fantastic zoo. Something I loved, I got to learn all the names of our favorite animals in German. We also saw some fantastic things. The zoo seemed to have more baby animals than I had ever seen at a zoo. They had a year old Asian elephant and a year old orangutang. They were adorable! Something else that was interesting was the way some of the animals reacted towards the other animals, like my favorite experience of the zoo, the white wolves hunting the brown bear. The wolf and bear exhibit were right next to each other only separated by a small wire fence that the wolves could easily jump over. The bear decided to go for a swim right next to the fence, and the wolves went into hunting pack mode. For a couple of minutes we watched at the wolves stalked the bear around the fence. I could have sworn for a minute the wolves were going to jump in, and all the children standing and watching were going to get a hard lesson on nature. Thankfully though, the bear swam away and the wolves went back to the other side of the habitat. Here are some photos of the zoo.

I just recently changed my settings so that anyone can comment anonymously. I did not realize that you had to set up an account to comment. Hopefully this makes it a little easier for everyone.

Thanks!

Ich bin ein Berliner!

This up coming Tuesday, Emma and I have 4 days off of work. We asked for these days off so we can go to Berlin and spend a good amount of time there to do everything we want.
Chef Florian used to work in Berlin so we were asking him some questions of where to go and where to stay. He recommended to us Hotel Pankow. Its a little small, but in expensive and in a good area for traveling around. Its a quirky little place based on the photos and descriptions we have gotten of it. We will have to see for ourselves when we get there.

Travel takes about 5-6 hours by train to get from Salach to Berlin, so two days will be half days to travel there and back again. But still it is a ton of time and we are so excited.

The next question is, what are we going to do in Berlin? So far on the list is to geocache. A couple of fellow cachers set up a list of good caches for English speaking tourists to guide you through the city and take you to the best monuments. What a grand idea! One takes us to the Brandenburg Gate which is a popular landmark in Berlin. One takes us to a Hiroshima monument. And another takes us to a park where the largest section of the Berlin Wall still stands. I read that it has been converted into a freelance art piece where different artists paint murals on it. If only I could still find a piece of the Berlin Wall to take home with me.

Something else that is on my list to do while in Berlin is to go to the one of the other Salvidor Dali Museum! For those of you who may not know, I lived not to far from the Dali museum in St. Petersburg. I also worked down the street from it for 10 months, and I remember at the top of the parking garage you can see the surreal building in the distance. Dali is my favorite artist, and to have the opportunity to go to the one of the other collection of his art is an opportunity I cannot pass up!

On Emma's list, she wants to visit the Berlin Zoo.

We will be traveling to the Tiergarten to get to the Berlin zoo which is in the center of this park. It is the largest green space in Berlin, and was restored in 1955, after being devastated during WWII and the trees that stood were chopped down for fuel.

Well the preparations are still being dealt with, and our plans are being made.

Here is a question to my readers, "If you were going to Berlin, Where would you go?"
Comment and let me know.