fine dining

In my experience of working at an upscale restaurant, I’ve experienced the fine dining environment as well as the food they serve.  The employee’s experience of course is rather different from the customers.  As employees, we have to satisfy the guest's needs and make their experience one of the best ones.  Although not all customers are understanding and nice we always have to maintain our positive and calm attitude no matter what. We need to understand that the customer is paying for the ambiance and the service and the food.  Working for an upscale restaurant is difficult and consists of strict rules that you have to follow.  I know the place where I work at, professionalism is everything, and even your vocabulary has to reflect it.  There just seems like a distance between the employees and the customers at fine dining restaurants.  It just seems like everything has to be professional and polished no room for mistakes.  I bet many of you can sense that, compare a family restaurant that has been opened for years and you have been a regular customer ever since it opened to a fancier chain restaurant.  The environment is different as well as the food. 

                The fancier the restaurant the smaller the food portions are, but there are more courses.  The customer is paying for the quality of food and food tends to be of higher quality in fancier restaurants.  It’s also healthier to eat smaller portions in different courses with varieties of food coming out one at a time.  Some restaurants I know do a 6 course meal.  There’s a starter plate that comes before the appetizer, then the appetizer, followed up by soup or salad, then an intermission which gets you ready for your main entrée.  The main entrée comes and last but not least you have the dessert.  The courses sound like a lot, but the portions are super small, so they get a bit of everything.  That’s the key difference between a fine dining restaurant and a regular restaurant.  In a regular restaurant, you tend to pay for the food so they give you more all in one time instead of doing 6 or 7 courses.  

The perks of knowing your food

It’s always beneficial and important to know what you’re eating and the good benefits and bad benefits you get from your food.  I know that I’ve talked a lot about healthy eating and how important it is to know where your food comes from, from my previous blogs.  After all, this blog is called the pivot point of food, the turning point of food. 

                Now I know that sometimes I get confused and categorize food as bad or good, either the food I am eating is healthy or unhealthy.  It doesn’t really work that way, surely some foods are worse than others but it’s all about portion size, control and mixing and matching.  For example if you are a huge fan of potato chips or chocolate, it’s important to control the amount, even though it’s hard and addicting.  Watch and take notice of how much you are eating because it’s unhealthy.  Make it a little bit healthier.  Get creative and make the chocolate into a granola bar, or smash the chips and use it to bread chicken.  This mixing and matching of foods makes the unhealthy chips or chocolate a bit healthier.  The two junk food sits in the middle of the scale between healthy and unhealthy.

               Being knowledgeable about the food world is also very important if you want to eat healthier or if you are on a diet.  Research or read about foods that will help you and your lifestyle.  Different kinds of foods do different things that will either harm you or help you.  Making sure that you know what you are eating will make your body function properly or better. 

                As people begin to be more cautious about what they are eating, many grocery stores have a rating system in which it rates foods from 1-100 on the nutritional value of the food. 1 being the lowest in nutrition and 100 as the highest.  Use the system to your advantage, the system is a great way to monitor the healthy foods you are buying and the unhealthy foods.  You might be shocked on what you might find and consider being healthy but it’s not really healthy. 

                Remember that foods are not all bad or all good, portion size, control and mixing and matching foods will make the unhealthy foods you like to eat better for you

Homemade is better

I am a girl that likes to bring food from home for lunch rather than eating cafeteria style food.  I’m sure there are others that are like me who despise packing and cooking but loves eating and knows that homemade lunches are incomparable to cafeteria food.  I guess you can ask me why don’t I just eat the cafeteria lunch, but make it a hassle to cook and pack food for lunch.  Well first of all let’s face the truth, homemade is better.  You put what you like in your food and take out what you don’t like.  You care about what you’re putting into your mouth so you cook carefully putting sanitation first.  You understand what you like exactly and the way you want it cooked.  When you’re eating at a restaurant or in the cafeteria at work or school you don’t have an option of what you want to eat.  Instead you have a menu with limited choices to choose from.  Worst yet in cafeterias they don’t even have menus, they just cook what they want and if you like it well theirs your lunch.  If you don’t, too bad it is what it is.  Does the cook know what you like specifically and don’t like specifically? Not as well as you know yourself.  Does the cook care about sanitation and preparing your food with the upmost care?  I don’t think so, it’s their profession to cook, so as long as they make their money then there’s no complaining. 

            I mean let’s also put money into consideration.  When you dine out or get food from the cafeteria, you have to pay for the food, and often the food there is far more expensive than it really should be.   At restaurants, you have to pay for the food, and the service.  For example, the chicken you buy at home is much cheaper than the chicken you order at a restaurant, simply at restaurants you are not just paying for the chicken but they charge you extra so the restaurant can make profit.  Although for convenient reasons, dining out is fancier, more relaxed, and you don’t have to clean up after wards.  I personally think dining at home is more intimate and the food just taste better. 

Fighting against hunger around the World

                    When we look around the world, there are first world countries that are doing well and not have hunger as a problem.  At another glance around the world, you see many third world countries that are struggling every single day with hunger.  Whether it's political, economic or natural disasters none of them deserve to go hungry every day.  Food is a necessity that everyone needs, to stay alive and not be malnourished.  There are many things that we could do to fight against world hunger and prevent families from starving.  

          1) Get involved in hunger programs There are so many different programs that are dedicated in stopping world hunger.  Whether it's donation or packaging food or having a food drive, help out with the programs.  They always need volunteers to help with something so get involved!

          2) Learn more about all the different hunger programs  In order to know which program suites you and which one you like, research about different programs that you like to join.  What program stands out to you? Why do you like being a part of that program? What does that program do? There are tons of programs out there, find some information about them and be a part of a program that you are interested in.  By researching more information about the different programs, you could educate others and tell others about all the different hunger programs they can be a part of.

          3.) Educate others about hunger  It's not that no one wants to help out, but sometimes it's just that nobody knows about hunger and how it's a big problem around the world.  Educate people about hunger, make brochures or informational packets for people.  Talk to them about what they could do to help out and reduce hunger around the world.   

                4.) Write letters to people to help contribute donations At my school, we are writing letters to different people asking for donations that would help the One Campaign.  The project was aimed to help the Filipinos recover from the typhoon.  Tell them about what the donation would go towards and a bit more about what the program does and how it will help the hungry adults and kids around the world.  Donors like to know where their money is going to so writing letters is a great way to inform them.

          

How much do we trust our food?

         I often pack my own lunch at home and take it with me to school.  Although it's a lot more convenient  just to eat school lunch so you don't have to pack lunch.  You miss you out on the foods you like to eat at home.  There's more choices to choose from at home, you pack what you like and eat what you like.  At school theirs a limited menu everyday, and if you don't like the school lunch then you are out of luck, you just have go hungry for the rest of the day.  It's always good to know what you are eating and have a first account of how it was made.  At school, the lunch ladies make your food, you don't know what it's made with or how it's made.  Wouldn't it be better if you knew what your food was made with?  When my brother was in elementary school, the students found out about how the spaghetti sauce used for the spaghetti had more red food coloring than the actual tomato sauce itself.  That's a bit scary isn't it?  The students don't know what they are eating because they don't know how it was made!
            So how much do we really know about the food we are eating?  Reality is, we know nothing about what we are eating.  That's actually pretty sad when you think about it.  Behind the scenes in the food industry is ugly, it was so ugly and horrendous that filmmaker Robert Kenner went to investigate the truth about our food.  In his documentary Food, Inc, Kenner opens the eyes of all the clueless and innocent Americans.  After watching that documentary, it made me wonder and think how powerful the food industry is.  They don't want us to know about what we are eating, because if we do, then we won't buy them and as a result they begin losing money.  Take a moment to think about how many foods that you have eaten that are not local grown? They are usually produced from either another state or even from another country!  We don't know exactly where our food comes from.  We have come from a society in which foods are not carefully grown but rather food industries care more about quantity rather than quality.  Quantity is where the big profit comes in because more people will buy it.   After watching the documentary over the food industry, it really opened my eyes and made me care about what foods I  am eating, my lifestyles has changed.  I eat only organic now, and I am slowly going towards in becoming a vegetarian.  I hope that each one of you will develop a sense of curiosity and question the food that you are eating, instead of just eating everything.  We only have one life, might as well make a healthy one.

Tea-licious

          Certainly in America, coffee is way more popular than tea.  The definition of coffee to me is a necessity  that I need in the morning to get through my day, and provides energy for me to stay awake.  To me it acts like an energy booster when I am drowsy or tired.  Coffee to me was something that I needed everyday to wake me up, however that changed when my mom told me about the benefits of tea.  You see, there are so many different kinds of teas with all different types of flavors, each type of tea has its own health benefits.  However the most common type of health benefit is it helps you lose weight.  By replacing a bottle of pop everyday to a cup of herbal tea, you can lose weight and stop gaining weight.  Tea also helps stop heart diseases and certain kinds of cancer, rich in antioxidants it boosts the immune system preventing cancerous cells to develop and grow.  The benefits of tea are endless, however you have to be careful on what kind of tea you are drinking.
         Brewed teas taste better and more nutritious than instant bottled teas.  The tea leaves brewed taste so much more different than the instant teas you buy at the grocery store.  If you have tried both types you can taste the difference between the two.  The brewed teas have a sweeter aroma from the tea leaves while the bottled teas are also sweet, the sweetness comes from the sugar that was added.  This ruins the taste of the natural tea flavor making the tea flavor less strong. 
        The  tea leaves could be used for many things, I know my mom uses the tea leaves to soak her feet.  Especially when winter is approaching, you might have dry cracked feet.  Add a couple of tea leaves to warm water and soak your feet in for about 15 minutes and your feet won't be dry but soft.  Tea leaves are also great for facials, acne problems? dry skin? no problem just blend the tea leaves and leave it on your face for about half an hour to an hour.  You skin will feel soft and refreshed. 
          If you don't believe me in the benefits tea can give you, give it a try, drink a cup of  tea everyday and see how you feel.

Eggs and Flour

          There are a lot of times in which many of you just can't decide or don't know what to eat.  With a refrigerator packed with food, there's still nothing to eat.  Here are some easy ideas on creating 2 meals, breakfast using eggs and flowers. 
         For breakfast, start with something light to get your day going.   Get a glass of milk to get your dairy for the day, top it off with a pancake and an omelet and voila, the perfect light hearty breakfast.  When making pancakes add some blueberries, chocolate chips or fruits that you like into the pancake, that way you don't just have a plain boring pancake.  Change the shape of the pancakes to make it more fun.  What I usually do is I have an egg shaper, so I put the egg shaper on the skillet and pour my pancake batter in the egg shaper to shape the pancakes.  That way you have a perfect shaped pancake that's fun and lively.  Going onto the omelets, I make my omelets healthier without using a skillet, I boil the omelet In a pot.  First I would take 2 eggs (2 eggs per person) and crack it in a Ziploc bag.  Then I would use my fingers to smush the egg to mix it up.  I go and get all the ingredients that I like to put in my eggs, like mushrooms, ham, or spinach.  I put the ingredients in the bag and mix it again, and then I would zip up the Ziploc bag nice and tight fold it in half and put it in the boiling water for about 12 minutes.  After 12 minutes the omelet should turn yellow and should be like a roll shape.  With milk, pancakes and an omelet for breakfast you don't have to worry about getting hungry later. 
         For lunch a healthy hardboiled egg, fried clam salad is an easy and filling lunch.  Get some mesclun lettuces and some spinach, toss it with a bit of ranch fried clams and sliced hardboiled eggs and you have your lunch.  To fry the clams, you can just use regular flour to coat the clams, put in the oven or the fryer for a couple of minutes and it should be ready.  The mesclun lettuce provides you with a variety of baby lettuces with all sorts of vitamins, they are colorful and nutritious.  The eggs provide you with protein, the ranch dressing is a good source of fat and oil and the clams are high in good fat. 
          Eggs and flours are easy to incorporate into our food, almost every recipe calls for eggs and flour.  Eggs and flours  are that component that can add a bit of flavor and fluffiness to our foods.

The evolution of food

         When you look back 50 years ago, 100 years ago, or 1000 years ago you realize that foods are so different back then compared to today.   Food was once something that was a necessity for survival is now something we take for granted and desire.  In prehistoric times, many hunter gathers would not waste a part of an animal or crop, but used every part of the food.  They did not have restaurants back then that catered costumers and produced an abundance of food that would just be thrown away if not finished.  If something doesn't look very appetizing we simply just throw it away, you’re full? Just throw it away.  We waste more food in a day in which we could have enough food saved up in a year to feed the hungry children around the world, places that don't have an abundance of food.  Sometimes we over eat because we want to eat away all the negative feelings we are feeling.  Our mentality has changed, food that was eaten for survival and nothing else is now food that we take for enjoyment.  In many first world countries, we don't ever have to worry about food, we get 3 meals a day, eat as much as we want, eat when we are bored and we overeat.  That wasn't necessarily true before or in other third world countries.  Those people have to go hunt for food and get food to bring home.  Sometimes they don't find much so they just have to eat what they have.  How many of us want to eat something but is not available to us?  Not many right? There are a variety of foods at the supermarket that we can eat what we want to eat.  The globalization of food has allowed almost everyone to get foods that are not native to their country.   

           Science has had a close relationship to food.  Scientists learned how to genetically modify foods to make them last longer or make them more nutritious and bigger in size.  People didn’t know how to do that 100 years ago!  It kind of makes me think how far we have come.  Corn for example, the corn we know today was so different from ancient times.  The corn we have today is about 3 times bigger then it’s ancestor.  Through thousands of years of selective breeding, the end result is the corn we have today.  With great power also brings great responsibility and consequences.    Although GMOs makes it a lot easier and prevents bad things from happening to our food, theirs also cons to GMOs.  You don’t know if it’s safe to eat your genetically modified tomatoes.   Even though nobody has been reported dead from eating genetically modified foods, you still don’t know the health risks involve and studies haven’t proven that there are no health concerns.