Tomatoland has a lot more than just tomatoes. It offers loads of fresh, organic, locally-grown fruits and vegetables in an outdoor produce market, and a deli and food store with handmade jams and jellies, cheeses, honey, milk and other goodies. Tomatoland is the perfect place to stop for a lunchtime sandwich. They have loads of options, such as pulled pork or egg sandwiches. They also sell salads and even offer breakfast sandwiches with sausage or bacon. On my recent visit I shopped for produce at the outdoor market. I went on a Saturday late in the afternoon. I’m not sure such a robust stand is offered every day of the week. Tomatoland’s produce stand offered a rainbow of choices, from light ripening avocados to onions to habanero peppers, peaches and, of course, dozens of tomatoes. We bought some of the namesake tomatoes, among other things. The tomatoes were exceptionally juicy and much better than the typical Publix variety. Add Tomatoland to your list of weekend errand stops.

Address: 1847 Thomasville Road

While the twelve tomato plants in the planter at the back of the yard are still totally fruitless, the eight plants in POTS near the front of the yard have started to produce.

(Back story: The 20+ tomato seeds I sowed indoors in February grew into 20 hearty plants. I offered a few to family and friends, but people were slow to claim them (or maybe didn’t want them!), and all of a sudden I had my very own tomato orchard. The majority went into a 3 x 4′ planter, and the rest are in 5 gallon pots.)

The tomatoes in pots are the same mix of varieties as those growing in the planters. They are also in the same soil and are watered on the same schedule. I wonder, though, if having less space to develop long roots has encouraged the plants in the pots to put more energy into fruit-making. This, of course, is pure speculation…but it’s the only reason I can think of that could account for the difference.

As for the plants in the planters, I intend to fertilize them this weekend, and I might also prune them a bit, and maybe soon they’ll be as fruitful as their potted cousins.

Photo: Mark Bittman/The New York Times

Side note (while I’m on the topic of tomatoes): Mark Bittman has a really interesting and eye-opening column in this week’s NYT about industrial tomato farming. It’s actually a follow-up to a piece he wrote last month on the book Tomatoland, by Barry Estabrook, which chronicles the rise of the tomato in the modern world and the deleterious effects that the mass production of this fruit has had on the environment, our food supply, and – most notably – tomato workers.

While I knew that most of the tomatoes sold in stores today are picked green and then gassed with ethylene to promote the ripening process, the image above really drove home the wastefulness of this system. After the green fruit is harvested, the plants are killed to make room for the next crop, and any tomatoes that ripened naturally on the vine are “left to rot,” writes Bittman.

It just seems like big price to pay for a product that we don’t really need all year round. I’d rather have no tomatoes at all than the tasteless, mealy lumps available at most grocery stores.

From Adele Melander-Dayton, writing for Salon.com:

The plump red fruit has become a symbol of everything that’s wrong with modern agriculture.

“Americans love tomatoes. As our second-most-popular produce item, we’re accustomed to the sight of them: plump and bright red, marble to soft-ball sized, and piled in abundance year-round in the refrigerated fruit and vegetable aisle of the grocery store. Many of us eat tomatoes every day: if not au natural, in ketchup, salsa, or marinara sauce.

Yet our favorite fruit may not be quite as innocuous and delicious as it appears. In his new book “Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit,” journalist Barry Estabrook writes the biography of the modern tomato, revealing the environmental and human costs of big agribusiness. Estabrook traces the history of the tomato from the wild tomato berries that once grew in abundance in the rocky foothills of the Andes to the most familiar salad staple on the planet. A true tomato devotee, Estabrook explains why our love for tomatoes is hurting not only field workers and the environment, but our taste buds, too.

Salon spoke to him over the phone about what the tomato—and its taste—really says about us.

Why did you decide to write a book about tomatoes?

I wanted to write about our screwed up food system, and if you’re looking for the poster child for everything that’s wrong with modern industrial agriculture, you can’t get any better than a supermarket tomato. Supermarket tomatoes are generally tasteless and grown at a tremendous cost to the workforce.

How did tomatoes get to be so flavorless and have so many hidden production costs?

Lucas Mariano Domingo came to the United States from Guatemala hoping to find a job that would pay him enough to send money home. But he was soon broke and homeless. And so it must have seemed like a lucky break when Cesar Navarrete, leader of a Florida tomato-picking crew, offered him false papers, room, board and a job that, if he did well, could earn him $200 a week.

It quickly became clear, however, that this was a false opportunity. Domingo was lodged with three other men in the back of a box truck with no running water or toilet. Food was scarce. Navarrete charged extortionate fees for just about everything. After a hot day in the fields, Domingo was docked $5 to stand naked in the back yard and wash himself with cold water from a garden hose. He was paid irregularly and in small, arbitrary amounts. Worse, Navarrete warned that Domingo or any other laborer who attempted to leave would be severely beaten. It took Domingo nearly three years to escape — and even longer before members of the Navarrete family were charged with what Douglas Molloy, the chief assistant U.S. attorney in Fort Myers, Fla., described as “slavery, plain and simple.”

Lucas Mariano Domingo came to the United States from Guatemala hoping to find a job that would pay him enough to send money home. But he was soon broke and homeless. And so it must have seemed like a lucky break when Cesar Navarrete, leader of a Florida tomato-picking crew, offered him false papers, room, board and a job that, if he did well, could earn him $200 a week.

It quickly became clear, however, that this was a false opportunity. Domingo was lodged with three other men in the back of a box truck with no running water or toilet. Food was scarce. Navarrete charged extortionate fees for just about everything. After a hot day in the fields, Domingo was docked $5 to stand naked in the back yard and wash himself with cold water from a garden hose. He was paid irregularly and in small, arbitrary amounts. Worse, Navarrete warned that Domingo or any other laborer who attempted to leave would be severely beaten. It took Domingo nearly three years to escape — and even longer before members of the Navarrete family were charged with what Douglas Molloy, the chief assistant U.S. attorney in Fort Myers, Fla., described as “slavery, plain and simple.”

Most of the action, though, takes place in Immokalee (rhymes with broccoli), ground zero of the Florida tomato industry. Ironically, Estabrook explains, the Sunshine State is anything but an ideal place to grow tomatoes. The sandy soil lacks nutrients and must be supplemented with tons of chemical fertilizer. The rarity of frosts provides pests and pathogens a haven, requiring growers to spray tons of chemical pesticides. The humidity encourages blights, spots and mold. But Florida does have one key benefit: proximity to customers in densely populated and very cold East Coast cities.

Estabrook’s exposure of the resulting environmental and human tragedies places “Tomatoland” in the tradition of the best muckraking journalism, from Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” to Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation.” There are plenty of shocking statistics: For instance, in 2006, Florida growers sprayed nearly 8 million pounds of insecticides, fungicides and herbicides on their tomato crops, nearly eight times as much as California growers used for a similar-size crop. But by and large, Estabrook lets people — migrant workers, activists and scientists — tell the story.

In the case of pesticides, there is no tale more heart-wrenching than that of three families whose children were crippled or killed, it was later proved, because of their mothers’ work in the winter tomato fields. All three women worked at a company called Ag-Mart, whose products include the nearly ubiquitous Santa Sweets grape tomato sold in plastic clamshell containers at grocery stores. The label depicts three smiling, dancing tomato kids. The company’s advertising boasts, “Kids love to snack on this nutritious treat.”

Not so the women’s newborn babies, born within seven weeks of one another. Francisca Herrera’s son, Carlitos, was born with no arms and legs. Sostenes Maceda’s son, Jesus, was born with a deformity of the lower jaw that put him at constant risk of choking on his own tongue. Maria Meza gave birth to Jorge, who had one ear, no nose, a cleft palate, one kidney, no anus and no visible sexual organs. It was later determined that Jorge was a girl, and she was renamed Violeta. She lived just three days.

Most instances of pesticide misuse, Estabrook reports, don’t result in charges or fines because workers are afraid to come forward and because of a shameful lack of enforcement. In the case of the deformed babies, agents leveled 88 counts against Ag-Mart, fining the company $111,200. A judge later reduced the fine to $8,400. It took a pro-bono personal-injury lawyer to win one family an undisclosed settlement, enough to sustain the little boy financially for life. Ag-Mart admitted no guilt.

It’s easy to get enraged reading such stories. But Estabrook is careful to maintain his journalistic distance. The tomato growers and regulators, whom most readers will consider the bad guys, get to have their say. (Sadly, this is a rarity in the ever-growing crop of books on food politics, which embrace an you’re-either-with-us-or-against-us sensibility.) But Estabrook also does not allow political spin or misleading facts to stand unchallenged. When Reggie Brown, the executive vice president of the Tomato Growers Exchange, protests to him that his industry complies with labor laws and pays competitive wages, Estabrook follows with an account of a 2008 Senate hearing in which committee members demolished the industry’s claims that workers earn an average of $12 per hour. To do that, one senator points out, workers would have to pick 3,000 tomatoes each hour, nearly one per second.

“Tomatoland” doesn’t offer fixes for the industry’s failures. But it does spotlight the people working to change it. Among them: Lady Moon Farms, an organic Florida grower that pays workers an hourly wage and provides them free housing, and still manages to compete on grocery-store shelves; Barbara Mainster, a teacher who offers free or low-cost child care and education for migrant farmworkers’ children; and John Warner Scott, an old-style plant breeder who developed the Tasti-Lee, a tomato that can keep its flavor even when shipped. Each of them offers a ray of hope for the industry — and for consumers who want a delicious, juicy and guilt-free tomato.

But there is still much work to be done. By the end of “Tomatoland,” a far more obvious solution will present itself to some readers: Head to the back yard and plant a few tomatoes of your own.

 Jane Black , a former Washington Post staff writer, is working on a book about a West Virginia town that is trying to create a healthier local food culture.

Source: WashingtonPost.com, “Barry Estabrook’s ‘Tomatoland,’ an indictment of modern agriculture” by Jane Black, 10 Jun 2011.

• Gender:Male
• Occupation:Chef/Educator
• Location:Rhode Island:United States

About Me

Douglas Stuchel, is the Senior Experiential Education Coordinator with Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island.  He also serves as an adjunct Culinary educator for both the College of Culinary Arts and the School of Education. Previously, Douglas was the Executive Chef for Sportservice at the Dunkin Donuts Center in Providence, Rhode Island.  Before joining Sportservice in 1999, Stuchel was a chef at the Johnson & Wales Radisson Airport Hotel for more than six years, where he began as a banquet chef and promoted to Executive Chef.  Stuchel’s other ventures include the Nomadic Chef, a personal chef & catering business for which he has operated for over 10 years. He was the overall winner in both the 1997 & 1998 “Keep Providence Beautiful” Pasta Challenge.  In 2010 he was a speaker at the The Center for the Advancement of Foodservice Education (C.A.F.E) Leadership Conference, held in Baltimore, Maryland.  In 2011 he was invited to be a chef instructor At-Sunrice Global Chef Acadamey in Singapore to teach a Western Cuisine Course.

Interests

• Cooking
• anything culinary related
• food
• gardening
• the enviroment
• hiking
• travel
• wine.

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But with every passing year, I’m getting pickier and pickier about which tomatoes I eat. The more I think about it, the mealier and more tasteless the tomatoes that you buy in the supermarket are. I’d almost stopped buying them altogether before I read Tomatoland. Tomatoland convinced me even more that the tomatoes from the grocery store, especially the ones available in the winter, are just not worth it.

Taste is the obvious reason. Every single one of us can go to the supermarket and tell the difference between a tomato grown locally and in the summer versus one grown in Florida in the winter. Estabrook makes clear that that is because the organization that regulates the tomatoes that come out of Florida regulate for every single aspect of a tomato – color, shape, texture, blemishes – except taste.

The second problem with tomatoes grown in the winter is that, if they are not grown in a hot house, they are grown in Florida or California. The problem with growing tomatoes in Florida is that it just happens to be one of the worst places in the world to grow tomatoes. In order to do so successfully, Florida tomato growers rely heavily on dangerous pesticides and chemicals to fight off pests and diseases and to put nutrition in the soil, which is actually just sand.

And now we get to the heart of Tomatoland, the mistreatment of migrant workers, especially concerning pesticide use, on tomato farms. This was not necessarily the turn that I expected Tomatoland to take, but I was so happy that it did. This is an important cause and an important topic that everyone needs to know about. When you purchase a tomato, you are making a choice. Are you going to support the abuse and slavery of the people who pick those tomatoes? Some of the things that Estabrook talks about will horrify you, from babies being born with deformities because of their parents’ exposure to pesticides to examples of modern day slavery.

A lot of work has been done in the last 10 years to make the life of migrant workers country-wide, but especially in Florida, better. And it’s a start, but big agriculture in the United States isn’t going to listen to us unless we make them. Tomatoland highlighted the best and worst of what’s happening in Florida so that anyone who reads the book can make an informed decision about where and how they get there tomatoes.

Estabrook does a good job balancing the political with the scientific. He interviews people on both sides of the debate and shows big agriculture in a fair light in my opinion. Not a good one, but a fair one. He shows what they have done horribly wrong and what they are doing, however reluctantly, to improve it. Things are getting better in the tomato industry, but it is all because of groups of people who were well-informed and willing to take a stand. The only shortcoming of this book is that I wish Estabrook had ended with a clearer sense of what still needs to be done. I would have rather had a final chapter that projected the future for tomatoes and the industry, as well as the future for migrant workers in the US.

I truly didn’t expect to be as enthralled with Tomatoland as I was, but I found it to be an engaging and well-written piece of non-fiction that has the power to change the way people view their tomatoes. Hopefully it will convince people that the best place to get tomatoes is their own back yard.

So go read this!: now | tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve read everything else

Desperado Penguin also has a review about Tomatoland. Do you? Link to it in the comments and I’ll add it here.

I received Tomatoland for review from NetGalley. 

In a great post by Kurt Michael Friese on Huffpost food he speaks on behalf of the tomatoes demise in American Agriculture and diet. We’ve all known for years that the nutritional value, taste and sizing have been distinct of it’s natural state for some time now. Friese also points out the book by two-time James Beard Award-winning journalist Barry Estabrook, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed our Most Alluring Fruit - which discusses these topics in detail.

If you haven’t, go read the post and then grab the book. You’ll be in good company if you’re sick of shitty tomatoes. Some of the valid and main points of the article and book is that the industry is basically followed suit with the cheese, dairy and meat industries. Factory farmed hybrid-like units created for optimum shipping dynamics. Again, Friese points out from a recent USDA study that,

The average tomato of today, the kind on your Whopper or Taco Bell taco, has “30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than it did in the 1960s. But that modern tomato does shame its 1960s counterpart in one respect: It contains 14 times as much sodium.”

Why? Because the metrics of the product are solely based on cost and transportable attributes. We have completely negated quality and nutritional functions to support our food culture that wants to eat “whatever – whenever”.

According to Friese,

In Immokalee Florida, where nearly one third of the tomatoes consumed in the U.S. are grown, are bred for one thing and one thing only. And it’s not flavor, and it’s not nutrition. It’s shipability, period. To qualify as grade A in that department, it needs to be a specific size, and a specific shape, and it needs to be picked while still green and rock hard. In fact, Estabrook relays a story of nearly losing control of his car as it was pelted with the tough green orbs bouncing off the back of a tractor-trailer on a Florida highway. The fruits hit the pavement at 60 mph and rolled to the gravel shoulder unscathed.

Like in most products of our Mega retail driven society, the food is force-ripened with gas to create the allusion of a “fresh” ripened red tomato. It’s our enormous appetite that has caused us to get into this quagmire and only by changing our eating habits will we eventually move away from this centralized eco-system of shit food.

In a great post by Kurt Michael Friese on Huffpost food he speaks on behalf of the tomatoes demise in American Agriculture and diet. We’ve all known for years that the nutritional value, taste and sizing have been distinct of it’s natural state for some time now. Friese also points out the book by two-time James Beard Award-winning journalist Barry Estabrook, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed our Most Alluring Fruit - which discusses these topics in detail.

If you haven’t, go read the post and then grab the book. You’ll be in good company if you’re sick of shitty tomatoes. Some of the valid and main points of the article and book is that the industry is basically followed suit with the cheese, dairy and meat industries. Factory farmed hybrid-like units created for optimum shipping dynamics. Again, Friese points out from a recent USDA study that,

The average tomato of today, the kind on your Whopper or Taco Bell taco, has “30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than it did in the 1960s. But that modern tomato does shame its 1960s counterpart in one respect: It contains 14 times as much sodium.”

Why? Because the metrics of the product are solely based on cost and transportable attributes. We have completely negated quality and nutritional functions to support our food culture that wants to eat “whatever – whenever”.

According to Friese,

In Immokalee Florida, where nearly one third of the tomatoes consumed in the U.S. are grown, are bred for one thing and one thing only. And it’s not flavor, and it’s not nutrition. It’s shipability, period. To qualify as grade A in that department, it needs to be a specific size, and a specific shape, and it needs to be picked while still green and rock hard. In fact, Estabrook relays a story of nearly losing control of his car as it was pelted with the tough green orbs bouncing off the back of a tractor-trailer on a Florida highway. The fruits hit the pavement at 60 mph and rolled to the gravel shoulder unscathed.

Like in most products of our Mega retail driven society, the food is force-ripened with gas to create the allusion of a “fresh” ripened red tomato. It’s our enormous appetite that has caused us to get into this quagmire and only by changing our eating habits will we eventually move away from this centralized eco-system of shit food.

Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook, Andrews McMeel 2011, $19.99 hardback, 220 pages

Have you stopped eating tomatoes in February yet? Have you abandoned all supermarket tomatoes? Do you know they taste like tennis balls, but buy them anyway? If you haven’t been thinking along these lines, read Tomatoland—it will have you running to the nearest farmers’ market.

Birth defects, environmental consequences, and a disturbing lack of nutrition and flavor are the result of science, economics, and politic that Estabrook traces in his book, expanded from a Gourmet magazine article, “The Price of Tomatoes.”

It’s the produce equivalent of The Jungle, more depressing proof that we’ve turned food into product in the name of profit.

Estabrook recounts some of the history you might know—they were considered poisonous, started as tiny berries that became domesticated, and were used for medicine. But he goes further to uncover botanist Alexander Livingston who cross- bred plants to develop the Paragon, a “uniformly smooth tomato” that he credited with starting one of the “great enterprises of this country,” mass produced tomatoes. Florida farmers began growing green, cheap, and off-season fruit as early as 1870, still the standard of the tomato industry.

Florida provides one third of America’s fresh tomatoes, overseen by the Florida Tomato Committee, which has no standards for flavor, but plenty for handling, containers, and inspection.

And the irony, points out Estabrook, is that in Florida, tomatoes are a barely viable crop. They require expenditures on fuel, pesticides, and fertilizer. To keep them market competitive, piece-work pickers wages haven’t gone up in 30 years. Florida law enforcement has successfully prosectuted seven major slavery cases in the last 15 years. That juicy BLT is suddenly a real problem.

In fact, Estabrook quotes Douglas Molloy, a U.S. attorney for Florida’s Middle District, who says that if you’ve eaten one of those tennis ball tomatoes, it has been picked by the hands of a slave, a strong but accurate word. The industry relies on convict lease and debt peonage, and farm workers have been manacled and imprisoned to keep them from filing complaints about unfair and unsafe practices.

As Estabrook continues recounting grisly stories of beatings, court cases, intimidation, and exploitation, those flavorless tomatoes take on a bitter aftertaste.

By way of contrast, Estabrook describes the upstate New York farm of “Tomatoman” Tim Stark. Rather than being treated as picking machines, his workers use their intellignce and initiative to keep the farm running. And his misshapen and oddly colored tomatoes, with names like Black Seaman, Green Zebra, and Purple Calabash.

Stark is a niche marketer, selling to restaurants and chefs you have heard of. He’ll never sell to McDonald’s, but that’s just as well, it’s not real food either.

In addition to the Career Expo we invited some of our top companies who provide year long internship opportunities or who offer management development programs to our graduating students to attend a  meet and greet employer/student breakfast.

One of the most exciting parts of our Career Events to me is seeing our JWU alumni who are now representing some of the best hospitality/foodservice companies our industry has to offer or come to the event to say hi.

A Special thank you to the faculty who brought there classes to the Expo. As well as my Chef Recruiting friends, without you my job would be so much harder.  I greatly appreciate spending time on campus and meeting with our great students.. There are to many to mention but here are just a few.

Chef Pauli from Disney

Chef Christian from the Hyatt Harborside in Boston

Chef Amy Tormey and her team from Compass Group

Frank Marino from the Patina Group

Americas Test Kitchen

Great American Restaurant Group

My last night in Singapore, I was taken to dinner by F&B superstar and Singapore native Ashwin Chelleram and Chef Thierry Marais, both consultants for the opening of the new At-Sunrice School. We went to a Singapore restaurant the Ashwin has been going to almost all of his life, the restaurant was located in downtown Singapore, but away from the hustle and bustle of the city.  The food was fantastic, the wines the Ashwin brought from home, were terrific.  We started with a French Champagne, then a great German Riesling and finally a Pinot Noir.  The dinner consisted of large steamed prawns, chili crab (a Singapore favorite), peppercorn crab, fried cuttlefish, a Chinese noodle dish, a chicken dish and finally a dessert of mango something, but I forget the name of it.  The dinner and wine as well as the great company left me leaving Singapore on a great note.

And finally; the class photos.  Until we meet again my new friends from Singapore:

I want to thank all the administration, faculty, staff and students At-Sunrice for welcoming me with open arms, making me feel at home and for all of their help and support. Chef Christophe, (thank you for a copy of your cookbook), Chef Randy, Chef Boon, Chef Ashwin, Chef Fredric, Chef Harald, Chef Xihong, ChefRam, Chef Montri, Chef Eng, Chef Alan, Muriel, Kedora, Chef Tan and Marie, I am sure I may have missed a few persons, but you are included as well.  Thank you At-Sunrice for a great experience and the signed cookbook.
A special thank you to my guardian angel (a term used by the school for the faculty member who is assigned to be you guide, support, director, etc) Chef Andreas, you have been very helpful, supportive and it has been a pleasure to work with my friend.

To Chef Bin, thank you for taking me on the site visits to Santosa and Capella and sharing your culinary experiences and adventures with me.

A special thanks to my students, who have made my teaching stay here, fun, educational (on both sides) and rewarding.  Bobby, Chow, Cui, Matthew, Ivan, Justin, Kumaresan, Loh, Low, Daniel, Alvin, Sahil, Tang and Teh.  Please keep in touch and let me know where you end up after At-Sunrice.

And this adventure would have never been afforded to me with out having to pleasure to work for Johnson & Wales University and the support of  Chef Guggenmous, Chef Jack Chiaro, Sheri Ispir and Andrea Frost.

So I depart from Singapore on Friday February 18th at 10am, fly to Shanghai, from Shanghai I go to the windy city of Chicago, and finally to the place I call home Rhode Island, arriving at TF Green Airport on Friday February 18th at 10:38pm, thanks to the international date line my return trip is actually 25 hours, but time wise it is only a 12 hour trip once I arrive back home.

At The Sentosa Hotel, I and Chef Bin meet with the Executive Chef Ryan Sonson (JWU alumni from the Charleston Campus) and Danny Lee, Director of HR.  We discussed the student work program At-Sunrice and the JWU internship program.  Both the Sentosa property and the Capella property look as though would be found in the Mediterranean.  At Capella, Executive Chef Jakob Esko, greeted us and gave us a tour of the lavish and hotel, with many villas, apartments and traditional hotel rooms.  Both properties offer luxury accommodations, fine dining and both have energetic talented chefs at the helm.

Today is also the day that the students take their final exams, a 50 question review and test of the first 7 days of lecture and production.  More importantly, the students get to do their evaluation of me..

I also have a new flatmate at the condo, Carrie Stebbins from the Denver Campus has joined me in the Condo as she will be teaching a Principles of Dining room and Beverage Service class starting Friday.

Chef Christophe Megel,Chief Executive Officer at-sunrice GlobalChef Academy gave me a copy of his cookbook Asian Tapas Small Bites, Big Flavor, check it out, great read, pictures and recipes.

Today’s Practical Menu:

Unfortunately, my batteries in my camera died and I wasn’t able to take all of the photos from today’s menu.

• Potage Parisien
• Salmon en Croute de Pommes de Terre
• Potrine de Volaiile Farcie aux Empinards, Coulis de Poivrons Rouges, Galettes de Pomme de Terre, et Chouxcroute Rouges aux Pomme et Marrons
• Grilled Steack en Eventail avec Courgette et Tapenade, Aubergines Farcies, et Pommes Gaufrettes
• Pomponettes de Sole, Beurre Blanc, Asperges et Champignons, et Pommes de Terre Nature
• Salad de Faisan sur Mesclun

Reaching the student practicals part of my class means that my time in Singapore is almost over.  I hopefully will be back again, and will schedule more free time before or after the course.  But in the mean time I plan on making the most of my next three days, enjoying, exploring and spending time with my new found At-Sunrice friends.

I also found out today at work that I have to be back at 8am for a two site visits one to Santosa, and the other to Capella to meet the Executive Chefs, it is now 10pm, need to shower and get to bed for a long work day of site visits and then class at 3pm.  Enjoy today’s photos.

For each of the next 3 days the 14 students are broken into 2 groups, each producing the same menu.
today’s practical menu is as follows:

• Buffalo Mozzarella Salad with Basil and Tomatoes
• Minestrone Soup
• Fried Calamari
• Prawn Risotto
• Grilled Chicken and Penne Pasta with a Pink Sauce
• Marinated Veal Loin with Onion Salsa

Today was American BBQ Cuisine, the student have been looking forward to this day, and cooking an American BBQ, well more or less, we couldn’t get all the proper ingredients at a reasonable price, so several substitutions were made, but all worked out in the end.

BBQ MENU

nBarbecued Beer-Cured Pork Ribs

 After the class ended, the school held their monthly homecoming event where they have alumni, current students and new students intermingle.  Today was also fire drill awareness and a mock fire drill, that took us out of the air conditioned school floor, into the hot, humid, sunny Singapore weather.

Once I got home and rested for a few minutes, I decided that I needed another trip to Chinatown to take a few more pictures of the Chinese New Year decorations at night, I also ate dinner in Chinatown, and ended up eating at a tourist trap and spending way to much money for average food, oh well live and learn.

Tomorrow, I go back to the pm shift, and I now only have 4 more days left in Singapore, I am amazed on how fast the time as gone bye.

Until tomorrow, Happy Valentines Day, and goodnight.