Blog 19: Independent Component 2

LITERAL
(a) I, Desiree Zarate, affirm that I completed my Independent component which represents 37 hours and 37 minutes of work.
(b) Baker, Chris. Personal Interview. 17 Feb. 2015.
(c) My Independent Component 2 Log is updated and completed
(d) I worked in a restaurant kitchen as a preparation cook on the busiest day of service. I chopped vegetables, made pancake batter, restocked the omelette and sandwich stations, constructed sandwiches, and often made soups. I completed about 37 hours working for the restaurant.

INTERPRETIVE
My mentorship is significant because I got to experience real life in a restaurant kitchen. I am a legitimate preparation cook and have worked side by side with real cooks in a very busy restaurant, serving over one hundred people in just a few hours. My work demonstrates 30 hours because I had a six hour shift once a week every week for the last two months (and three months before that for mentorship). I will bring in my most recent pay stub Monday (after recieveing it from work on Saturday) as part of my proof I work there. I also have these pictures a coworker took fr me on a slow day.

I would have liked to get pictures of myself making soup or sandwiches, but I mostly work on those when the restaurant is busy. These pictures are from particularly slow days doing my most basic duties.

APPLIED
This component helped me answer my EQ by exposing me to many taste and flavor combinations I never would have thought of. For example, one of our sandwiches contains sliced tri-tip steak, cream cheese, grilled onion, grilled bell peppers, and Monterrey jack cheese on sourdough bread. I would have never made this combination at home, but after trying it, I really enjoyed how the onions and peppers became sweet and felt well complimented by the creamy cheeses. The sandwich was a bit decadent for me, but it's also one of our best selling sandwiches. I also got to try making a couple different soups, which was fun because I made a couple different ones I'd had but never made, or had never had and wanted to try. When I made broccoli soup, for example, I didn't know the recipe included Worcestershire sauce. However, trying the soup before and after adding a few teaspoons of the sup made it clear that Worcestershire sauce was very important because it was the only ingredient that included umami; the soup was definitely lacking something salty and savory and moth filling; the nearly 100% umami sauce helped a lot. These types of exaples were presented all the time, and I got to work with my mentor a lot. He'd often drop little bombs of wisdom, related to my EQ or just my topic in general, which was always entertaining and interesting to listen to. He was my 3rd interview, and told me about the chef I interviewed for Interview 4. Both of these sources are cited many times on my three column and in my I-Search Paper. My mentor basically formed my second and third answer with me during mentorship. He was the one that advocated strongly for btoh quality ingredients and the importance of salt/seasoning when cooking.