Sunday, March 11, 2012

Day 4 - Cinnamon, Part 2


As previously, breakfast is at 6:30 a.m. The cinnamon rolls have to warm up and raise before baking for an hour or so. You do the math. I got up at 3:30 a.m. and wandered down to the kitchen to pull the cinnamon rolls out of the fridge and turned on the oven. I noticed the bacon was still frozen from the night before so I spread it out better hoping it would thaw in time for breakfast. I started the frosting: powdered sugar, milk, butter, vanilla and Crema (Guatemalan cream cheese). Yum… All of this was mixed by hand. There is no mixer in the CMT kitchen.

I had enough pans full of rolls for at least 2 for each person. We averaged about 110 people at each meal. The one oven that worked properly could hold 4 of the pans. I popped the first 4 pans in and set the timer.  As the rolls came out of the oven, the rest of the team had been preparing the other dishes for breakfast. We frosted them up and were on time to serve at 6:30!

At 8000 feet there are several challenges to cooking. Everything takes longer to cook and you have to adjust recipes to accommodate the altitude. We had many bags of black beans. The team leader expressed frustration in years past with getting dried beans to cook properly at the high altitude. Maybe I had a sure fire way to get them cooked properly:  brine the beans. Soak them in salt water. So we started the soak on Wednesday with the hope that letting them soak for 2 days would be enough. I nor the team leader knew if it would work but we were going to give it a try.
Dinner had a Middle Eastern flare. Chicken, peppers, onion and seasoning pan sautéed together, rice pilaf, lentil salad, fruit. It was delicious, kudos to the team leader for this recipe.

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