With regard to production, this was the toughest day I've seen. We had to do all sorts of eggs: hard, medium and soft-boiled; sunny-side up, over easy, over medium and over well; Western and French Omelet; Quiche Florentine and Lorraine; Crepes Suzette; Eggs Florentine; and, blanched asparagus with Hollandaise. It didn't help that many of my dishes just didn't want to come together well at all.

But, before I could even get started on all that, I and a few others who were on the day's steward team were tasked with dropping some veal and chicken stocks. "Dropping a stock" simply means straining it and cooling it down for storage. It is simple, but quite a task. First thing, we wanted to fill some of the sinks with ice for the ice baths the stocks would get. Problem: the industrial ice machine was clogged. Solution: chip away at the packed and frozen mass of ice with a shovel. Yes, a shovel. Got a good shoulder workout, as I chipped from beneath and then from the top of the frozen block. I must admit it was satisfying when I finally broke through the blockage and ice came pouring out of the machine like coins from a slot machine that hit jackpot.

Anyway, clearing the ice blockage was the quick part of the task. The more time-consuming effort came in straining the stock. Danny, my former station mate, and I worked at it until about 7:10am, putting us more than an hour behind in our production.

Fried eggs and omelets don't take much time to cook, at least passably, so I decided to save those until the end. So, first thing, the quiches. Had to roll out the pastry dough, and blind bake the shells. While they baked, prep the two different fillings. Actually, the quiches were the easiest thing, though they took a lot longer to bake then they should have. Twenty-minutes at 350? I think not.

I then prepped the crepe batter, which should rest for twenty minutes before use. While the quiches were baking and crepe batter was resting I blanched, shocked and drained the asparagus, got the hard-boiled eggs going and worked on the orange supremes for the Suzette.

Here's the problem with boiled eggs, however. You don't know what you have until you open them. You start them in room temperature water and then time them from the start of the boil, but it is fairly easy to mis-time them if you are trying to multitask. And that's what happened to me. My soft-boiled was medium and my medium was over cooked. The hard boiled is actually kind of hard to mess up, so long as you don't let it go on for minutes and minutes beyond the recommended time, but the soft and medium boiled can fall far short of perfection by thirty seconds one way or the other.

I'd have to start them all over, from room temperature water.

No time for that, though, I needed to make some crepes. For some reason, though I've done it a few times already, with excellent result, my crepe batter today was pillowly, making the crepes too thick and difficult to flip. What a waste of time fixing that problem. Adding more milk, trying to make another crepe, only for it to be too thick, or to ruin it on the flip (I'd flipped dozens and dozens before with nary an error) ate up time like crazy. I finally got the crepes done, but lost even more time by burning the sugar for the sauce. Geez. Had to throw out that batch and start again.

Got the Crepes Suzette done at the same time the quiches were cool enough to serve. Finally, two dishes down.

Next, the Hollandaise dishes. Didn't even make the Hollandaise (no time thanks to stock-making, so I borrowed some of Arturo's excellent sauce - he had also been working the steward team and so borrowed some of my extra crepes). My first poached egg came out very nice, except for that part about the yolk breaking when I took it out of the pot. Start over on part of a dish once again. Actually, though, my second egg was even better.

Did the fried eggs next ... stupid over-easy didn't want to slide in the non-stick in order to flip it. Only got a half-flip out of the thing, but went with it anyway since the color and yolk consistency were good. Got the boiled eggs going again and figured out a better of way of making sure I got them right: adding a couple of extra eggs and taking them out at 30-second intervals in order to make sure I presented the best ones. The timing has to be right for some of them, no?

And that was it. Time over. Didn't get to the omelets.

We're going to be doing the same thing for finals next week. I'm going to have to have a better plan of attack and not make so many mistakes in order to finish on time.