I didn't do anything ILE related yesterday, but today I went to BU! There was an Asian Noodle class going on tonight with which I was able to help out.
When I arrived, there were already people preparing for the class. There were 4 noodle dishes and dessert. I started by getting out all of the dishes for the meal. I'm not quite sure why you'd want to know this, but I took out, in total, 150 small dishes, 50 large dishes, and 50 dessert bowls. I was able to chop some chili peppers for a spicy, sweet, salty, and something else (I forget) sauce. There were about 45 people who went to the noodle class. Once the class had started, I got to help plate, serve, and clear dishes. I had a lot of fun!
I forgot to bring a camera, so I took some pictures with my phone, which does not have the best quality.
This is the first dish that we plated and served. It noodles with a meat (pork) sauce. We used spinach, bean sprouts, radish (I think), and zucchini as garnishes. Plating 50 dishes of food seems like it could be a daunting task, but we split up the work so that some people were putting the noodles on the plate while others were putting the garnishes on.
This is the second dish that we plated and served. It's a shrimp salad type thing with a spicy sauce on top of noodles. Not really my cup of tea since I don't like shrimp and I'm not a big fan of spicy.
I don't have pictures of the rest of the dishes, but there was a fried noodle cake with a chicken-mushroom sauce over it. That was really yummy. There was also soba noodles with a special sauce and some condiments (like wasabi, dikon, etc.). For dessert, we had fruit. It was a mix of pineapple, leche, and loquats. I've never had a loquat before, but it was good.
The people who I met at BU were extremely nice and fun. There was also so much extra food afterwards. I have no idea what they did with it all.
What did they do with the food? Having done a little bit of middle- and large-scale catering before, my guess is that it was all thrown out. Once food is plated, it's generally considered not saveable. I heard recently about a legal initiative in either NY or MA to make it legal for restaurants and caterers to donate more surplus food to food banks, since there are unfortunate liability issues that stand in the way of this!
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