Catering for Dru

Drucilla - aka Dru - is a girl from my class who moved to NYC from California this year. Before starting culinary school, she worked in TV production in L.A. With a passion for cooking and a frustration with catering on film sets, Dru has set out to make some changes! The company that she worked for had an off-sight event in NYC last weekend and hired Dru to cater the "Be your true self" breakfast and luncheon. She hired all of us from school to be her "sous chefs", and so my friend Tracy and I were in charge of dessert, naturally.

To go along with being your true self, we made desserts with pure, "health-supportive" flavors, and all organic ingredients. No, in most cases, desserts are not health-supportive, BUT I believe that every once in a while, every person needs something sweet. The way to make such a thing "health-supportive" is to use the best quality ingredients, flavors that lend themselves towards healthful benefits (ex. fresh ginger has cleansing and digestive qualities). Our menu included spicy ginger cookies, Jaques Torres chocolate chip cookies, miniature brownies with caramel centers, chocolate-covered strawberries, and pumpkin oat spice bars.

For the past 2 or 3 years, I've done some catering at home, and so I felt pretty good about what we were doing and how the process would work. When we started working on Saturday, I expected to be prepping for at least 5 or 6 hours. On the contrary, we had all of the doughs made in 2 hours and everything for the next day was prepped in 30 more minutes... and we had tripled most of the recipes. I was SHOCKED at the difference of time, organization, and cleanliness in the way that I worked, and how working with other people who know exactly what to do changes the quality of work. (not that I haven't had GREAT help in the past, but I think it was just especially noticeable since this is what we've been doing 24/7 for the past few months!)

Whole-wheat chocolate chip cookie tray

Spicy ginger cookie and caramel-filled brownie tray