AN ODD COUPLE

Garde Manger has some pretty weird foods. Good foods but really in essence weird. 
Take for instance when you say mousse what comes to mind? Chocolate right?  Well in Garde Manger there is no chocolate to be found. Try Salmon, or Asparagus, or maybe some other savory ingredients. Mousse is a light, airy food made with a combination of eggs, whipped cream, gelatin, and flavorings. Mousses are served both hot and cold, and they can be savory There are a range of ways to prepare and serve mousse, making it an extremely varied dish.
So the most recent lab was on Mousse. I chose to do a Roasted Red Pepper Mousse, which was challenging since there is such a high water content in the pepper when cooked, that it makes the mousse soupy. To serve my gelatinous mess, I toasted up some garlic butter and Parmesan slices of bread, deep fried the biggest basil leaves I could find and quinelled the mousse. Not bad kinda pretty, even tasted ok. The other odd part of our couple was sausage making. Annette and I were partnered up finally to create more disasters in the kitchen, by choosing a Szechuan Spicy Sausage, we wanted to go different and bold. 
Well it was different, as for the bold it was more like the Lucy and Ethel comedy relief show. Grinding raw park is an experience in it self. But really when you forget to place key parts in the grinder to actually grind well that's a whole other story. We had some great ideas, grind up the pork  add our super duper spices, and case the stuff, and slice it up and sautee it in with some rice noodles and fun, colorful vegetables. Well we lost twenty minutes fighting with the grinder because we forgot the blade to help cut and grind, then since we lost time on that we discovered to late that the noodles needed to be soaked for 40 minutes, so then another brilliant idea comes to mind. Make Spring Rolls and dipping sauce. Se we ground up the veggies of cabbage, carrot, ginger, garlic with the sausage mixture we then decided to cook up the sausage mixture before putting into the wrappers. After browning and cooking we then discovered we had the wrong wraps. So another mess was created by soaking the wraps with water and then stuffing the things and rolling. 

Now here is the Lucy and Ethel moment of all moments. We dropped the spring rolls into the deep fryer and they exploded. They blew up, fizzed and did this rolling thing. 
I fished the wrappers out, which as soon as they hit the air disitgrated into a hot fried gluey mess. Annette fished the sausages out. Which looked ok at least we could save them. 
I can say one thing though they tasted pretty good and the sauce was top notch for dipping our naked spring rolls in.