Recently, I cooked and served the menu I planned in its entirety to my parents. In this post, I’ll show pictures of each dish and some thoughts I had after I finished serving all my dishes.

Menu

Here’s my complete and finalized menu:

The Dishes

Antipasti

Minestrone Soup

Insalata

Caesar Salad

Frommagi

Fried Mozzarella

Palate Cleanser

Lime Mint Sorbetto (It slightly melted before I remembered to take a photo)

Pasta

Brown Butter Sage Gnocchi

Il Secondo

Osso Bucco

Dessert

Tiramisu

Thoughts

Immediately after I finished cooking all these dishes, I felt incredibly tired, but at the same time, also incredibly proud of myself for what I’ve accomplished. I was able to achieve an even more ambitious version of my original goal in the same time frame of 5 months, I was able to cook 7 different dishes and serve them all during the same dinner, and I successfully planned each dish out so that the menu would synergize well together. Through this experience, I also learned that cooking this many dishes at the same time is very exhausting and my respect for those working in the food industry has skyrocketed as they do this basically every single day. I am also very thankful for my parents who assisted me in cooking all these dishes.

And that’s a wrap on my project this year! I’m super happy with what I was able to accomplish this year for my project, as I was originally worried I wouldn’t be able to achieve my original goals due to how ambitious they were. I’m also really grateful to my mentor for being there to help me along the way, as without his help, I would’ve not been able to improve as much as I did at cooking.

Thank you for reading,

Dylan