Piggybacking

A new blog that I'm following is Ecoculinaire, written primarily by Nan Kavanaugh, partner of Scotty Schwartz, the Chef at 29 South in Fernandina Beach, FL. When I was still in school, Scotty hooked me up with the chef at PLaE for a stage during my spring break, and then generously brought me down to 29 South to work for a week in his kitchen. We've kept in touch intermittently, and the last news that I heard was that he was going local, probably a little over a year ago.

There's local, of course, and there's planting a year-round garden out back to supply your restaurant. Nan is the garden manager, and started Ecoculinaire a couple of weeks ago. Her blog posts are focused and well-written, and she clearly loves writing about the restaurant, the garden, and larger food issues. Her most recent post, on markets, has me excited to get back to the first one I can in Atlanta.

Here in Coventry, and indeed throughout Warwickshire and the West Midlands, the farmers' market comes monthly. There's some good food available, but eating locally and sustainably has to be a hobby--even in the winter, most veg won't last a whole month. As someone who was pretty good at sourcing food, people who treated it like something that I did for fun, or something out of a pyramid scheme--"But how do you really know that the animal was raised humanely?"--had to be the most irritating response. When people view the responsible acquisition of their food as akin to a love of canoeing or needlepoint, they have no reason to examine what's in their refrigerators, how it got there, and at what cost.

As I was shopping at the supermarket yesterday, I was surprised twice: once when there was no garlic, which I didn't think was possible at a supermarket, and again when I saw wild Alaskan salmon on offer, for a price that, considering the exchange rate, was pretty competitive.

The state of English fish stocks is notoriously dismal; a cookbook I was reading this morning conjectured that soon the only fish that could be legally caught would be mackerel. Cod struggles, salmon has to be farmed, and fish like pollack and mackerel, which are actually abundant, are being roundly ignored by all but amateur fishers and responsible chefs. Wild salmon in America are faring little better, with the southern seasons getting shorter and shorter, or cut off altogether. The demand then turns to Alaskan stocks, which will, if history is any indicator, soon find themselves in the same situation. It's not responsible right now to fish too much Alaskan salmon, or to offer it in supermarkets over 6000 miles away.

The English are moaning at the moment: everyone loves salmon, and fish and chips apparently can't be made with any of the incredibly similar members of the cod family that have healthy populations. What are we to do?

Suck it up. Learn to eat more than two to three species of what the oceans produce. Encourage responsible fish farming or shelve your salmon recipes for the next five years or so. And then when you can eat it again, make it a treat, like anything that rare should be.

Profit

At my current job, we live and die by the spreadsheet. I weigh everything, quantify recipes, and oh god, I know my formulas.
At my last job, when I wrote down recipes, it looked like a shopping list. Everything was to taste, and quantities were reserved for perhaps 20% of the recipes I was given there. By all accounts, Woodfire was in a more comfortable position than Millsy's. What gives?
Honey and I had a couple beers last night and hashed this dilemma out. This is what we came up with:
Years of experience: Tuohy has over 20 years of experience, and worked extensively in hotel kitchens. If you're going to find a costing spreadsheet, it'll be in a kitchen that is as varied and high-volume as a hotel's. I surmise that after awhile, a chef memorizes the costs of certain basic recipes, the same way that we memorize that a vinaigrette is 3 parts oil to 1 vinegar.
Premium price: Woodfire was fine dining. Millsy's? No. Sure, diners were paying a premium for unique, exciting ingredients, but as we were always told, they were also paying for them to be cooked and presented perfectly. If that's the model, then telling the cook (who is to be preparing and plating every dish to exacting standards) to make a sauce to taste assumes some variability, and the higher price covers that. In a perfect world, that means that the cook making your food can accommodate lovely, inconsistent products. Skill costs in every industry: in a restaurant, it costs the chef in wages, and in the dining room it costs the guest. But when a dish is consistently amazing, everyone's happy.
Waste, menu, and stock. We record every gram of wastage at Millsy's, so that the accountants can square our numbers. You can guess how this worked at Woodfire. Woodfire's menu also changed daily. Crate of corn in the walk-in? Guess how many places you'll see corn in the next three days. People tend to assume that a daily menu is some insurmountable task, that every dish on the menu changes daily. A daily menu means that chefs have the flexibility to find as many ways to sell what's in their walk-in before it goes off as possible.
Millsy's is also a bar, and like several of the restaurants where I've worked over here, if we run out of something, we have to buy it from the supermarket next door. It was probably easier to keep track of the kitchen costs at Woodfire.
Any other ideas?

Old post!

I usually get all excited about publishing a new post, as my razor sharp editing skills have...declined since graduation, and I'm a perfectionist.
Earlier tonight though, I stumbled upon a post I wrote after last Mother's Day. for the life of me, I can't figure out why I didn't publish it. Here's a link, if you're interested.

Learning outside the restaurant

I just finished the notes for chapter 25 of The Professional Chef, on cooking vegetables. It was by far the most intensive sitdown with the tome yet. After reading McGee, one thinks about fast vs. slow ways to cook veg and wet vs. dry. I came to the conclusion that were probably about eight different ways to get a vegetable from raw to finished. TPC lists ten. The difference seems trivial, but when committing to memory the advantages, disadvantages and rules for each one, ten feels like a lot. And I haven't even gotten around to the cooking yet.

Restaurant work, especially in a kitchen that doesn't change menus frequently, or approach dishes with ambition, can get tedious, and it's important for a chef to keep learning, even if it's got to be done at home. This week, I've found quite a few motivators to get me cleaning my fridge out at home, and trying things I don't get to try at work.

On working clean: I used to be a damn mess in the kitchen. Then one Saturday night I got the tongue-lashing from the chef. The rest of the week, the sous chef would come over at the correct times during service, and say "You might want to take this time and wipe down." At work now, I don't have a station, and keeping the whole kitchen clean is a sight harder than wiping down one station after every pop. But it makes such a difference, it's breathtaking.

Ratio I didn't get in on the chart and scale giveaway--I need new glasses more than a new cookbook, sadly--but I want this book. So much. Ruhlman's posts about the ratios and the variations one can get from them only fuel my longing. I love kitchen math, and ratios have always been the easiest way for me to make the same thing time after time. I can't wait to see what he's come up with.

Nostalgia?Perhaps. I learned a lot from Tuohy at Woodfire. I remember how amazing the vegetable ragout was, especially as it changed with whatever we had. I also remember the initial tedium of peeling favas, and the accomplishment I felt as I got better and faster at it. Tomorrow morning, I'll be at the market, looking for some asparagus, broad beans (what they call favas here) and spring peas.

Mission: Professional Chef: On Folding

No, I haven't made an angel food cake. Cake bakery terrifies me. Years of cheap ovens in cheap rentals have instilled a solid love of the braise, and an automatic distrust of promised success in anything as unforgiving as pastry.

This is where working as a chef comes in handy. That which I would avoid at home (where I have a functional oven for the first time since I left the nest), I am forced to do as a matter of prep. My love of measuring things has earned me the dubious honor of "dessert queen" in the kitchen, and thus I find myself making tiramisu and chocolate souffles a couple of times a week.

This, combined with the fact that my promised pay rise is tied to our ability to meet our forecasted GPs (gross profits) has made me fanatical about yield. To wit: I costed tiramisus at a yield of 15 from a recipe. My current--delicious--record is 18. But in the hands of a less-practiced chef, we got a grand total of 12. Obviously, this affects our margins.

My secret is in the folding, and Professiona Chef reminded me of finer points of technique that I'd learned long ago from an Alton Brown program. Folding carelessly or roughly deflates the egg whites, reducing total volume from a recipe. Here, as far as I'm concerned is the proper folding technique:

1. Mix all the heavy stuff together. This should really include everything but the egg whites or whipped cream used to lighten the final product. Taste. It should be delicious, if a little intense.

2. Beat your lightener to the desired consistency.

3. Immediately fold 1/4 to 1/3 of the lightener into the heavy stuff. Go for incorporation more than ethereal texture, but don't batter the lightener into flatness.

4. Fold your now-lighter flavoring mix into the rest of the lightener. Pour into the final pan or mold as quickly and gently as possible.

The above technique has the advantage of bringing the consistency of an often-heavy flavoring mix/component closer to the consistency of fluffy, light, and fragile egg whites or cream. It's easier to fold, and you keep the volume. And in a restaurant, that means two things: a guest ecstatic at the juxtaposition of lightness in texture and richness in flavor and higher actual than forecasted profits.

Plus the cook saves time through saved effort combining two diametrically opposed solutions. Also, I feel like a badass when I get more yield than I predicted. Score one for The Professional Chefas a casual reference.

Mission: Professional Chef: Eliminating Waste

Chefs who like employment quickly learn to limit waste as much as possible. Any scrap that can be used should be. In a restaurant kitchen a wide variety of techniques is needed to get the most out of what you buy. Whole chickens are ordered, and broken down by cooks, to yield the usable cuts at half the price, plus material for stocks that go into sauces, risottos, soups, or staff meals. Vegetable scraps are saved for the same purpose. Restaurants that budget for staff food can use excess to feed the staff, and through the magic of accounting lose less than if the food were wasted. Specials are created to use excess food.

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of wasted food in the West comes from the home. With the recession upon us, and my ambition to incorporate the chef's techniques in every facet of my cooking, avoiding waste becomes mandatory. So when I tired of taking notes about what I'm cooking, I looked to the bananas on the counter.

Bought for Honey's breakfast, I knew from their dull allover brown that they were gorgeously ripe. Unfortunately, I still haven't exorcised my food prejudice against bananas, and years of uniform, blemish-free, flavorless food in megamart produce departments have conditioned Honey against brown fruit. So banana nut bread it was. I got a couple of loaf tins and ingredients for the PC's recipe and then I weighed my bananas, a preliminary step that probably should have been undertaken before I left for the shops.

I had 1/6th of the banana needed for the recipe. This was fine; it worked out to one loaf, would get plenty of flavor and moisture from four bananas. I even tried a little of the raw fruit while I was making the batter. I'm not buying a bunch for myself anytime soon, but it wasn't disagreeable.

For the purpose of my project, I learned the blending method, mixing solid and liquid ingredients separately, and then quickly combining. As soon as they come together, they go in the pan and then the oven. Generally, the blending method is used for chemically leavened quickbreads that are supposed to be moist and tender. Mixing thoroughly works against this in two ways: liquid activates the leavening before cooking--since it's a chemical reaction, each recipe has a finite amount of lift-- and overmixing develops gluten in the flour. And nobody wants tough muffins.

The resulting bread convinced me that bananas could be delicious. Especially when the bread was toasted with butter--Grandma's poundcake treatment. Or toasted and turned into a peanut butter sandwich.

Mission: Professional Chef: More than you can chew

The early stages of any project are marked with vast ambition. Last year I planted about ten different tomato plants of four or five varieties, and three kinds of peppers in our friends' back yard.

Professional Chef was no different. I saw no reason that every part of my meal couldn't contribute to my ultimate goal. Sooner begun, sooner done, right?

What I'd forgotten since my university days is that everything has a process and laying the foundation is the most labor-intensive part of learning. In the case of Professional Chef, taking notes about steaming vegetables, braising lamb and making chicken stock would be terribly disjointed if I neglected to cover the details of mis en place and prep technique. I decided this after buying for our dinner and starting the meal.

The lamb stew was good, the steamed sweet potato and rutabaga played nicely with it, and the brown rice pilaf was...edible. I'm allowing myself some do-overs in the name of perfection. I've gotten about halfway through the relevant sections of the text, finishing the veg mis en place chapter the other day.

Veg mis en place was really helpful. That's where I found the basic knife skills, information that isn't complex or difficult to remember, but is vital. It made for easy and highly productive note-taking, and even found me, Ms. anti-superfluous garnish, fluting a mushroom the other night when we were slow.

I still need to cover the actual cooking of the veg, and the mis and method for the rice. Since then I've cooked quickbreads (notes taken), bechamel (not yet), and I'm finding it much easier to cook through the book than to keep up with the notes.

But the slog continues. There are only so many mise chapters after all. Surely my pen will catch up with my pans eventually.

Mission: Professional Chef

I've heard it for years. After I got in Scotty's car at the Jacksonville airport in March of 2006, and he sold me on bypassing culinary school. From Chef, every few months when I asked what I should be doing. From linecook on his blog last month.
"Buy Professional Chef, and cook through it. Learn all of it."

Professional Chef is the CIA's textbook. It's big. It's a little intimidating. It's kind of expensive, at least new. For nearly three years, I rationalized spending the money on expensive produce, beer, and to a far lesser degree, kitchen tools. Then I learned to play poker.

My first week here in Coventry, Honey taught me the game at the picnic tables outside the hotel we called home. Two introverts in a pub need a pretense to meet locals, to talk to people, and getting pissed enough to get over our shyness isn't a winning strategy.

It took months, but I'm now consistently decent at poker. I do well at the league game, but the cash games bring out the worst in me. I'm impatient, I try to bully new players, and inevitably get beat by someone I can't read. Finally, two weeks ago I committed. I was going to win money. I would stick it out through large chip stacks and small. I even kept myself from trying to scare off the new guy at the table--a good move, as he was a hell of a poker player. Fours hours later, I won £30 after accounting for our buy ins.

I'd lost my paring knife in February. The temptation to replace it was strong. But my need to improve myself finally, finally won out. Reader, I bought the book. It arrived a few days later, waiting for me two feet from my front door, as though the postman could lug it no further.

It's massive. I threw it down on the pass at work with the announcement that if my fellow chefs--who have heard my unequivocal pronouncements that one cannot put members of the brassica family in stocks and demi glace, that a vinaigrette does not contain that much mustard and can't be made with just malt vinegar--thought I was obnoxious before, they were in for a world of hurt. The plates under the pass rattled. The CD in the stereo skipped. The new commis chef chuckled nervously.

I've bought two notebooks, and will buy a third for the portion of the book that deals with ingredient identification and food safety. I have taken detailed notes on the mise en place and method for stocks, the mise for meat, and tomorrow on the preparation of grains and legumes, the blending (or muffin) method, braising, and steaming. I will work my way through the entire 1200-page tome, taking notes and committing to memory everything that I need to know.

My job here has been frustrating at times, and less rewarding and educational than my year at Woodfire. I am resolved that the next time I have to find a new one, to be confident in my role as chef. Expect updates.

The special you'll never eat

Every cook coming up the line knows her limitations; those areas where knowledge, experience or palate are lacking. The kitchen, or at least a good kitchen with a good chef, is not forgiving, and if you operate in oblivious unawareness of your shortcomings, you won't do so for long.

I'm not a fish person. I like to eat pork and vegetables. Baking, charcuterie, the types of cooking that take time and care well in advance in order to be successful are where I'm happiest. Fish is generally fast: cook it quickly, and just enough to be tasty. Serve it simply, with light flavors so that the guest tastes the fish he's paying for first. In the world of line cookery, fish requires skill. Also, it's expensive.

Or at least that's how I see it. There's a high likelihood that I've made a bogeyman out of fish cookery. And I want it to stop. Yesterday we got a shipment of red mullet. The chef was out and it wasn't on our specials board. I talked with our senior chef de partie--an admitted fish-hater--about what to do with it.
"What's it taste like?"

"It's awful. Very, very earthy. But the skin stays that gorgeous red colour. Maybe a risotto?"

"Hmmm. or something with orange and olives."

I went on my break and thought about risottos with fish. The idea has never quite appealed to me, but a citrus risotto with an earthy fish fillet sounded promising. And I could introduce the senior chef de partie to gremolata, one of my favorite garnishes for it's ability to lighten and elevate the flavor of dish without overpowering it, and to bring more colour to the plate.

My risotto was too lemony, so it took a lot of butter to bring it back to the proper flavor, and the the fish--seared on the skin side, and finished in the low section of the grill with cracked pepper--stuck to the pan, so I lost that beautiful skin, but the whole dish tasted great. I'd like to add peas to it if we served it.

It won't make it onto the specials list, though. I'm a commis chef, and my duties don't include creating a special. A fish risotto would be pretty out of the ordinary for us. And as today is my day off, I'm not there to make the case to the junior chef de partie and the head chef.

But it was good fun on a slow Monday night. I liked the fish that I made. I'm curious to try other preparations, fish and shellfish.

In other news, I want:
On the Line. I've been looking at the excerpts all morning, and it looks so good.
Ratio. Not out yet, but looks like one of those really useful books.
A bigger case for knives and tools. I haven't found one I like yet, but I'm typically indecisive.

Green Eggs!

I had the rare Sunday off, and Honey and I were hungry. It was one of those days when what's in the fridge is all technically food, but whether or not it can make a coherent meal is debatable.

The cook's mind immediately goes to fantasies in the face of potential breakfast and an empty stomach. I wanted gofio pancakes, either sweet with fruit, or savory with dried porcinis. No milk, no porcinis, and only a sad banana, killed that dream.

All our cheap knives--which I'm not wild about after the dull chef's knife turned and cut my middle finger a couple of weeks ago--were dirty. So I decided a knife-skillsless meal would be a good idea.

Pancetta scraps, a grated potato and enough time to render fat and wash some dishes yielded passable hash browns.

About a half-cup of Canarian mojo verde, an ounce and a half of grated pecorino that needed to be used weeks ago, and three eggs made an olive-drab omelet batter.

This omelet was not about proportion, delicacy or technique. It was about making three eggs for two people into a meal that would keep us satisfied for more than an hour and using food that would otherwise have been wasted. It was also about being damn tasty, and I plan to keep up this practice of using sauces as omelet-extenders in the future.

American and British breakfasts are meat-heavy affairs, and I completely agree with Mark Bittman about the necessity to consume less meat. I've tried to start treating meat more like a condiment. Since this means adding bacon or pancetta scraps to nearly everything, Honey hasn't complained. And since I'm using pieces that would otherwise be thrown away, we're reducing our waste. Green eggs indeed.

Now if only we could get around to eating more of our leftovers while they're still edible...

Food News and Links I Like

USDA trims patas negras, doubles price:

Drunken Animals in the NYT

New Orleans Cookbook

Or you could call it recipes for a recession: Cheap Lentil Ragout and Pasta.

Lots of NYT links this time around. I'm cleaning out my reader after the honeymoon. Expect more from Serious Eats and Ruhlman later.

Missing the Point

In the book that I'm reading, Terry Pratchett describes a desk:

"There was a blotter on the oversize desk, but it was part of it, fused to the surface. The drawers were just raised areas of wood, impossible to open. Whoever had made the desk had seen desks but clearly hadn't understood deskishness."

Sometimes, bellying up to the English table makes me feel like sitting at this fictional desk. Sandwiches in coffee shops are freshly made every day. In factories, and then shipped in. The gourmet sandwiches advertise applewood cheddar--whatever that is--next to "reformed ham."
Pubs make their food fresh, according to recipes in the Ma Broon's cookbook. Then they store the food in a residential refrigerator and reheat it in a microwave to order. Pie and pasty shops advertise deliciously slow-cooked fillings, well-seasoned. They arrive par-baked and frozen at the shop, and a baked the day of service. This is advertised as "fresh baked." A commercial that I'm watching right now is marketing frozen salmon as the sort of high-quality product that deserves the simple treatment. Without salt. I've seen lots of cured meat labeled as salami or chorizo, but it bears no resemblance to what I've had in Spain or in fine delis. Most of it is obviously salted, cooked meat stuffed into casings.

There is a lot available here that looks like food, but it seems that an understanding of foodishness is lacking. Gorgeous Scottish or Welsh salmon could be shipped fresh to the entire country within 24 hours of being caught-there's no need to freeze it. Surely the students who work in the coffee and pie shops can assemble sandwiches and learn how to cook. And as we're fewer than 100 miles from Tamworth, namesake of the famous pigs. Perhaps we could use ham that doesn't sound like it's been on the wagon for awhile?

I'm aware that these little deceptions occur in America, but I know the language to find them there. My only salvation has come from knowledge of processes generally employed.

I've tried to be gracious and inoffensive to the country that's generously hosting me and employing me. But my inability to find the quality food that I know is produced here is frustrating. The acceptance of unpalatable food in tins and jars, just because it's sold by a high-street grocer, is a disservice to a nation that's in need of healthy, honest food. And after six months I feel like accepting these practices condones them.

I'll bring the hot sauce...

I might be romanticizing, but the food, drink, music, art and other aspects of culture in a place are fascinating, and separate one otherwise indistinct place from another. Since we've moved across the ocean I've pretty much stuck to English and Continental food, with the occasional foray into Chinese, per Honey's newfound interest. I love Southern food, and I still cook a good Southern meal about once a month, but without the stoneground grits, the gorgeous pink turnips stunning array of winter greens, it just doesn't feel, well, Southern.

Of course a lot of major components to the Southern meal can be found in England, and that's what I've tapped whenever culinary homesickness strikes. For New Year's Day, I bought some spring cabbage, English cider, smoked streaky bacon--ham hocks can be found, but it requires more planning than I'd invested--and broke out the black eyed peas that came as part of our flat's furnishings. A little chunky tomato sauce went into the peas, in the hope that Honey would like them if they tasted less like peas. And my gorgeous, gleaming cast iron cornbread pan was pressed into service, along with the stoneground cornmeal from Riverview, smuggled in a Dutch oven back in July.

I should have made pepper sauce months ago, when we emptied our first bottle of olive oil, but I'm indolent at best, and the greens needed something. So I dredged up and modified a friend's hot sauce recipe: Equal parts cider and white vinegar, a good bit of cayenne: at least 4 tablespoons for about 250 mL, and about an equal amount of hot and sweet pimenton, mixed evenly. This is all based on taste, as I sure wasn't measuring while trying to make hot sauce, retrieve cornbread, and dish out peas and greens.

Sitting on the couch and eating for money and luck, with my good smokey hot sauce, humming "Unhappy" by Oukast, I felt comforted, even I daresay optimistic. And honey and won respectably at the casino the next night, so maybe there's something to these old rituals.

Or do you just like the uniform?

When I first decided to walk down the long, doubt-ridden road to chefdom, I was fortunate. I'd already worked for about 18 months, under three very different chefs. Each of them, and at least one of the chefs at the Italian Restaurant gave me The Talk.

The Talk goes something like this:
"So you want to be a chef."
"Yup."
"Do you know what that means?"
"Yes."(Note to aspiring chefs: your answer does not matter here. Get used to that; in the future, you will be given the answer, whether or not you know it.)
"You will never spend New Year's Eve with your friends, Christmas Eve with your family, Valentine's Day with the one that you love, or Mother's Day with your Mom. You will not get a Friday or Saturday off for a party, no matter how important. Every Halloween, people will ask if you're dressed as a chef, and the answer will be no. You'll work 12 or more hours a day. You will get burns and cuts, and still have to work, and the scars probably won't go away. People will scream at you. A lot. You will fuck up. A lot. You will not have a successful relationship, unless you find another chef, or a saint. And no one will understand what it means when you say 'I'm a chef.' They'll think that you cook really well."

There are certain things that I would add to this, though it might scare potential chefs off from the gig.

You might never earn the right to be called "chef." More and more people get called chef--hell, I get called chef--without the responsibilities that real chefs have. You might find yourself as a line cook at 45, and line cookery is a young person's game. Your job is not just to cook: you must manage people and costs. You need to understand what happens in the dining room, and when it's broken, you must fix it. You need to know food: you must know how to fabricate meat, fish and veg, you must know not merely ethnic, but regional cuisines, and you need to know how to create at least a basic version of most dishes on command. You need to get every red cent (or pence) from every item in your kitchen, and you need to be comfortable harassing slackass cooks into doing the same. You need to be willing to stay up until 1 or 2 in the morning as a restaurant chef, and if you want to be a pastry chef, you'd better be ready to wake up at 3 A.M. You need to know how food gets to your kitchen, how to make that path more valuable to your bottom line, and where something exciting is that your competitors haven't found yet. You need to understand that if people call you Chef, everything that comes out of your kitchen has your name on it. You need to taste everything. All the time. And you need to be brutal with whoever made it, even if it was all you.

If you don't want to do that, if you're convinced that surely there's an easier way, I have to ask: Do you want to be a chef, or do you just like the uniform?

Recently, our breakfast commis, admittedly a kid, was bitching about the hours in December. When I put the above question to him, everyone else on the line assumed I was taking the piss, but it's a question to ask not only other cooks, but oneself.

I have a degree in journalism. I was a smart kid. My parents always wanted more for me, and I like to think that I have the mind for this nebulous "more." Nothing makes me feel better than working well in the kitchen, but I regularly burn bread, make basic procedural mistakes, and need advice for simple processes. I want to work my way up the line, but it's impossible both to be aware of my limitations and assume that I can go where I want to.

Being a chef requires both suspending doubt in one's abilities, and being painfully, constantly aware of one's limitations. The best chefs teach you this, and how to overcome it. They punish mistakes, lend confidence in the face of the unknown, and encourage you in your experiments. And even with the best chefs, you'd better be your own worst critic.

Tomorrow, what a chef, or aspiring chef needs in reading materials.

December in 101 words

Landing from Atlanta, straight to work for nine days, sous chef quits, day off, seven days, friends from Brussels get embarrasingly poor service at the restaurant, day off, pork soup, carolers in an empty restaurant, easiest set menu EVER, wine for Christmas, new sous chef, grease fire with 26 guests in the restaurant, the show goes on, hockey game, ordering gifts for family back home, contracting the plague, day off, poker win, slow Christmas Eve, drinking with friends in their pub, waking up to potato pancakes, scrambled eggs, tomato sauce and pecorino and Authentic Mexican and The Essential Cuisines of Mexico.
Happy Christmas!

Information wants to be free; Mission Thanksgiving

I'm visiting Atlanta and have made it to Woodfire, a farmers' market, a friend's restaurant by Oakland Cemetery and Northside. I totally failed at the Highlander, but am about to head to Little's. And maybe Whole Foods.

It's been four months since I possessed the knowledge necessary to eat really well. Having the meager money from my job has helped. But just being able to find good food honestly sold requires being networked through inefficient channels, and that takes time.

I'm reading a book on markets, and just finished a chapter that advocates information's uninterrupted (and thus free) flow in markets, and the existence of entities that facilitate that flow. And I thought about buying locally in Coventry. The terminology of farming and preparation are different. Chemical composition, not ingredient name, becomes the standard, and a constant source of doubt. Knowing as much about the foodways as I do here would certainly make life easier.

So to facilitate the flow of information to the Georgians who read this, here's a link to the Georgia Organics Directory. You can locate nearby markets, CSAs and restaurants, even a farmer if you need one. The printed version has the added bonus of being organized by location as well.

I get to shop because I've been asked to MacGyver a Thanksgiving dinner without a range or oven. My hardware consists of a grill, a smoker, a large outdoor burner, a small sauce burner, a slow cooker, a toaster oven, an electric skillet, a microwave, and possibly a torch. My software thus far is two turkeys of an as-yet-undetermined size, two paper grocery bags of various braising greens, and a few pounds of winter veg: turnips, radishes, parsnips and winter squash. I think I've got a line on some good stuffing. And I possibly have a satellite kitchen.

Now I just need to get a replacement notebook. I have lists to make.

Cowboy caramel, learning new methods and opening a restaurant

I've been at the new job for a couple of days now, and I'm getting used to working again, to riding 2 miles to and from work, new coworkers, a new kitchen, and a new chef.

We start dinner service in a few days, so I've mostly been working on prep for my station while the other cook and the sous chef run breakfast and lunch services. My station is huge: salads, starters, pizzas and desserts. I feel like I'm in the weeds already, even though the chef has instructed the other cook, an incredibly capable chick, that she'll be helping me. I'm trying to keep positive: work this incredibly busy station, and I will get faster, more organized, clearer. My systema will be strong. I'm a natural optimist, but it's a challenge.

The prep list is daunting, and I can't see how it'll all be done before we open. Opening a restaurant, I've decided, blows like a hurricane. It's hectic, the lists have to be completed, and we only got a copy of the menu yesterday. A cook no-called no-showed on my first day, and was standing outside smoking when I rode up the next day. As a cook, I hate having to talk to cooks who are deep in the shit, usually about to get fired. Inevitably, there are the explanations, the rationalizations, the guesses of the clueless, the desperate questing about for some reason to hope, to believe that they won't soon be finding out how exciting the prospects are on the current job market. When it's a good cook who just made some mistakes, I feel bad, and wish that I could realistically offer some help, but I don't make the decisions. When cooks screw over the team out of laziness though, I just want them to get out of my way and let me do my job. Cooks are funny that way; most are pretty forgiving if you aren't a total fuckup, but screw over the team or half-ass it, even once, and you're already operating in the past tense. You're not here anymore, you're just in the way.

But yesterday was fun. We were slow during lunch service, and chef had me clear away my prep during lunch. He doesn't want any prep done during service, and I've got to get ready to transition from prep to service. Then, of course, we had the slowest lunch service ever. So he showed us how he makes risotto, pasta carbonara, and caramel.

We made risotto at Woodfire, and after a year there, I knew how to do it the Woodfire way. Cooking requires discipline, and if you're learning well, there's only one way to do something: the right way. So I tend to approach different methods with lots of skepticism. But I'm here to learn, and even though his method was different, and didn't look like it would work, the risotto was great. The ingredients weren't the super-special produce that we worked with at Woodfire, but it was simple, hearty and delicious. Especially as I hadn't eaten much that day.

The pasta carbonara was good to watch. It's a dish I've tried once, and predictably made scrambled eggs. I was surprised by how much the copious pepper brought to the dish, by the transience of the sauce--within about 5 minutes, it had broken, something to remember for service. It was also a simple rendition, a reminder as we recalled all the gussied-up versions with peas, mushrooms, meatballs, or cream for people who couldn't emulsify with eggs alone, that Italian cuisine is simple, meant to be whipped up at home, and as it's been exported, it's almost baroque in its complexity.

The caramel was for a special dessert on the lunch menu, and the chef made it "cowboy style" with just butter and caramel in the pan. It came together beautifully, and made me want to go home and try it myself. Of course that was before another six hours and a pizza lesson, complete with excited children. More on that tomorrow.

Notes

We got bicycles last weekend. I rode about 13 miles Saturday and Sunday, and I think about 3 today. I can already feel my metabolism kicking up. I can't wait to be able to eat more without getting fatter.

I made quince jam. It's pretty nice, but 1 kilo of fruit makes a LOT of jam. My neighbors downstairs were supposed to get a jar, but didn't answer the door. Which sucks, because I want to try and make something else with quince before the season is over.

Purple-sprouting broccoli has shown up in the markets. I can't wait to get some.

Everyone who's spent time in Europe has told us that we'll miss real Mexican food. There appear to be about three types of dried chiles available in the markets, none of which I've ever seen in Hispanic and Latino markets in Atlanta. On an episode of The Restaurant--which I don't like as much as the first season, for the record--one couple actually served Doritos and green bean and carrot "burritos" to Mexicans. They had no clue why the Mexicans were insulted, and claimed that they couldn't make Mexican food because they didn't have a working oven. Right.

Leaving aside the obvious rant, today I found two sources for dried chiles, posole, masa harina, jamaica, tomatillos, and all the other wonderful things that I need to make actual Mexican food. Now I just need to temper my enthusiasm with some sort of budget, lest I spend my first paycheck on dried chiles.

Oh yeah, one other thing: after obsessing about it for days with no particular cause, I spotted Malabar Spinach at the Carribean stall in the market today. Coventry may not provide all the opportunities that Atlanta does, but the daily surprises are nice.

Thank You, Grandma

When I was a kid, my little brother and I spent at least one evening a week with my mom's parents. Grandma grew up in the tobacco-farming (and last I heard, Nissan-manufacturing) mountains of east Tennessee, and was born smack-dab in the middle of the Great Depression. Theirs was not a rich family, despite the rumoured ownership of a Stradivarius violin--which perished in a fire.

As kids, one of our favorite dinners and Grandma and Papa's was creamed dried beef, known charmingly in the army as "shit on a shingle." Crispy toast, milky gravy, salty dried beef--cut up with scissors, natch--and not a vegetable in sight, it was easy food for kids to love. And last I checked, it cost about 50 cents a serving. I haven't had it in years.

I come to this because tonight I attempted Potted Hough. The British are big on potted proteins as a way of preservation. From what I can gather, they are finely chopped meats refrigerated either in a rich stock or butter (in the case of crab and shrimp.) They're usually served cold, but occasionally warmed and served on toast. After riding 8.5 miles today (see the other blog), I was not in the mood to wait until the paltry amount of stock I had jelled, and wasn't convinced that Honey would be in the mood for cold meat jelly after a day spent out in the brisk wind.

Tasting the Hough (Scottish for beef shin, apparently), I felt that I understand why this delicacy had stayed for the most part in Scotland. Highly spiced beef reminds me of medieval recipes involving eight or nine different warm spices, and a dearth of salt or acid. A cook never wants to disappoint, however, and I'm no different. After such a long day, I felt we deserved something nice. So what to do to this tepid beef to make it delicious?

And here the inspiration of Peggy Belcher's thrift food struck me: a slab of toast would save the beef from being a pile of mush on a plate, and soak up the admittedly rich beef broth. I even got a compliment from Honey.

So thank you, grandma, for teaching me about the food of thrift, and how to make something special out of something that most people would ignore.

Things I'm not in the mood to do:

Work on another draft of the menu.

Start dinner.

Clean.

Write emails to chef, former coworkers, and family.
Call the butcher to secure venison mince.

Make gnocchi.

Convince English pubgoers to eat gnocchi, ragu and gremolata.

Correct the seasoning on my pumpkin soup.

Find something to do with a litre of aioli.

Check my bank balance.

Order a new steel, four six pans and a two-thirds pan from Nisbets.

Shower.

Clear my reader.

Go to my second shift tonight.


Things I'm in the mood to do:

Sit.

Eat Crisps.

Watch television.

Make unproductive lists.