Gone Cookin' (Farm Feast or Foible?)

Slept in, spent the afternoon packing and thinking of what could be fun to cook this weekend -- this evening, I'm leaving for a farmstead in Massachusetts, where a friend inherited a large piece of land and another is attempting to farm the soil. I'll be in the kitchen cooking for three others, and I'm not sure what the state of the place is -- I hear it's a bit rough. I'm busting out the school tool kit and a quart of double 00 flour.

No mixer, no food processor, no blender, no ice cream machine, what in earth am I gonna do?! I'll have access to a farmer's market and a Wholefoods by car, and apples are in season. So, apple pie in a simple paté sucrée (rub that butter into that flour!) it shall be! Ditto roasted squash, since one of us doesn't eat wheat or potatoes, another doesn't eat meat, and the other has dairy issues. Oy.

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume I won't have internet access this weekend. Check back here on Wednesday for a full report with pictures...

ADDENDA:
Had extra latke mix in the fridge, so it was either lunch or the trash. Aging it for a day in the fridge helped the flavor of the chives, salt, and potato come together, and a lot more moisture separated from the mix, too.

BREAKFAST: 9:30am, banana, 4 spoonfuls of pudding, .5 bowl, hunger 3/5
There was only a little pudding left, a lot of burny bits in the corners of the bowl. I'm so gonna cook the hell out of my next batch. And serve it with whipped cream, mmmm.

LUNCH: 2pm, potato pancakes, pickles, apple sauce a la momma-in-law, water, 1.5 bowl, hunger 4/5

Had to run off, hope you can wait to learn what I had for dinner until next week!

Achey Breaky Stomach (Latkes-a-Poppin')

This evening I went back to c-school for the first time since graduation to take a continuing ed class: contemporary Italian pizza. Similar to the 'make pizza at home' class I took a few weeks ago, this one focused on making more authentic pies -- double 00 Italian flour in the crust, some traditional (sautéed artichokes), others less so (bottarga: pressed & grated roe) toppings -- and a cavalcade of Italian cheeses. At the previous class, I had to request buffalo mozzarella; today the class was already equipped with a bucket of it, as well as stracchino, caciocavallo, robiola, and some others that were a pleasure to taste.

My pastry chef, Chef G, taught the class; it was nice to slip into her groove for a night. The class was mostly setting the mise, and it was fun carmelizing a bucket of onions with A, blogger for one of the premiere foodie sites in the city (and unrepentant Jersey girl). I got in a minimally topped margarita before everyone else, in hopes of taking advantage of a hotter oven, but soon enough a flood of all sorts of pies followed, and my pie took a sold 15 minutes, getting too crisp yet underbrowned. When I put it out, I turned around to get basil, and Chef G basically yelled, "WHOSE IS THIS? WHERE IS THE BASIL?" I should have had it in hand, I should have known better; for a second I was back in in the culinary program. Need that hot-out-of-the-oven heat to wilt the basil properly.

I spent the next hour basically grazing the pies, as there were a lot of topping combinations, hoping to be inspired. A had a fondness for ricotta, something I've regarded as a calzone stuffing, not a pizza topping. However, her pie matched it with a green pesto and zucchini. The zucchini had a lightness that complemented the ricotta's fluffiness, and the sharp saltiness of the pesto drew them together nicely. One guy did some sort of sardine pie, he swore it was only mildly fishy, but it tasted like a chum-bucket to me. A few people did arugula pies, but nobody finished these with any sort of dressing, they looked a bit drab, but I quibble.

Toward the end of class, some butter cookies were put out, and before I could blink, the chocolate ones were gone. Damn, I wanted chocolate. Craving was the mother of invention as I scoped out a bag of it, along with a carton of almond paste. I took a hunk of the paste, dissolved it in some water, thickened it with a little flour. Stretched a dough, coated it in olive oil to protect it from the wet almond sauce, then topped it with a sprinkling of dark chocolate pieces.

Good idea, poor execution. The almond wasn't intense enough -- it kept the dough pleasantly pliable on top, cradling the chocolate, but the almond flavor was just a mild tickle in the nose -- it needed to stand up and greet the chocolate. I think this could be a really good dessert pie, maybe even in a deep-fried mini-calzone kind of way, but I have to figure out the almond paste issue. Hmmmmm.

ADDENDA:
Woke up with a pudding hangover, with all the dark dark chocolate keeping me up all night, and now blocking my desire for breakfast. B requested I make latkes for the family (for you goyim, it's the day of atonement, Yom Kippur), so I got the rotating grater going and got 6 pounds of organic potatoes processed into 2 Spanish onions, salted, then pressed in a colander to get as much moisture out as possible. After sitting a while, I poured off the liquid and scraped up all the delicious potato starch back into the mix. Into the pile went more salt, pepper, 6 whole eggs, a half cup of matzoh meal, and a large handful of finely sliced chives.

Fried off a few to taste, adjusted seasoning, shared a few with B, and soon found the latkes did not appreciate day-old pudding as a neighbor. To atone for this sin, I went to yoga, burped and gurgled, and sent in a portabello sandwich as a peace keeper. Things ran late at my momma-in-law's, as I took the nuclear option (antacid) and promptly napped for an hour, so I left B to fry up the latkes while I went back downtown to participate in pizza class.

BREAKFAST: 11am, 2 test latkes, .5 bowl, hunger 3/5
I got puddin' stomach.

LUNCH: 1:30pm, grilled portabello sandwich with small side salad, bowl of dahl, water, 1.5 bowl, hunger 3/5
Burped my way through yoga, snarfed some vegan food after, didn't do any favors to my stomach.

PM DRUGGING: 4pm, 2 antacids
Pudding, latkes and portabellos, not happy mixing in my stomach.

DINNER: 8-9:30pm, nibbles of 15 or so different pizzas, a handful of buttercookies, water, 2 bowls, hunger 4/5
Must be the mind-body connection, felt good being surrounded by pizza.

Bagel Love

I picked up hot-out-of-the-oven bagels and sour pickles from a pickle stand on the way home in the morning, a nice local produced (and unintentionally totally kosher) meal. Spreading cream cheese on the bagel, I was reminded of a strong food memory.

I must have been 9 or 10 and on a rare visit at a friend's house. Seth's mother was there, and she served us bagels with cream cheese. She spread her cream cheese very thinly, just a skim coat so you couldn't see the bread underneath, but not much else. My mother would lard on the cream cheese like frosting on a cake, generous and peaked. My first reaction was YUM!! -- my mouth isn't being gummed up with a ton of cheese, I can taste the bagel, it's just yummier. I hadn't come up with the concept of 'balance' yet, but that was the beginning. Then I had another reaction that came around like a swinging hammer.

This other mother, not my mother, wasn't overly friendly to me, certainly didn't love me like my mother did. She prepared this bagel for me not out of love and devotion, but because she was obliged to because I was in her house at a meal time -- was she just skimping on the cream cheese because she didn't love me? Was the unpleasant blanket of cream cheese a sign that my mom loved me?

Today, I spread my cream cheese thicker than Seth's mom, but thinner than my mom. I look forward to showing my love with a better sense of balance to my kids, so they can associate love with the best a bagel has to offer.

B came home early and went into the bedroom for a nap and I went into the kitchen. She wanted broccoli, she said. So I roasted some in the oven, coated with a little bit of olive oil, diced garlic, cubed portobello, sea salt, fresh ground pepper, and freshly toasted panko crumbs. When it came out of the oven, I hit it with a nice raw milk sharp cheddar cheese that made it scream, "ALLAWAGAWANDA!" Or something.

C-school was in full effect in making the protein. I cleaned and deveined a bunch of shrimp, butterflied them, then used a bacon press to keep them flat and get them to quick fast on the caste-iron grill pan. When I saw it stuck, I killed the heat the the shrimp released themselves in a minute to be flipped. I took a small sauce pan and placed the shells in there with a rough chopped carrot, two pepper corns, some dried shallots and some dried porcini. Covered it all with cold water, brought to a boil, then let simmer for an hour. Strained it into an ice bath, and once cooled into the freezer with a 'homemade shrimp stock' label -- next time I make shrimp or shellfish for guests, I'm gonna fashion a wicked pan sauce with that stuff.

Around 7:15, I was seriously craving sugar, had no sweets in the house, and did not feel like going to the corner store. So I poked my head in the pantry, took note of what I had, and -- c-school in effect! -- made chocolate pudding, using this recipe as a guide. I only had baking chocolate, so added an extra quarter cup of sugar, and doubled up on the eggs, as I only had medium. Upon tasting the hot pudding, it tasted a bit on the bitter and unsweet side still, so I added a shot of honey, a splash of vanilla and an extra pinch of salt. Into the fridge, drat, the recipe says cool for 2 hours, if I eat it hot, then it's a mousse, right?

ADDENDA
An exciting morning in the courts for jury duty; I was excused early so I can return Tuesday for selection on a case involving the multiple murders of presumed contract killer. Oooh, am I invalidated by writing that here? The vending machines were quite scary in the back of the waiting room, but at least now there are computer stations with free internet...

BREAKFAST: 7am, organic chex with good milk, banana, quart of water ,1 bowl, hunger 4/5

BREAKFAST 2: 11:15am, fresh onion bagel with cream cheese, 3 small 3/4 sour pickles, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5

PM SNACKLES: 2-4pm, pretzel chip things, spoonful of peanut butter, potato chips, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5

DINNER: 6pm, pan-grilled butterflied shrimp, roasted broccoli with sharp cheddar, water, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5

EVENING SNACK: 8:30pm, hot chocolate puddin', .5 bowl, hunger 4/5

Professional Pizza (Ballin')

Today was an intense day. Even though I did one trail (one-day in a restaurant where I literally trailed the chef), today wasn't a trail -- it was the first day of my externship: time to put the feet to the fire, so to speak. The (unpaid) work is for credit toward completing my culinary degree. In theory, there will be a job there for me after my apprenticeship. And that job will be Pizza Cook. Chef de la pizza? Pizzaoilo? Assistant Pizza Chef?

The point of culinary school is not to turn the student into a celebrity chef, or even a chef. It is to teach a standardized set of skills, theory, and techniques so that when you go to a joint and say, "Gimme a job, I gots me a culinary degree yo," they'll have a reasonable expectation of what you can do. I felt that in full effect at the restaurant (which for purposes of anonymity, I'll call "Prospect Heights Fine Pizza" or PHF here).

I arrived at 1pm to meet the head chef/manager of the kitchen, let's call her Chef R. Got on my comfy chef shoes from school, put on my cycling cap (with sweatband lining it.) Without much pomp and circumstance, we got straight to it. She pulled out a chart with the formula for the dough, the foundation of any pizzeria. Without giving too much away, the dough is a 50/50 mix of Italian double 00 and organic high-gluten bread flour -- not the stuff of a run-of-the-mill slice joint. After seeing how much dough is left over from yesterday, it's calculated how much dough is needed for the day, and how much new dough is needed -- the mix is 10-20 percent old dough, to give a certain depth to the flavor of the dough. With the extra old dough, foccacia is made.

The flours, salt, and fresh yeast are placed in a Hobart floor mixer after the liquids are put in the bottom (warm water, olive oil, a bit of whole milk). Chef R stood with me, telling me the signs to look for when the dough is ready to come up, and warned me that if I'm going to walk away to turn off the machine (as it can go from perfect to overmixed in a matter of seconds). About half way through, we chucked in the right proportion of the old dough. It took both of us to unload the dough into a carton and bring to the front kitchen that is open to the dining room, where the 'za is made.

The dough had to rest and relax for a minimum of an hour. While R took care of ordering and administrative stuff, she set me up to make flourless chocolate hazelnut cake. Unlike all the warnings in c-school, I was given a recipe and enough space to get the task done relatively comfortably. This is where my c-school training helped. Separating 16 eggs was no problem, setting up and getting the robocoup ditto, zeroing out the scale whatevah, whipping eggwhites to stiff-peaks got it, beating in one step, folding in another, understood. No silly questions, into the oven, cleaned the station, good impression (hopefully) made.

Then we got ballin'. For the 26 kilos of dough we made, we had to portion out different sized for the slice pies, the individual pies and the kiddie pies. Once portioned, they had to be rolled in a circle in cupped hands to make perfectly even and round spheres. I've been shown this technique in class, in the pizza tutorials I've taken, and taken a crack at it home, and still hadn't got it. This time, under the pressure of wanting to be taken seriously as a professional, I got it on my second try. That's for the best, as I did it about 200 more times right after!

I sat in the backyard and ate a few slices as service began around 5pm. Talk among the staff expected a heavy night -- tonight was the 2nd presidential debate, and judging from the vice-presidential debate, everyone wants pizza to accompany the enlightened discussion of the issues (snort). As the night rolled on, my main task was to stretch the dough as the orders came in. Following Chef R's lead and technique, I avoided thickened edges and tried to make the dough perfectly even and round all the way through. First slap the dough down, then stretch with one hand while holding it down with another, then pick it up and use the knuckles-going-round/tossing method to achieve the final size while detecting and reacting to thin and thick spots. The first few came out wrong -- I've been aiming to go from thin in the middle to thick at the crust for such a long time -- but this technique was different and, I daresay, more elegant. Chef R comforted me, saying it takes some practice to get some feel. Midway through the night, she was tossing compliments my way for my dough stretching.

So I would stretch, Chef R would top with the various combinations on the menu and slide them into the oven, I would prep the boxes or plates, pull the pies when they got appropriately charred, slice them, finish certain pies with post-oven ingredients (like basil on the Margarita, arugula, and cherry tomatoes with salt and olive oil on the tricolore), and either call out 'order up' for in-house or place them on a rack with the ticket for delivery.

Chef R & I got into a rhythm, dancing around each other clumsily and getting the pizzas out. The night stayed quiet, but there was an uptick around 8pm for delivery, but the deluge never came. The owner visited and joked that this was because of the bad luck the new guy brought, ahhh thanks. Despite it being 'slow', tickets ganged up on the board and I lost track of how many doughs needed to be stretched, what was in the oven, what needed to come out and be finished, plates or boxes....I was quietly in the weeds, due to my lack of inexperience. I just poked my head in the oven, stretched more dough and looked for cues from Chef R, who was clear and comfortable and probably didn't even notice I was lost. I soon picked it up again and before I knew it, my 10 hour shift was over.

Chef R made pies for whoever wanted one, clean up was relatively straightforward and easy, and best of all, unlike friggin' c-school, this place hires someone to wash the dishes. Chef R asked me how it was, I could only come up with the words, "whole lotta fun." Due to jury duty, school obligations, and going away this weekend, I'm not starting my externship formally until next week, but I'm looking forward to getting in there and getting my hands dirty on more pie.

BREAKFAST: 9am, organic cornflakes with good milk, banana, 1.25 bowls, hunger 3/5

PM SNACK: 12:15pm, slice of yellow cake with chocolate frosting, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5
On the way to the restaurant, feeling nervous, didn't want to get there too early, stopped by a nice bakery.

LUNCH: 5:15pm, 2 square pizza slices, water, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
Eaten standing in the industrial but pleasant backyard of the brownstone the restaurant is in.

DINNER: 10:15pm, diavolo pizza, root beer, 2 bowl, hunger 4/5
Fresh moz, thin peperoni, some hot pepper flakes, hit the spot after rubbin' n' slappin' dough all evening.

EVENING WATERING: 11:30pm, quart of water
Winding down slowly.

Welcome Back

Now that I've finished culinary school (well, at least the class-room stuff; I still have 210 hours to complete as an extern at a restaurant, which starts tomorrow), I'm still not the greatest home cook in the world. But I do have a nice set of skills and ideas that make cooking a bit more interesting. When you end up cooking a wide variety of foods, including stuff you'd never eat in a million years, you have no choice but to...open up a little. I even ate eggs! Still not a fan, but I can cook them competently.

Learning to feed: It's about learning to eat well, with thought and compassion for others and the world from which the food comes. It should be as fundamental as learning to read. These will be my newly invigorated explorations into eating and feeding -- myself, my suspiciously flexetarian wife, my omnivorous friends, my strictly vegan HVS, and other friends and family.

This weekend was mostly spent with my wife, recovering from graduation -- indoors, and eating poorly. Tomorrow, I'll spend the day helping making some damn good pizza.

Note all the previous entries here are from the blog previous to Culinary School Confidential, my initial stab at keeping a diary of what I ate called, "I Am What I Eat, I Eat What I Wish to Become". Oy, such a title!

ADDENDA:
When I got on the scale this morning, I was shocked to see it say 219, a solid 6 pound drop from a week ago. Ilsa will not be happy -- since I dropped from a high of 235 to 225 over a period of 6 months, I maintained that weight for another 6 months. I guess the stress of school ending led me to eat less, as well as a couple of solid bike rides and 3 yoga classes last week, the physical activity to keep me balanced. To balance the weight loss, I ate a big ol' brick of Chinese today. Now THAT should make Ilsa happy!

I usually don't eat this crappily, just a weird transitional day.

LUNCH: 1pm, peppersteak with pork fired rice and an eggroll, water, 2 bowl, hunger 4/5

PM SNACK: 5pm, homemade vanilla ice cream, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
I finished the ice cream so my wife wouldn't be tempted.

DINNER: 7pm, brown rice pilaf, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
Softened onion in butter, sauteed the basmanti brown in it for about 10 minutes till it got really fragrant, through in a quart of store-bought chicken stock along with a few spoonfuls of minced dried shitakes and a few bay leafs and thyme stems wrapped in cheese clothe. Brought it to a boil, covered it, into the oven at 350 for about an hour till the liquid was absorbed. A little bit gluey and firm, but tasty. The store stock already had a ton of salt in it, no need to add any more.