Battleplans for 2009

It's 2009. Last year I left graphics behind and freelanced while attending culinary school. I graduated with honors, and briefly worked at the restaurant where I externed. This year B and I are going to have a baby, and I plan to freelance in graphics and look for another gig at a restaurant. But I'm also...gonna do something bigger and better. My first move is going back to school.

On January 7th, I'll begin the management program where I attended culinary school. It's not strictly a restaurant management program; it's an entrepreneurial program, the focus of which is the food world. I just need to be my own boss; I don't know if I really want to be in the restaurant world, but to be able to produce something -- and/or feed people -- hmmmm.

I'm going to continue this blog but focus more on what I eat, what I feed my family and friends, and other musings on the fun of food. I will restart my old blog, Culinary School Confidential, while I'm in the management program, reporting and ruminating on everything that is taught and discussed. While this blog will be daily, CSC will go part time, as the program is only 3 days a week.

On a personal front, I want to push myself farther at home on the cooking front. I'm pretty happy at the trajectory my home cooking is taking -- my pizzas are becoming more complex and have potential to take on personality, and I surprised myself yesterday by baking bagels that could seriously compete with my local bagel bakeries. I want to keep pushing.

I'm happy with my health, but I need to do better. I've kept a consistent 10 or so pounds off since c-school, but I want to train myself to eat smaller portions. Or more particularly, cook smaller portions. This evening's stir fry, for instance, I purposefully tried to do smaller portions of all the ingredients, going so far as putting more than usual into the stock. Still, it all added up to enough for two, which didn't stop me from eating the whole thing, it was so good!

I also wish to eat more seasonally. Ilsa has been riding me a little to eat more fruit and veg, eat more simply. On the positive, I'm really conscious of my urge to eat wintery -- heavy on the carbs, starch, oil, light on the more typically healthy stuff. Hopefully I'll spring back in, uh, spring.

Woah. I just did a spell check and got 'entrepreneurial' on my first go! Maybe I AM smart enough to have my own biz!

ADDENDA:
I went uptown to do yoga with a friend I've never yoga'd with -- the HVS is on the opposite side of the world, and I had to do something after that miserable class I took earlier in the week. It was a beginner hatha class, a style of yoga I've never experienced and...I think I still haven't. The class was fun, as I was able to do 100% of the positions and when people had the option to do a full wheel, NO ONE did, they all were like me and stayed in half-wheel. The HVS would not approve at all! :) It kind of felt like the first half of a vinyasa class, without all the super-flexible model-types downtown. I want to try a more middle-level hatha class, now.

BREAKFAST: 11:30am, half a wholewheat bagel, smoked sable, water, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5
The smoked fish was not a hit yesterday, must eat as much as possible before it goes bad. Goyim, hrumph!

LUNCH: 4pm, club-style BLT with fries, half a pint of good beer, water, 1.5 bowl, hunger 4/5
First bacon of the new year, pretty yummy.

DINNER: 8pm, stir fry with shrimp, veg, brown rice noodles, freshly made shrimp/veg stock, mirin, soy, sesame, nori, caramel ice cream, water, 2 bowl, hunger 4/5
Went all-in on a stirfry, happy with how it came out. All the extra veg and trimming along with the shrimp shells went into cold water and boiled for 20 minutes, before being strained and reduced to about 1/3 of a cup. Peanut oil got infused in the hot wok with fresh pieces of ginger and garlic, then cooked the shrimp half way and held aside. Removed the ginger and garlic, then put in the veg, from slow cooking to fast cooking, hitting with a little soy sauce along the way. When that got far enough, hit it with some mirin, let the booze cook off. Added the shrimp and stock, covered for a minute for some steaming action, then uncovered and added the noodles, which were loosening in cold water but were still crunchy -- they did a good job of soaking up whatever liquid was still in the pan, bringing the whole thing together. A hit of sesame oil, a hit of sesame seeds and chopped up nori, a hit of hot sauce, one final jooj and into the bowl and into mah mouf, yo.

A nice balanced flavor, lots of umami. The stock and mirin (which gave the needed subtle sweetness) really made this the best stir-fry I've done yet, I just wish B wasn't on a bagel-and-butter kick this evening so she could've shared it with me. -wah-

Bagels: In the Raw!

Above are some raw rings of bagel dough, ready to be dropped in a large pot of boiling lightly-sugared water for a minute before being dredged in sesame seeds then baked for 20 minutes. I spent the morning making the bagel dough, 4 different kinds of mini muffins, and finishing the caramel ice cream from yesterday. Three of my closest friends from childhood came over with their respective partners and babies and just had a fantastic afternoon. The food helped, sure, but when you're so intimate and friendly with people you've known forever and don't see nearly enough, food is secondary....


....but it's still nice to get compliments. I bought Kossar's bagels as a back up, but my bagels came out pretty well indeed. I stuck to this recipe, and I was worried because the dough was SO stiff, it was near impossible to knead....but I left it to rise for an extra 30 minutes on the first go, and an extra 15 after it was shaped. They browned up perfectly, nice and chewy and still a good crispness to the outer shell.

I was lazy and didn't scale out the dough, so the bagels were different sizes, but all were maybe 1/2 the size of the current American bagel, more like what our parents would expected a bagel to be. Eating two of these bagels is a perfectly reasonable portion, and twice the opportunity for different toppings!

While the bagel dough was proofing, I whipped out 4 different muffin batters, baked off two at a time: lemon muffins which came out like biscuits, apple cinnamon muffins, corn muffins with whole sweet corn kernels, and a non-reciped oatbran-apple sauce-banana thing which tasted really healthy, but I didn't quite like. They looked faaabulous though:


The size worked to their advantage -- no way peeps would've eaten four muffins if they were full-sized. I had some good fish on hand for the bagels, but the homemade toppings got a lot of love, like the Israeli salad...


...and the hummus, to which B threw in some pine nuts to class up the joint....


....and the home-made butter, which to my palate was nothing special but was a show-offy kind of thing....

There was so much food, I forgot to make the bacon, oh well. To think I started 2009 by forgetting to make the bacon. Tomorrow, I'm going to do a run down about plans-hopes-goals for the year. This blog may be taking some interesting zigs and zags in the near future...

BREAKFAST: 9:30am, organic cheerios with good milk

AM TASTING: 11am-2pm, mini corn muffin, mini apple cinnamon muffin, mini lemon biscuit, mini banana oat bran muffin, half a homemade bagel, a spoonful of caramel ice cream, a slug of apple cider, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5

BRUNCH: 2pm-5:30pm, bagel with smoked sable, a few muffins, a small ramekin of caramel ice cream with a cube of brownie in it, glass of cider, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5

PM SNACK: 6:30pm, Boylan's Grape Soda, .5 bowl, hunger 3/5
I actually ordered a 12-pack of this stuff on-line because it's gotten so hard to find in shops. Easily the best grape soda out there, a real treat.

DINNER: 8pm, curry-flavor shrimp over a bed of Israeli Salad, .75 bowl, hunger 4/5
Needed something unsweet, defrosted some raw shrimp, salted and through in some curry powder, nice compliment to the lemonness of the salad.

Prediction for 2009

Tomorrow, friends are coming over for brunch. I won't give away too many surprises, but I boiled 2 cans of sweetened condensed milk to make dulce de leche, which will be turned into a caramel ice cream. I made a small batch of hummus and a small amount of Israeli salad, two things that taste better when left to develop overnight. I also whipped a cup of heavy cream into butter -- a c-school, they warned if you walked away from a mixer while whipping cream, it would turn into butter....but never demoed it. So I put the cream in and walked away....and when I came back, the fat had separated from the liquid into pale yellow curds, and the whey left behind kind of looked like skim milk. I rolled the curds into a little tube of parchment paper.

AM SNACK: 8:30am, chug of apple cider, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5

BREAKFAST: 10:30am, veggie burger, fries, water, 1.25 bowl, hunger 4/5

LUNCH: 3:30pm, small bowl of homemade rice & beans, half a brownie, apple cider, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5

DINNER: 7pm, sausage onion mushroom pizza, assorted antipasto, 1/3 of a slice of chocolate cake, 1 glass prosecco, water, 1.5 bowl, hunger 4/5
Last dinner of 2008 should serve as a warning. B, a couple of friends and I went to Little Frankies for dinner on 1st Ave and 1st St. It's Italian enoteca style, with brick-oven trad style pizzas. Undercooked, overtopped, got flibbidy flobbidy within seconds of presentation, a real lack of chew OR snap. The only thing that stood out as above average was the house-made sausage. Pizza has been trendy for a while now in NYC, and sooo many gourmet pizza places have opened and are about to open. Well, it's places like this that are going to break the trend's back and shake out shitshows like these.

Evilly Delicious

I woke up at 8 to get things done around the house and try to reset my recent late-wake late-sleep habits. In the afternoon, an evilly delicious brownie made me nap and make me feel weird, so I stayed in with some felafel.

ADDENDA:
Went to a noon yoga class with an unfamiliar teacher. Was in a good mood, avoided eating before the class, felt a bit yawny but psyched to be there. Once the class started, it was straight down hill. After an annoying anecdote, the first thing that pulled me out of the zone was the WORST. MUSIC. EVER. Led Zepplin is not yoga music. King of Pain by the Police is not yoga music. F@cking BRUCE HORNSBY AND THE RANGE IS NOT F@CKING YOGA MUSIC!! Evil mid-80s top 40s light pop took me back to when I was 13, hating everyone, and plotting how I was going to rebel (ska music! shave my head! combat boots!) against the twits who actually unquestioningly listened to this piffle. Then a long stretch of poses I've never seen and could not do, and during headstand practice several people fell with frightening force. I was lying on my stomach, and once some new-wave pink-suited Eric Clapton came on, I found myself unthinkingly rolling up my mat and leaving 15 minutes before the end. I felt aurally assaulted.
BREAKFAST: 8:30am, homemade brownie, .25 bowl, hunger 4/5
Oh my. After refrigeration, these bad boys got yummier. The chips solidified, giving a nice textural breadth to the otherwise soft, gooey and stretchy interior. They taste so deeply chocolately and...unhealthy.

HONORARY SNICKLE SNACK: 1:30pm, spinach salad, hijiki tofu patty, cold sesame noodles, 1.5 bowl, hunger 4/5
The HVS was supposed to join me, but life got in the way. I was thinking of her when eating this vegan meal at Dojos.

PM SNACK: 4:45pm, brownie, quart of water, .25 bowl, hunger 4/5
Damn, they're good.

DINNER: 9pm, felafel platter with hummus, whole wheat pita, 1.25 bowl, hunger 4/5
Ordered in.

Mario, c'mon!

B and I finally got out of the house and got ourselves to a pizzeria. We met up with her momma and brother at Otto, Mario Batalli's joint. I've eaten here several times over the years, and I must say every time I like it less and less. Maybe it's because I've become more pizza-aware over the time?

The service was unusually lousy, but I can easily forgive that for great food. But this was not great food. I started with a shrimp appetizer, which was really a small bowl of chickpeas and hot pepper, with some small blanched freezer-fresh shrimps strewn in. This is Italian cooking, man, simple recipes that live or die by the quality of the ingredients! This one was DOA.

There are basically two columns of pizza on the menu, classic and neuveau. B went for a simply pepperoni pie, and momma got the quatro stuzzini (or some such Italian name), which was basically a margarita with a different topping in each quadrant -- cooked prociutto, butternut squash, mushrooms and something else. I ordered from the funkier side of the menu -- fungi & tallegio. I learned to love the soft, wine-flavored ripe cheese in c-school. The pizza was....fneh. The crust was nicely colored, brown and spotty like a good crust should be. But it's not really baked -- it's cooked on a griddle, and it's snap-to-chew ratio is much closer to a cracker-like snap than any significant chew. (Good pizza should have a balance.) The tallegio itself was good, but there was too much of it and there were too much cooked mushrooms. Every bite was just gobs of cheese and mushrooms, overwhelming the sense of crust. It was just....unpleasant to eat.

B went out this evening to a girls-nite-out kind of thing, so I was the good house husband and stayed home and baked brownies. I used this recipe, replaced extract with the scrapings of 2 vanilla beans, doubled the salt and replaced walnuts with a cup and a half of semi-sweet chocolate chips. Makes me want to make chocolate-chocolate chip ice cream and a hot fudge sauce to pour all over the hot mess. Porno a la chocolate!

All the tallegio and hot chilis weren't too kind to me this evening, but was greatly soothed by two warm, gooey brownies.

ADDENDA:
While picking up groceries at the market, had the pleasure of running into two famous people. One was the author Sarah Vowel, of whose historical political diatribes I've read several. The other one was our very own HVS!

BREAKFAST: 10:30am, organic cheerios with the bleah milk, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5

LUNCH: 1:30pm, bread & olive oil, a few bread sticks, chickpeas with shrimp and chilies, tallegio & mushroom pizza, small slice of pepperoni pizza, water, 1.5 bowl, hunger 4/5

PM SNACK: 5:30pm, swig of apple cider, .25 bowl, hunger 4/5

PM SNACK: 7:45pm, 2 homemade brownies, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5