Sunday, November 6, 2011

This is the sound of my knuckles cracking...

Howdy, folks!

Long time no see...

As you may know (or not, if you're just tuning in), I fell off the face of the internets sometime around Christmas last year, largely due to the INSANE workload I was shouldering at Stratford Chef School. My 8 months off school were also pretty intense, and I didn't much see the outside of a kitchen.

I am now back in school for my second and final year, and while my academic obligations have, if anything, multiplied, one of my assignments is to write and maintain a food weblog. The assignment is part of the Stratford Chef School's Gastronomic Writer In Residence Program - every year, the school invites a prominent gastronomic writer to instruct the students in the art and craft of food writing. Last year, our writer in residence was Ian Brown, of the Globe and Mail, and this year, we are lucky to have the lovely Clotilde Dusoulier, of the weblog Chocolate & Zucchini. Clotilde is visiting us from Paris, France, and is focusing our attentions on emerging media in general, and on weblogs in particular.

Seriously, this lady is lovely. In every way, she is gracious and kind, articulate and empathetic, and most importantly, Clotilde is elegant in exactly the way my feeble mind thinks French ladies ought to be. I have not yet had a weblog-related encounter with her, but she and I did have an encounter of tremendous cultural, gastronomic and gustatory importance. More on that tomorrow. Now, it's time to hit the books. I was away from my desk all weekend, and assignments are already starting to pile up.

I don't know if you can hear this out there in the internet, but this is the sound of my knuckles cracking, as I get down to work.

It's nice to be back.
xoxo

Friday, December 24, 2010

Happy Birthday, Weblog!

It's erev Christmas, and I am home alone, plague monkey that I am. Unwilling to broadcast my illness far and wide, I am quarantined with my cats, some short ribs braising in the oven, and eager anticipation of Alan Maitland's reading of The Shepherd on the CBC.

This is evidently becoming a tradition for me, only last year, I was screwing up my first ever batch of ice cream, and this year, I can churn ice cream like it ain't no thing. In my year of sporadic weblog postings, ramblings and incoherent ravings, I have, apparently, made progress, in some sense of the word. I am getting my learn on at Chef school, for one thing. Finally, I can tell the front of a chicken from the back, once the legs are off. Puff pastry is no longer an abstract and theoretical challenge. I can (with every ounce of concentration I can muster) produce springrolls that in no way resemble pregnant worms. I am becoming proficient at all kinds of things I wouldn't have imagined possible, this time last year. With my accumulating confidence and experience, I realize that the mountain of all things gastronomic that I don't know is actually growing, even as it seems less insurmountable. Nice to see that an old dog such as myself can learn some new tricks, I guess.

I wish you all a restorative and joyful holiday season, a happy and healthy New Year, and peace (and peas) in your hearts.

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Jewish Penicillin vs. Dirty Stratford Germs

I had been fighting a cold all week, and my body graciously granted me a stay while I finished up my exams before heading home for the holidays. No sooner did I disembark from my overbooked train to Kingston, however, than the invading Stratford germs executed a coup, and felled my school-addled self.
I don't remember the last time I was this sick, and while I will spare you the nasty details, suffice it to say that I am a mess, and am best left to my own devices until this plague clears up.

I was less sick yesterday, when I committed to making brown veal stock. My plan was to turn it into a demi-glace base for a sauce diable, sauce chasseur, or sauce charcutière for the chicken I also picked up whilst at the butcher. I cursed myself over and over today, lying in bed, half-blind. Here I was with a chicken, some vegetables and a vat of veal stock for an elegant chicken sauté, but all I wanted, nay, all I needed was my mom's chicken soup. I couldn't see my way to leaving the house to pick up dill, the essential missing ingredient.

I rallied with an equine dose of cold capsules, pain killers and antibiotic eyedrops, and managed to produce a chicken sauté with local shiitake mushrooms, a port-demi reduction and baby potatoes roasted in duck fat. I even managed to put away the bulk of the bottle of sauvignon blanc I was cooking with. All in all, not a bad effort, but it paled in comparison to the restorative magic that my mom's chicken soup would have wrought.

This is the best thing you can do, if you or anyone you care about, is sick:
1) Get a chicken. A kosher chicken is the best for soup, because they're saltier (and therefore tastier, IMHO). Barring that, see if you can get your hands on an older stewing hen. Beyond that, just get a chicken, or even a bag of dismantled chicken parts (to save yourself the trouble of butchering the thing, if you don't know how, or are too sick to wield a knife safely). Remove any organs like heart, kidneys and liver, because they will make your soup a) bitter, and b) a funny colour. There are tons of delicious things you can do with these morsels, but if you're illin', don't worry about them- deal with them later, or feed them to your pets.

2) If it hasn't been done for you, cut up the chicken into large pieces (breasts, thighs, drumsticks, halve the remaining carcass). Leave the skin on, but remove any pin feathers sticking out. This may require tweezers, which will then require careful disinfection.

3) Put the chicken in a soup pot, cover with cold, clear water by about 2 inches. Set on the stove top, and slowly bring to a boil. Once the water has boiled, turn the heat down to a simmer. Now you can prepare your vegetables. My family's tradition dictates that the only acceptable vegetable accompaniments for chicken soup are: carrots (either peeled and coarsely chopped into chunks, or the baby shaped carrots), celery (strings removed, chopped into pieces roughly equal in size to the carrots), and dill (added as a bunch, then fished out once the desired level of dill-ness has been attained). Black sheep that I am, I embellish on tradition, and add potato, leek, lemongrass, lime leaf and white turnip (if I can find any. The waxy yellow rutabaga has too strong a flavour for the delicately flavored soup). I also chop the dill before I add it, and leave it in. I really like dill.

4) You want to let the chicken simmer for a while, though, before adding the vegetables. These should only be added in the last 45 minutes of simmering, so they retain their structural integrity. The exception, of course, is the lime leaf and lemongrass, which can be added early, to extract the maximum flavour. The secret to a clear soup is careful skimming- all the scum, fat and impurities that rise to the top should be ladled off, without removing too much soup. If the soup is at too vigorous a boil, the excess fat and schmutz will emulsify into the soup, which will them be cloudy, and muddy-tasting at the end.

5) How to know when to add the vegetables? Taste the soup. It should be flavorful and alive with chicken-y goodness, but not very strong- remember that unless you are using a kosher bird, the only salt in the pot will be the natural salts occurring in the bird itself, which aren't that potent. Wait until the end to season the soup- if you salt it, and then reduce it too much while cooking, it will be overseasoned. Better to be patient.

6) Once the vegetables have been added and simmer until tender, you can season your soup with salt and pepper. Your pepper choices are many. Black pepper tastes amazing, but the black flecks may distract you from the golden perfection of your soup. I use black pepper. My mom does not. A really good way of getting the clear pungency of black pepper would be to tie some up in a sachet of cheesecloth, suspend it in the simmering broth, and discard at the end. You could also include: bay leaf, parsley stems and thyme, if you wanted. These seasonings (peppercorns, bay leaf, thyme and parsley stem) can also be tied up in a leek leaf, for the ultra-traditional bouquet garni, which is a generally nifty trick to have up your sleeve for imparting subtle aromatics to all manner of stocks, soups and sauces.
But I digress.
To avoid pepper flecks, you could use white pepper, although I find it generally tastes like ass, and I try to avoid it. What my mom does, is not season the pot of soup with pepper at all, and instead, she passes a shaker of celery pepper at the table. This is the only seasoning ever on the table at my mother's house. It is made of celery seed that has been ground with black pepper. It is commercially available, or you can make your own.

7) Now I like to remove the chicken, discard the carcass and skin, and shred the meat, returning it to the pot for a really hearty, chunky soup. I also boil small pasta shapes (I am partial to stars and alphabets) separately, and add them to the bowl (not the pot- they will get ultra-soggy) to serve. My mom usually leaves the chicken out altogether, saving it for cold lunches, and refrigerates the soup overnight so that all the fat congeals at the top and can be discarded easily. I never have this much forethought. This is something I am working on. Aside from pasta, you can add matzo-farfel, dumplings (potato or meat-filled kreplach), matzo balls (which, when I am sick, are way too much to ask of me), and soup mandlen (which are basically little puffs of choux paste, probably made on water rather than milk so they are pareve).

My mom calls this Jewish Penicillin, with good reason- a homemade chicken soup can cure all manner of ailment, from a common cold to a broken heart to whatever ungodly illness I managed to pick up in Stratford. I should have sucked it up and picked up some dill, which is exactly what I plan to do tomorrow, assuming I am more ambulatory.

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Internet silence, explained.

The long and short of my sporadic posting: I have way less free time than I would have thought possible.

I thought that being on my own in a new town, in school full-time meant that I was going to have tons of time on my hands, that my weblog was finally going to be picture-rich, that I was going to knock off some knitting projects that have been dragging, that some pressing paperwork was finally going to be dealt with.

As it turns out, I was mistaken.

Those of you that know me, know that I am in general, fairly organized, and an accomplished multi-tasker. I can shoulder a heavy load, and can get incredible amounts of work done cheerfully and efficiently. And yet here, in Stratford Chefs School, I am nearly drowning in my workload. The work is not particularly difficult, but there is a lot of it (and I mean, A LOT). For the most part, it is fascinating, and every chapter, every assignment, totally deserves my fullest attention, and completely rewards that attention with an incredible amount of knowledge that I would be hard-pressed to gather for myself, unguided.

And so, I have written encyclopedic treatises on boiling, poaching, pan-frying, sautéing, stir-frying and pot-roasting (which is not what I thought it was!). I am reading beautifully written work about food by important authors. I am learning about classical menu design. I am familiarizing myself with the principles of nutrition (and the Canada Food Guide is damaging my self-esteem). I am learning to serve guests graciously (a stretch. I am mostly serving them awkwardly, but hope springs eternal). I am coming to understand wine. And colour theory. And the history of industrial agriculture. And the history of food culture. And the rudiments of food costing. I am tasting, trying and learning.

But I am not knitting, I am not dispensing with my paperwork, and I (unfortunately) am not taking pictures for this weblog.

I am drowning in my workload, and I couldn't be happier.

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs

This is the way you make a french folded omelette, if you are a Michelin-starred Italian chef/demigod who trained under Alain Ducasse:

First of all, you should, at all times, look cool and composed. Your immaculately white neckerchief should stay tucked in, as it is largely for show: sweat wouldn't dare break on you.

Your pan and butter rise to the perfect temperature under your gaze, and your whisked and seasoned eggs leap into the pan just to please you. You can, apparently, communicate with the eggs telepathically, because all you have to do is wave a fork at them, and they are perfectly fluffy, and they don't even dream of browning.

When you are ready to flip the omelette, you nonchalantly tilt the pan, and with your free hand, gently drum on the panhandle, and the omelette turns itself over, and you slide it onto the plate, like it ain't no thing.

This is the way you make a French folded omelette if you are a first-year apprentice in week three at SCS:

8 attempts later, I have no idea.

There was no part of Chef Camanini's demonstration that I could replicate. I get that the omelette is devious in its simplicity. With so few ingredients, and no elaborate filling, sauce or garnish to hide behind, the execution of the omelette must be perfect.

I did not attain perfection.

My butter browned, the eggs wouldn't flip, and when they did, they were either over- or undercooked.

I ate a lot of omelette today. For those of you that know me, it wasn't a pretty sight. I couldn't stomach the thought of that much perfectly good food going to waste (plus: free meal(s)). As it turns out, I could stomach the omelettes even less.

Fortunately, most of my classmates were in the same boat- collectively, we scrambled, flipped and burned our way through well over a case of eggs.

This Saturday night will be remedial omelette-making, with a few of my delightful classmates. I'm living a wild and crazy life, here in Stratford.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

The word is...overwhelmed?

A little over a week ago, I uprooted myself from comfy old Kingston, and headed to Stratford, Ontario, to attend Stratford Chefs School. The decision to go to culinary school was not easy- there are loads of pros and cons, and every chef, cook and dishwasher has an opinion one way or the other (and this is not a group of people that is reticent!). Once the decision was made, however, the choice of school was easy- SCS is, simply put, among the best cooking schools in North America. It is tiny in comparison to some of the big name American schools: think fewer than 80 students across both levels, compared to the nearly 3000 at the Culinary Institute of America, but it is mighty, and its curriculum packs a wallop, let me tell you.

I have an incredible course load- I am in practical cookery 4 hours per day (except for Thursdays, when I am in practical pastry for 4 hours); theory-wise, I have Food Costing (math), Gastronomy (food history), Food Style (art, design and concept), Nutrition, Writing, Wine, Commodities, Kitchen Management, and a surprisingly intense aerobics and movement class called Body Moves, which I swear to you, is going to transform me into a beautiful, graceful butterfly.
EVERY WEEK.

Oh yeah, and one of the school's restaurants, the Old Prune, is open during the school year, but is staffed by a rotating schedule of second year student chefs, who execute and expedite a nightly four-course menu. The dishwashers, servers and buspeople? First year students, i.e: me. Serving actual haute cuisine to actual paying customers. Granted, these customers are generally aware that they are participating in a learning experience and so are somewhat more forgiving than they might otherwise be, but it has been some time since I've been out of a kitchen, and the tidy hair and tucked-in dress shirt is so disconcerting. I'm not on dinner service every night- just once or twice a week, which is plenty, thank you very much!

All of this is in the interest of giving us a well-rounded education in the culinary arts.

And now, back to my Commodities reading. Please stay tuned for reports on my Michelin-starred chef-instructor, the ultra-cute town I'm living in, and my beyond creepy accommodations.

I miss you.
xoxo

Friday, October 29, 2010

I'm sure Dr. Seuss has something to say about this...

Hi folks,
I'm still around.
The weeks leading up to my departure from Kingston went by so quickly, I haven't had time to write anything worth reading, nor have I had time to cook anything at home worth telling you about.
But now I'm here, and it's better, funner and more challenging than I thought possible.

Please stay tuned for a description (with photos) of where I am, and what 'it' is.

Miss you,
Randi