Murder in the Kitchen

Ahh fall finally feels like it's just around the corner, that hint of crispness in the air. While I'll miss the bountiful summer offerings of the farmers market every Saturday: the plump, juicy tomatoes and the crisp cucumbers, I'm looking forward to the flavors of fall: the cinnamon scent of a baking apple pie, the warm comfort of a simmering stew. It's been a few days since my last post on Wednesday so I'll update you with all I've done in the kitchen since then.

On Thursday morning, a stabbing occurred in the kitchen...on my cutting board. I murdered a lobster; slicing my freshly sharpened chef's knife through its head, in a vain attempt to ease its suffering before being dropped in a pot of boiling court bouillon. I've eaten and killed plenty of lobsters for the pleasure of their sweet flesh dunked in warm butter during my summers in Maine, but this time it was more than just averting my eyes to the last struggle of the lobster and dunking it in a pot of boiling water. In class, we were using the lobsters to make a sauce americaine, a rich creamy lobster and brandy-flavored sauce that would coat the lobster meat poached in court bouillon. To make the sauce we first had to each kill a lobster, take it apart completely and make the sauce americaine with the leftover shells. After watching a demo from Chef Nick on how to take apart the lobster, we were sent to do it on our own. I pulled out two lobsters from the box in the refrigerator, one for me and one for my partner, Sam. As we prepped our cutting boards and knives, the two lobsters crawled around the metal bowl they were being held in, one grabbing onto another bowl and causing it to spin around my station. I quickly grabbed an empty bowl and it put it on top of the one carrying the live lobsters so we wouldn't have to see them moving around and so they wouldn't escape prematurely. I didn't feel too squeamish about killing the lobster to be honest, or as squeamish as it seemed like most of the class was. Yes, of course I felt bad for the poor thing, but as with most things in the kitchen, you can't really hesitate, you just have to jump in and do it. I watched Sam kill her lobster, pointing the tip of her chef's knife into the back of it's cephalothorax (head and trunk part), at the point where the shell has a slight horizontal line. After inserting the knife, she quickly maneuvered it through the shell and head part, splitting its head in two.

Then it was my turn. I said a quick goodbye to my lobster friend and positioned it on my cutting board, taking one more good look at it. "Don't be afraid, Eleese," Chef Rogers said, walking by my station. "I'm not," I said, "Just saying a quick goodbye." And with that I inserted my knife and pushed it down through the lobster's head, it's nervous system still causing the body and legs to move even though it was now dead. We took our lobsters apart, separating the meat from the parts we would use for the sauce and got everything on the stove to simmer. For the presentation, we removed the meat from the tail and claws and arranged it on the plate so it slightly resembled a lobster body again. Then we topped the meat with the rich, orange-colored sauce americaine. It was not my favorite dish because of how rich the sauce tasted and how concentrated the lobster flavor became from how far we reduced the sauce. But I am a bit of a lobster snob, always preferring a freshly caught and steamed lobster to any other variation on the delicious crustacean.

Next we made a quick mussels dish with white wine, shallots and parsley, which was very good. Because we were very careful about not overcooking them, and ate them right away, they were much more tender than any mussel I've ever had before. Usually in restaurants they end up getting too overcooked and rubbery. After mussels we made seared scallops with a parsley coulis. We ended up burning the outside of our scallops a little bit so even though they still tasted good, they did not look so pretty. And we ran out of parsley before we could grab enough for our parsley coulis so it ended up having more of an olive green tint to it than a bright, grassy green that we were looking for. Slightly embarrassed, we presented our dish to Chef Nick, right as Alain Sailhac, one of the deans of the French Culinary Institute and a former head chef of restaurants like the 21 Club, Le Cirque and The Plaza Hotel, came into our kitchen. He said hello to us, asking us how things were going, while our overcooked scallops bathed in an olive green mess of parsley coulis. Luckily he didn't mention the less than pleasing aesthetic of our plate, but nevertheless I was a little embarrassed that he had seen it.

After scallops, we made escargot and then took a shot at shucking clams and oysters. After attempting to shuck an oyster, I realized a new found appreciation for anyone that shucks oysters for a living. To shuck an oyster, you have to hold it carefully in a towel, so you don't stab yourself (great!) and then try to dig a semi-dull knife into the hinge on the back of the oyster, while not breaking the extremely fragile top shell. Then once the knife gets into the hinge (a nearly impossible task), you have to carefully scrape of the adductor muscle that holds the oyster onto the shell. I managed to shuck two oysters, although both had a great deal of crumbled shell in the oyster when it was eaten. Several hours later, I was still picking shell out of my mouth from eating the two oysters. Besides that, they were pretty delicious. I wasn't brave enough to try a raw clam though...something about it freaks me out. I did try escargot though, which was a first for me. I thought I would like it more than I did because of all the butter and garlic that it's swathed in during cooking, but I think it was the antennae sticking out of the shell and the muddy taste of the snail turned me off from every trying them again.

Yesterday, on Friday, we had our first poultry day! How exciting. We made Poulet sauté chasseur (Sautéed Chicken, Hunter Style) and Poulet Poché dans un court bouillon méditerranéen (Chicken Poached in a Mediterranean-Style Broth). We started out our day with our second test of the week, on the fish and shellfish lessons from the previous few days. Then Chef Rogers took us through a powerpoint on different methods of cooking: roasting, braising, grilling, baking, etc, etc. And then he showed us how to quarter and how to truss a chicken. Each team took two chickens, one to quarter for the poulet saute chasseur and one to truss for the poached chicken. My partner Sam did most of the work for the quartered chicken while I prepped for the sauce ingredients, although I did cut off one half of the quartering. I decided I really hate chickens. Well, I've never really like chickens, but trying to truss it made me hate them even more. Most of you probably know this, but trussing a chicken is when you tie a piece of twine around it so that all the chicken is stuck together so that it cooks evenly if you are roasting or poaching it or whatever other cooking method you want to use for it. Chef Rogers instructed us to take a piece of twine the length of our arms, "For Elise, you take a leetle more." (For my midget arms). Then you slip the string under the chicken, make an x over the legs and slip the twine under the legs and bring it up to the front of the chicken, tying it tightly, ensuring that the legs are crossed under the breasts and the wings are tightly secured under the string.

The Poulet sautee Chausseur, was sauteed first, then finished cooking in the oven, while we made a sauce with brandy, mushrooms, enriched chicken stock (chicken stock boiled with the leftover chicken bones from quartering it), shallots and white wine and finished with butter, and chopped tarragon and chervil . Our sauce ended up being a little thick and very rich tasting, so it wasn't my favorite dish. But I loved the next one. For the poached chicken, we made a Mediterranean -style chicken broth with sauteed onions, lots of garlic, Kalamata and green olives, capers, tomatoes, red peppers, tumeric for a yellow color, fennel seeds and red pepper flakes. It was fragrant and delicious smelling...and was probably the most healthful thing we've made so far...I don't think it had any butter! We poached the trussed chicken in the broth until the meat was so tender it started to fall off the bones. When it had reached a temperature of 150 degrees, we pulled it out of the broth and then cut it into serving sized pieces. For serving chicken, the rule is that you always have to have one piece with bone and one without, and one dark piece of meat and one white piece of meat. So we carefully carved out the breasts of the chicken and the legs, removing all the necessary bones and leaving some for the presentation. Then we place one piece of boneless dark meat under a piece of white meat with the bone in on a bowl, surrounded it with the luscious yellow colored broth, punctuated by the red pepper and tomato, topped it with two twisted caper berries and a flourish of chopped parsley and served it to Chef Rogers, who proclaimed it perfect.

So now it's the weekend again, time to relax and practice cooking on my own time without the restrictions of recipes and butter! I just returned from the farmer's market with a bag of tomatillos in their sticky green husks, bright pink finger radishes, eggplants, and some of the first Macoun apples of the season. I better start cooking!