Overdue Pictures

Dinner tonight: Barely cooked salmon with red wine sauce and braised leeks

Lemon Tart with Raspberry Coulis

Today's Amuse Bouche: Spinach Ravioli stuffed with Zucchini and Ricotta Cheese in a Lemon Brown Butter with a Zucchini "Chip"

Yesterday's Amuse Bouche: Shrimp and Fennel Vietnamese Spring Roll

Spanish Tortilla with Chorizo on top of a baguette slice with saffron and anchovy aioli

Terrible picture of our breakfast amuse bouche with shrimp scrambled eggs, bacon and a tarragon cream sauce on a mini biscuit

Pancetta, pear and blue cheese cream sauce on a sweet cracker with salted caramel cream sauce

One of the 88 pork chops last week

Our first amuse bouche of level three: Gravlax on a potato chip with a julienne salad of carrots, leeks and radish with a lemon sour cream

And the one you've been waiting for...our last day with Chef Rogers in Level 2 (He's the one on top with no hat on) Can you spot me? (I'm right in the middle, sort of to the right)

88 Pork Chops

"Cooking is the only thing we do that involves all the senses." -Heston Blumenthal

I thought the quote above by Heston Blumenthal, the chef at The Fat Duck in England, was appropriate to what I had to do today, although I would have preferred to have one less of my senses (smell) while we were forced to clean out the fat from the inside of a huge pile of pig rectum, on its way to becoming sausage. Today was our first day in the kitchen with Chef Pascal, who was on vacation all last week. And what an interesting first day it was. He is working on making all the charcuterie for an event with the James Beard House, and six 20 pound boxes of the pig rectum (he technically called it pig asshole, but I'm just trying to be a little more discreet) is destined to become what will hopefully be delicious sausage. Since we finish up all our cooking by 1 pm everyday in Level 3, we have free time in the afternoon to go over what we made, do extra dishes or....clean pig rectum for Chef Pascal! Earlier in the day he asked if anyone wanted to stay after to help him with some charcuterie work and about half the class raised their hand to volunteer. But he asked again while we were all elbow deep in pig rectum, the smell of pig poop/vomit lingering in the air, and only a small handful were still willing to stay and help out. As I write this on the train (I feel sorry for whoever is sitting next to me), I can still smell it on my hands even though I was wearing gloves. I'll let you imagine the jokes going around the classroom, even Chef Pascal getting in on them, as we literally cleaned shit out of a pig's asshole, (pardon my French) They wouldn't quite be appropriate for me to share.

Today we started a new group of four recipes, and it didn't go as well as we would have hoped. Every week in level three we make four different dishes at each station of four people, everyone rotating through the dishes so everyone has a chance to make them once. In addition to that, we also make an amuse bouche every day, which in case you didn't already know, is not only the name of my blog, but also a small bite of something that is meant to awaken the palate before a meal. Our recipes this week are poulet roti grand mere (a roast chicken with some fancy garniture), Barramundi Americaine (basically flavorless fish with a lobster sauce, mussels and shrimp), a salad of macedoine (dice-shaped) vegetables with a poached egg and hollandaise sauce and a lemon tart. Today I was responsible for making the roast chicken, which involves a lot of work because of all that goes into making the garniture, which consists of crisped bacon, mushrooms sauteed and browned to perfection in bacon fat, pearl onions glacier a brun (caramelized pearl onions), pommes rissolets (turned potatoes blanched, sauteed, then finished in the oven) and a jus from the roast chicken juices.

Two of us at the station had just come back from homecoming weekend at our respectful universities (Vanderbilt and Richmond, of course), so in our post-homecoming depression and recovery we were not quite on our game. I was moving at a snail's pace and didn't manage to mess anything up too badly, but was just really rushed for time when I had to present my four dishes (we have a time everyday for when we have to present our dishes, and we are discounted points if anything is presented early or late). I also managed to get a pretty badass burn on the palm of my hand from trying to pick up a pan that had just come out of a 425 degree oven. You can actually see the mark of the handle on my palm. Luckily it's not too bad of a burn and I iced it right away so there shouldn't be any permanent damage done. And then in the afternoon...the pig rectum. I actually thought I was going to vomit for a few seconds from the smell. I don't know if you've ever smelled the inside of something like that, but I really do not recommend it.

On Friday we had our first mock midterm, which is to prepare us for what our midterm will be like in a few weeks. Each person had to present two dishes at specific times during the day. On friday it was beef consomme and pork chops with green peppercorn sauce, and each person had to present four dishes of each. Four pork chops for 22 people equals a whole lot of pork chop...88 to be precise. And unfortunately a good amount of it ended up in the compost because we just cannot eat that much. It was a very stressful day, trying to plate everything on our own, but I did alright. We encountered a slight issue when my large bicep muscles popped the spring that keeps the oven door closed (just kidding. it wasn't actually my biceps). But that left us with one oven for four people to heat plates and finish up the pork chops. But there were no major catastrophes to report. Tomorrow I'm making lemon tart...hopefully it will be easier than the roast chicken!

Will post some pictures tonight of everything we've been making and a class picture, featuring Chef Rogers!

Two cuts, one day

The first day of level three didn't start out quite the way I would have hoped. While simply slicing the root off a shallot, as I've done numerous times before, I sliced the top part of my thumb. Then later in the day as i went to clean off my vegetable peeler, it somehow slipped through my hand and sliced my left ring finger, causing a torrent of blood to pour out, which then in turn caused me to feel like i was going go faint so then if had to go sit down for a while catching whatever breeze was coming through the window. Sort of embarrassing, but I do not like blood. Besides the bloody start to the day ('ll blame it on the fact that we were in a new environment) the rest of the day went pretty well. Level three is completely different from levels one and two. Instead of focusing on learning all the French techniques and vocabulary, we are focusing on our timing and our consistency. Instead of being divided into teams, we are separated into stations of four students, with everyone making a different dish. Each week for the first four days we make the four same dishes everyday. This week it's sauteed porkchops with green peppercorn sauce, beef consomme, apple tart and sauteed skate with brown butter sauce. In addition to the four dishes we have to make, we are also responsible for making an amuse bouche everyday after they give us one special ingredient to make the amuse bouche from. In case you were wondering what an amuse bouche is (no it is not just the namesake of my blog), it's a small bite of something that is intended to wake up your palate before the meal. Yesterday our ingredient was gravlax and today we had stilton cheese, pear and pancetta to work with. Being able to make an amuse bouche everyday brightens up the repetitiveness of the recipes that we have to make everyday.

Everyday the chefs put a timeline up on the board for when every dish will be due. The amuse bouche is usually due at 11:45, consomme at 12, skate at 12:15, pork at 12:30 and the apple tart at 12:45. The morning is typically pretty calm up until 11:25 when everyone suddenly starts plating their amuse bouche and firing up their other dishes. It can get pretty hectic, but at the same time its also pretty exciting. Yesterday we named our amuse bouche "Fish and Chips." It was gravlax on top of a fried potato chip with lemon creme fraiche and a salad of julienned, carrots, apples and cornichons. It was very yummy and got some praise from the chefs, which is always nice. Today our amuse wasn't as much of a success, but it was still good. We cut out small pieces of the dough that we used to make the apple tart, baked them and topped it with a slice of crispy pancetta, a creamy Stilton sauce, a pear poached in simple syrup and then flambeed in brandy and topped it all off with a drop of salted caramel sauce. It wasn't the chef's favorite of the day, but it was still fun to make. Instead of levels one and two where we got feedback when we brought up our plates to the chefs, in level three, we don't get our feedback until the afternoon and we get it in front of the whole class, which adds that extra pressure to do as well as we can.

Yesterday I was responsible for making pork chops and today I made the apple tart, which was more difficult that I anticipated. The apple tart is really all about getting the timing right. We have to make the dough, then put it in the freezer to chill for an hour, then we have to roll it out and allow it time to chill again while its in the tart mold. Then we have to arrange the apple slices perfectly on top, put it in the oven and make sure that we allow it time to cool before 12:45 when the plates need to be at the chef. I was a little off with my timing today because the eggs were late arriving to the classroom, so my tart tough didn't get into the freezer early enough. So even thought it wasn't as brown as I would have liked it to be, I had to take it out of the oven so that it would have enough time not to be "nuclear hot" in the center, as the chef called it.

Tomorrow I take on the consomme...hopefully it works!

Wines and Goodbyes

After proving my skill in quartering a chicken, filleting a fish, cooking a creme anglaise without curdling it and successfully hand whipping whipped cream and piping it into 6 rosettes and 6 eclair shapes, I am officially a Level 3 student. It's going by way too fast! In just 3 short weeks I'll be taking my midterm practical exam. Besides all the testing, Friday was an excellent day because we managed to convince Chef Rogers to meet us at the bar that everyone usually goes to after school to celebrate our last day with him in Level 2. Yes, sadly Friday was my last day with Chef Rogers...and all of us are pretty sad about it. For some reason everyone was feeling very giddy on Friday morning, either from too much coffee or too much excitement for the coming weekend. The first thing we had to do on Friday morning was take our ServeSafe test, which is a test you have to take to get your food handler's license. It's not mandatory that we pass the test, it's just something they have us take because sometimes it can give you a slight edge when a restaurant is hiring and one person has their certification and the other person doesn't. It was a tedious 90 question multiple choice test that we had to use good old Scantron sheets for and everyone came out scratching their heads a little. They seemed to throw in a few curveballs and no one's quite sure if they passed it or not. I guess we'll find out later this week!

After the ServeSafe exam we had to take our written test for Level 1 which was pretty easy. Then we had some time to spare so we talked with Chef Rogers and took a class picture, which I will post later. In the afternoon we had our practical exam, which was to fillet a fish, quarter a chicken, make a creme anglaise and a creme chantilly, which is just a fancy French word for whipped cream. The fish were slightly decomposing and the whole room reeked of fish as we were filleting them. And if I so much as put a finger on the meat part of the fillet it started to disintegrate, which cost me some points. And the chickens were beyond disgusting...industrial Perdue chickens with shriveled yellow skin and watery flesh. I was able to quarter it ok, but the flesh of the chicken was also slightly disintegrating and when I popped off the leg a huge puddle of water? gelatin? fat? extra hormones and antibiotics that they stuffed in the chicken at the last minute? poured onto my cutting board. So gross. Please don't eat Perdue chicken. I ended up getting a 94 on the practical part of my exam, which is good...but I wish I had done a little better. Next time.

After the exam we all headed over to O'Nieals, the bar around the corner that most people go to every Friday after school. It was particularly crowded last Friday because a lot of people were celebrating...both Level 3 and Level 6 had just finished their major tests and so the bar was filled to the brim with FCI students until 5 o'clock when the Sex and the City tour rolled through the place to drink cosmos. (I guess the bar was on one episode of Sex and the City so every Friday at 5 o'clock they line up 30 martini glasses for the Sex and the City tour that goes around NYC looking at all the places they filmed the show). Most of my class was there because we all expected Chef Rogers to come around and he did! He said it was the first time in 2 years that he went to the bar after school to hang out with students, so we were all quite flattered. We did a few toasts and chanted Rogers several times..."ROJAY, ROJAY, ROJAY." It was very fun. My class has bonded a lot more during Level 2 and everyone is a lot of fun, so we had a great time celebrating our ascension to Level 3. After the bar, we headed over to Chinatown to this Vietnamese place with a few classmates, one of whom, Jane, is Vietnamese and wanted to order us al the specialities. It was very delicious, but I couldn't even tell you what we had!

Thursday was wine day, we spent all day learning about wine and tasting wine. But we were obliged to spit out all the wine that we tasted for several reasons. 1: we would have been drunk. 2: it would have obscured our taste buds from fully tasting the rest of the wines. So I had to spit everything out. A few people tried to sneak in sips here and there, but no one seemed to be drunk by the end of the day. After spending everyday standing and moving around in the kitchen, everyone found it really hard to sit in a classroom all day and listen to a lecture, even if the lecture was on wine. Half of us were falling asleep and the other half were fidgeting in their seats the whole time. But I did learn quite a bit about wine...you might even call me a mini sommelier. Just kidding...I don't know that much. The main thing we were trying to learn was how to pair wine and food together. So to do this we had to experience what foods can do to the taste of wine. We had 7 small cups of lemon slices, salt, salami, smoked almonds, sriacha chili sauce, currant jam and butter. We pretended to be eating things like beure blanc sauce by eating a piece of butter with salt and a squeeze of lemon and then tasted wines to see how the flavor was affected. When we tasted the Shiraz wine we pretended to be eating American barbeque: Salami, dipped in butter, salt and currant jam then topped with a smoked almond. Sounds gross, but it was actually sort of delicious. Especially when we paired it with the wine. Things like acidity, fat and salt make the greatest differences when you're tasting wine. Because wine is acidic, it pares down the amount of salt that you are able to taste when you're eating, which is why chefs have a tendency to season everything extremely well. Chef Rogers was always telling us to add salt, salt and more salt for this reason.

Tomorrow I start Level 3, which will be a whole new ballgame. More on that tomorrow...

Flounder, Elise's Way

Ahh creativity. Up until now, it seems like our culinary creativity has been smothered. Smothered by butter and French technique, of course. But today we were allowed to let our creativity shine free, with a few restrictions. We were instructed to create a recipe for "Flounder Your Way." Given a list of limited ingredients, zucchini, haricots verts, mushrooms, tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, rice, garlic, onions, shallots, heavy cream, white wine, butter, chicken stock and 6 others that we chose as a class (lemons, leeks, couscous, parmesan cheese, peas and one more that I can't remember), we had to put together our own recipe for flounder. Over the past few days and late last week, the class began to buzz about how everyone wanted to put together their recipe. Some were going all out, getting as creative as possible, while others were sticking to what they knew how to do. I chose to stick with what I knew, keeping it relatively simple. My recipe was pan-seared flounder fillets with pommes anna, zucchini salad with pea coulis and lemon oil. Here is a picture of how it all came together:


My first idea was to do a lemon risotto, but when we decided what 6 extra ingredients we were going to use, my risotto rice didn't make the cut. So instead I decided to do pommes anna, which is sort of complicated and I probably should have done something simpler. For pommes anna, you have to carve a potato into a curved cylinder, then use a mandoline to make very thin circle shapes, which you then have to layer in a circular pattern and cook with a lot of clarified butter, both on the stovetop and then finished in the oven. The end result is usually very elegant but mine sort of ended up falling apart. For the zucchini salad I shaved a zucchini lengthwise on the mandoline, making thin ribbons, then tossed it with a lemon vinaigrette, toasted pine nuts and shaved parmesan cheese. Next I pan seared the flounder and topped it with a shallot and scallion compound butter and finished the plate with a pea coulis (basically just pureed peas) and a lemon oil, which was made by heating olive oil with lemon zest. I was pretty happy with the result, although I still wish I could have made lemon risotto instead of the pommes anna. It was interesting to see everyone's adaptations of the basic ingredients we were given. Everyone's plate was so different, yet we were all working with the same ingredients.

Yesterday we made pasta and gnocchi, which I was very excited for. The first thing we made was Ravioli filled with the handmade ricotta cheese we made on Monday.

Ricotta-filled ravioli with tomato sauce

When I made pasta this past weekend, I really had no idea what I was doing, so it was nice to be taught how to make pasta the right way. I was pretty close, but I did not knead my pasta dough nearly as long as I should have. We kneaded ours for a good 20-25 minutes in class, until my arms were about to fall off and the pasta had the texture of what Chef Jeff kept calling, "a baby's butt." But it was worth it when we got to taste the delicious ravioli. We also made a spinach pasta dough that we used to make lasagna with meat sauce and bechamel sauce, and mozzarella that we made ourselves that morning. Next we made gnocchi, which I was particularly excited about since I recently saw a butternut squash gnocchi that I wanted to try making. We started with cooked and warm Idaho potatoes that we put through a ricer. Next we mixed flour into the potatoes, making sure to coat the potatoes thoroughly. After that we added eggs and mixed it very very lightly, being careful not to overwork the dough. Next we rolled it out into long thin snakes, and using a pasty scraper, cut the snake into smaller pieces. Using a gnocchi board, we pressed down on the small piece of dough and lightly rolled it, which created a lined side on one end and made the dough into a curved shape. Here are our gnocchi, tossed in a thyme-flavored butter:

The gnocchi were delicious, very light and airy, but still not quite as good as the ones I ate in Florence. I'll keep experimenting so I can get them to taste that good.

And here is a picture of the sugar sculpture that the Level 3 pastry class made:

Pretty cool, right?

Guess what I get to do tomorrow? Taste wine all day! Although we've been instructed that if we attempt to actually drink the wine instead of spit it out, we may be subject to discipline. We'll see how that goes.

Cheeeeese

Today was the highly anticipated cheese day. I feel like I've been groomed to love cheese by my cheese-loving mother, who always puts together the most beautiful cheese platters in the spur of the moment for any guest who happens to stop by. I mean, who doesn't love cheese? So I was very excited to learn more about cheese and to compare the different tastes in a cheese tasting. But first we had to make a few recipes: a meat sauce that we will use tomorrow in our pasta-making lesson, mushroom risotto and handmade ricotta cheese. First we put our meat sauce on the stove...a pretty simple recipe with ground meat, ground pork, pancetta, prosciutto and onion, carrot and celery. Then we made a mushroom risotto, carefully adding the chicken stock to cook out to a creamy consistency. And lastly, we made our own ricotta cheese, which was much simpler than I thought it would be. All you need is about 4 cups of whole milk and some acid...you can use vinegar, lemon juice or citric acid. You just bring the milk up to a boil very carefully, then add the acid, stir until curds form and then let it rest on a warm surface for about an hour. Then you carefully scoop the formed curds into a lined strainer with cheesecloth and hang it to release the moisture. It was pretty hilarious to see the balls of ricotta cheese hanging from everyone's station. Here's a picture of mine:



Tomorrow we'll use the ricotta to make cheese ravioli with tomato sauce. Yum :) After lunch, where we all tried to eat as little as possible to save room for the cheese we watched Chef Rogers carefully cut into pieces all morning, we began our cheese tasting. Chef Rogers and Chef Jeff sat at the front of the room, while we all sat at our stations with our trays of cheese carefully laid out. Here is a picture:



The tasting went from left to right, with the cheeses on the left from a cow, then a goat, then a sheep. On the top is cow's milk, goat's milk and was supposed to be sheep's milk, but unfortunately it's out of season right now. Below the milk is cow's yogurt, goat's milk yogurt and sheep's milk yogurt. And then below those are very soft cheeses, quesa fresca, goat cheese log and feta cheese. Below that are the hard, aged cheeses, from each separate animal. We went through each of the rows horizontally, tasting the differences between each of the cheese, milks and yogurt and going back so we could taste the similarities between the hard cheese and the milk. It was actually really interesting to taste that progression from milk to cheese. Before we tasted our strongest-tasting cheese, the Roquefort on the bottom right, Chef Rogers announced, "If you don't like this, then you don't like cheese." It's definitely an acquired taste. Much more strong than the goat cheese that we tasted earlier, which Chef Jeff deemed, "the gateway cheese," similar to marajuana being the "gateway drug", because like marajuana makes you want to try more drugs, goat cheese gets so many people hooked on cheese. A reasonable comparison. We are talking about cheese after all. And what can be more addictive than a good hunk of Brie?

After our cheese tasting, we watched two riveting DVDs on cheese. And when I say riveting I mean it was a DVD of happy looking cows licking the camera and a woman who was so obsessed with her goats and homemade goat cheese that she actually resembled one of them. The second DVD went into great depth about the history of Camembert cheese. Very exciting stuff.

Tomorrow we're making pasta...and lots of it! Ravioli, Lasagna and Egg noodles, all from scratch.

Nutrition, Day Two

"Cooking something delicious is really much more satisfactory than painting pictures or making pottery. At least for most of us. Food has the tact to disappear, leaving room and opportunity for masterpieces to come. The mistakes don't hang on the wall or on shelves to reproach you forever. It follows from this that the kitchen should be thought of as the center of the house. It needs above all space for talking, playing, bringing up children, sewing, having a meal, reading sitting and thinking...It's in this kind of place that good food has flourished. It's from this secure retreat that the exploration of man's curious relationship with food, beyond the point of nourishment, can start." -Jane Grigson Good Things

Thursday was our second day of nutritional cooking, along with another lecture on nutrition from the ever-entertaining Chef Tim. Yesterday he told us a story of when he decided to try out the Atkins diet, and just ate straight protein for two months, no sugar, no carbs, nothing but protein. Then one Sunday he started having a craving for Belgian waffles and maple syrup...he tried to fight it off throughout the day, but finally, later that night he gave into his craving and after wolfing down a few bites, passed out very hard. So hard that when he woke up, he realized, after confronting a small pile of mess left from his dog and several concerned messages on his answering machine, that he had fallen asleep for 36 hours and it was now Tuesday night. Some people might call that a coma. We all thought it was pretty funny. So even though nutrition is not the most exciting topic, Chef Tim makes it exciting by interspersing as many hilarious, yet still relevant, stories as he can.

For our second nutrition day, we made a tapas-style plate of three dishes: roasted spaghetti squash with tomatoes and capers, falafel and a watercress, fennel and grapefruit salad. During the falafel demo, Chef Jeff called on the class's trusty Turk, Umut to describe to us the history of falafel and the proper way to prepare it. Slightly offensive, but entertaining nonetheless. After preparing our three recipes, we had another long lunch break, then a second lecture on nutrition in the afternoon from Chef Tim, this time focusing on lipids, or fats. I've always been interested in nutrition and try to eat as healthily as I can, and it was interesting to hear the real nutritionist's perspective on fats because our perspective on it in America is so jaded through what we hear from marketing companies and advertisements.

One thing I learned is that the reason the Mediterranean diet and the Okinawa diets are so healthful and cause those people to live up until they're 100 years old with relatively no cancer is because of the ratio of Omega 3 to Omega 6 fatty acids that they consume. In the Mediterranean diet, the ratio is 2:3 and in the Okinawa diet, it's about 2:1. Guess what ours is in America? 1:20. The huge Omega 6 number comes from all of the corn that we eat in America, in our processed foods and through what we feed our chickens and beef. Gross. Also why I try to buy as much food as I can from the farmer's market because I know where it comes from and what it's been grown in or fed. Michael Pollan summed up nutrition pretty well in these three concise sentences in his article Unhappy Meals: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." The basics of nutrition come down to the fact that you will most likely remain healthy if you stay away from as much processed food as you can, eat a diet of mostly plants and try not to eat anything that makes any sort of health claim (Low Cholesterol, Heart-Healthy, Low-fat, etc). That low cholesterol butter substitute? There is no cholesterol in food, cholesterol is produced by our own bodies, so how can a marketer claim that I Can't Believe It's Not Butter is low in cholesterol when it isn't supposed to have any at all? If you want to read more about America and it's food supply issues, definitely read The Omnivore's Dilemma if you haven't already. Or if you would rather sit on the couch than use your brain, you can also watch Food, Inc. and it will have the same kind of I-never-want-to-eat-meat-ever-again effect on you. At least it did for me. (I even highlighted the links to Amazon, so now you have no excuse not to read it/watch it)

This weekend, in honor of my brother coming home from college and my grandparents coming to visit, I decided to try making pasta for the first time. It's sort of been a tradition that whenever Nani and Baba (my grandparents) come into town or we go up to their house, that we have spaghetti with meat sauce. So instead of doing the typical thing we always do, I decided to "take it to the next level" (I hate that saying so, excuse me for saying it) and make a traditional Italian Bolognese sauce and homemade pasta. I got both the recipes from a combination of Barbara Lynch's cookbook Stir and Lidia Bastianich's cookbook, as well as lots of advice from my fellow culinary classmates on how to make pasta. I made the bolognese with ground lamb, pork sausage, beef and veal and let it simmer for about 5 hours yesterday. It was super flavorful and was delicious with the fresh pasta. The pasta wasn't as tricky as I thought it would be, although I did have to knead the dough until my arms were about to fall off. I made two different batches using the same recipe, but they both came out differently. One of the dough balls was a little wetter than the other one and came together very well when I kneaded it, so I thought it would be the better of the two, but it ended up being too wet and after I cooked it, it was a little too gummy and wet. Here is a picture of the pretty dough ball that did not end up as well as I would have liked:



And here is a picture of my first batch of cut pasta after going through the pasta roller:


For desert, I made a chocolate raspberry layer cake, which was also very yummy. I got the recipe from Epicurious.com and I believe it was printed in Bon Appetit a few years ago. But I changed the recipe a little bit by adding a layer of chocolate mousse. I cooked two separate cakes, cut them in half, and filled one layer with a mixture of raspberry preserves and fresh raspberries, the next layer with chocolate mousse, and then another layer of the raspberry mixture. I topped the whole thing with a layer of chocolate ganache (a mixture of melted chocolate and whipped cream) and piped some chocolate mousse around the outside. The cake recipe ended up being perfect, it was really moist and chocolatey. If you are in the mood for a chocolate cake, I would highly recommend making this recipe. I used Scharffen Berger chocolate with a higher cacao count (70%) than the recipe recommended, but the darker the chocolate the better, in my opinion.


During the frosting process, a majority of the kitchen, my outfit and the cake stand got chocolate on it. But that's just a risk you'll have to take. Time for me to go roast a few chickens for dinner and read the NY Times Magazine, which is so conveniently focused on food this weekend :)

Happy Sunday,
Elise

Oh crepe!

Pastry is done! Yesterday we ended our pastry section of Level 2 by doing simple batters for crepes and fritters. We made crepes suzette, crepes stuffed with ham and mushroom and banana and apple fritters with a cinnamon sauce. And on Monday we made a genoise, a plain sponge cake, that we decorated with a mocha flavored buttercream frosting and we also made ladyfingers, those cookies that you use in tiramisu. Both involved a lot of whipping…I think my right bicep is getting a little larger than the left...always a good look.

Here is a picture of my genoise cake with mocha buttercream:

Chef Rogers explained to us that covering the sides of the cake with something like toasted almonds, like I did here, is called in French, couvrir la misère, which translates to, "cover the misery." If you've ever tried to frost the side of a cake, you'll understand why that misery needs to be covered.

Today we did a total 180, transitioning from a week filled with sugar, butter and baked goods to a few lessons on nutrition. Makes sense right? Let’s stuff you with all the sugar and fattening baked goods you can eat and then tell you that you really shouldn’t have eaten that. For our healthful, nutritious recipe today, we made a sautéed striped bass with lentils and a horseradish vinaigrette. Sounds pretty healthy right? Well, it was “French” healthy…the lentils were cooked with bacon and finished with a dab of butter, but everything else wasn’t so bad. Everything in moderation, right? We had a refresher on how to fillet a whole fish, since we hadn’t done it for a weeks since our lesson in Level 1. Chef Jeff taught us a completely different way of doing it than Chef Nick did the first time we did it, so everyone was a little bit confused when they started filleting their fish. The bass we used were monstrous, and mine was extraordinarily bloody for some reason, leaving me with blood stains all over my uniform and hands. For some reason, I’m still not sure how it happened, I totally butchered my fish, I’m pretty sure it was missing the whole bone that we are supposed to base our filleting off of (I’ll just blame the fish, it definitely wasn’t any fault of mine), which left me with some mangled-looking bass fillets at the end, and still a lot of meat clinging to the fish bones. I quickly hid the evidence by throwing the bones in the compost bin and tucking my fillets in the back of the refrigerator, while I cleaned what looked like a crime scene on my cutting board because of all the bass blood loss. When our lentils and vinaigrette were assembled, we sautéed the fish briefly after rubbing it in curry powder and salt and pepper, then put out plates together, garnishing the whole thing with some crispy bacon and julienned radish. Here is the final plating of the dish:

Because we had a nutrition lecture in the afternoon from Chef Tim that wasn’t until 1:00, we had about an hour and a half lunch break, when we usually only get about 25 minutes. A bunch of us sat in the library after eating, pulling out cookbooks and showing them to one another, admiring the beautiful photographs and wishing we could make something as beautiful as what we were seeing. One of the things that I like the most about being in culinary school is being surrounded my like-minded people who are all as obsessed with cooking, cookbooks, chefs and new restaurants as I am. When we talk about well-known chefs like Michael White, Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud, we talk about them like we know them, and we don’t have to bother explaining, “Michael White is the chef at Marea, Thomas Keller is the chef at French Laundry, etc. etc.” Sometimes when I talk about food or a new restaurant and I’m really excited about it, people look at me and probably wonder, “What is she talking about and why does she care so much?” For example, no one seemed to understand my obsession with trying to find an heirloom breed of turkey to cook for Thanksgiving. I’m pretty sure I convinced several people of my insanity just by trying to explain my reasoning for eating a breed of turkey that is on the verge of extinction. Yet at school, everyone understood immediately. It’s so nice that in school, we are all on the same page in how excited we are by food.

Yesterday, we made crepes, one savory and one sweet. The hardest part about it was making the actual crepes, and getting them to be the exact thinness and achieve the right amount of color that Chef Rogers was looking for. As expected, my first one was a total disaster, but after a few times of ladling in the batter and swirling it around the hot pan, I started to get the hang of it. I even got so confident that instead of carefully flipping the crepe over with a spatula, I flipped it up into the air and then back on the sautee pan…successfully! (Ok, so I messed one or two up, but those were just for practice). For the crepes suzette we made a compound butter with orange zest, orange liquor, and brandy and then folded the crepes into quarters and sautéed them with the butter to reheat them and to add more flavor. We plated them topped with the heated butter and some orange zest that had cooked in grenadine. They were delicious without being too sweet. Here is a picture:

For the ham and mushroom crepes, we made a batter with buckwheat flour, giving it a more nutty flavor. For these, we wrapped a ham and mushroom filling inside like a mini burrito and popped it in the oven to warm up. Here are my ham and mushroom crepes:

Later in the afternoon, we fried up our banana and apple fritters with a batter that was made bubbly and airy with beer. However ours ended up being a little thick and when our fritters came out of the fryer, they had little sticks pointing up all over them from where the batter stuck as we dropped them into the fryer. They looked like little alien fritters. After we cleaned up the kitchen and got everything ready to go, Chef Rogers, deciding he needed to do something with the 5 quarts of extra cream in the room, gave us a pop quiz. In 10 minutes, we had to whip up some cream chantilly (whipped cream with vanilla and powdered sugar) by hand and then pipe it onto a plate in an éclair shape. Panicked, we all ran around the kitchen like chickens with our heads cut off, grabbing the cream, then whipping it until our arms were about to fall off and finally piping it onto a plate, which were all warm from the dishwasher, which then melted my

carefully whipped cream chantilly! My “éclair-shaped” cream looked more like misshapen blobs after the heat from the plate melted them, but we weren’t actually graded on it, so I guess it turned out ok.

Anyways, today I was slightly missing the relaxing atmosphere that pastry provided for us the past week and a half. The kitchen was less chaotic, less rushed, but a lot cooler, temperature-speaking. But it was nice to pick up my chef’s knife again and start cutting up that onion, making the callous that I’ve developed from holding my knife regain its hard edge that was lost during a week of pasty. Tomorrow we continue with our nutritious recipes, making falafel (it’s fried, is that really healthy?), a watercress salad with grapefruit, and roasted spaghetti squash.

After what felt like the busiest week of my life, I finally got a full 9 hours of sleep last night and feel like a brand new person. Yesterday I volunteered at the New York Culinary Experience, an event that the French Culinary Institute and New York magazine put on where amateur cooks can buy (very expensive) tickets to take classes with some of Manhattan's best chefs. Since it was held at the French Culinary Institute, students were encouraged to volunteer to work in the classrooms and help the chefs. Although I regretted having to be there at 7:30 on a Saturday morning, it was definitely worth it to see all of the chefs who were there and what they were cooking. I worked in a kitchen with Bill Telepan, who owns a restaurant called Telepan in New York that focuses on using the best available fresh and local ingredients, and with Ben Pollinger, the head chef at Oceana Restaurant in Times Square. But I was also able to walk around and see some of the other chefs who were teaching classes, like Marcus Samuelsson, David Bouley and Morimoto. Here are some pictures I took:

David Bouley

Morimoto

Marcus Samuelsson

One of the things that I really love about the culinary world is that the people who are "famous" are very tangible. You don't have to be a VIP to go into one of their restaurants and meet the chef. As a student, it's amazing to have experiences like this, where you are able to actually see first hand the work that these well-known chefs do. Most of the work I did yesterday was just cleaning, prepping the kitchens and running out for whatever the chefs needed, but it was still a really exciting experience and I'm looking forward to next weekend when I'm volunteering at the NYC Wine and Food Festival with Chef George Mendes of Aldea.

In class on Friday we cooked tarts, an apple tart, a pear tart and a quiche lorraine:

Apple Tart

Pear tart with an almond cream

Our Quiche Lorraine started to fall apart because the crust was too thin so I didn't take a picture of it. But the other two turned out pretty well. We did the apple tarts individually, using dough that we made a few days ago that had been refrigerated for a few days. Because it was so hot in the kitchen, we had to move really quickly so that the buttery dough wouldn't melt and break. I successfully rolled out my sweet tart dough for the apple tart and the savory dough, called pate brissee for the quiche lorraine while Martin tried unsuccessfully to roll out the sweet tart dough, pate sucre, for his apple tart and for the pear tart. The dough fell apart several times and overmelted so we had to keep it in the fridge for a few more hours until it was slightly manageable. After chef gave us a demo on how to properly arrange the thinly sliced apples on our tart, (slice them very thin then arrange them so you can only see the outside of the apple, not the inside core part), Martin went back to the station, chopped his apples very thickly and started arranging them the way chef just told us not to. He seems to go off onto his own planet during lectures...The rest of the day went pretty well, except for the quiche that wouldn't stay together. At the end of the day we finally got to try the ice cream that we made earlier in the week and it was a huge disappointment. Chef Jeff added some sort of liquor to the vanilla ice cream that made it taste solely of alcohol and then for some reason the chocolate ice cream because totally crystallized and had a very strange texture that wasn't appetizing at all. But fortunately, Chef Rogers saved the day with a bowl of liquid nitrogen, which is nitrogen in a liquid state and is well below freezing point. Chef Dave Arnold is a chef who works at the FCI who does a lot of scientific experiments with food and liquid nitrogen is one of the materials he works with. Chef Rogers poured the creme anglaise we made earlier in the week into a cuisinart mixer and then Chef Dave Arnold came into the kitchen with a bowl of liquid nitrogen that had frozen steam pouring off of it. He added the liquid nitrogen into the mixer with the creme anglaise as the cloud of liquid nitrogen poured over the bowl and off the sides of the counter. Within 30 seconds, the creme anglaise was delicious vanilla ice cream. It was very cool to watch.

Tomorrow we're doing egg white cakes and puff pastry. And I finally get a new partner!