A Cooking-Free Thanksgiving

Happy Turkey Day everyone! I hope everyone had a delicious and relaxing Thanksgiving...I know I did and I definitely enjoyed the four days off from school, and the three full days off of cooking! Fortunately we were spared from hosting Thanksgiving at our house this year, so I didn't have to do any cooking for Thanksgiving except for an apple cranberry crumble pie that I brought up to my aunt and uncle's house for the big day. But I made up for my three days of non-cooking with an entire day of cookie dough-making on Sunday, all of which I froze for the upcoming party that I'm catering. I made orange cardamom sugar cookie dough, pate brisee (savory tart dough for quiche) and pate sable (shortbread dough for pumpkin pie bars) and world's largest batch of chocolate chip cookies, half of which ended up all over the walls of the kitchen.

Yes, it was a long day...I think I went through about 10 pounds of butter, 2 and a half dozen eggs and several bags of flour making all the doughs. And on top of all that, a minor slice to my pinky finger from the blade on the plastic wrap caused me to faint from seeing all the blood. That was not fun.

At school, I'm not in the family meal rotation, which means that I'm in the same group of people that I did buffet with last week, except now we are making lunch everyday for the 300 or so people who work and eat at the FCI. It sort of feels like slave work and I'm not sure I'm really learning anything except that chopping 100 zucchini is miserable work, but I think I could have told you that without the experience doing it. So, family meal isn't really my favorite. I guess they're trying to teach us how to make recipes on a mass-scale, which I seem to have taught myself this weekend trying to make a batch of chocolate chip cookies that probably wouldn't have fit in an industrial sized mixer in my teeny little KitchenAid mixer at home.

As requested, I'll start posting some more recipes of things that I've been making at home. On Saturday night after getting back from Boston around 7:30, all I wanted was a big steaming bowl of pasta, so I scrounged around the kitchen to see what I could find: peppers, penne pasta and that delicious sausage from the farmer's market that I stashed in the freezer for a moment like this. While I boiled the pasta, I browned up three hot italian sausages, added some crushed garlic cloves and then about 4 or 5 sliced orange, yellow and red bell peppers. I sautéed those until the peppers were soft and then added the cooked penne pasta along with some of the pasta water to add a little starchiness to the sauce. Topped with some chopped parsley, it was just what I was craving.

Here's the recipe:

Bell Peppers and Sausage with Penne Pasta

4-5 Bell Peppers, Red, Yellow or Orange
3 Hot Italian Sausages, casings removed
3 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
1 lb. penne pasta, or whatever you have on hand. Oreciete would also be good.
Chopped Parsley
Salt and Pepper

Heat a small amount of oil in a large sauté pan. Add the sausage and break apart as it cooks. When almost completely browned, add the crushed garlic and cook 30 seconds. Add the bell peppers and continue cooking until the peppers are soft. In the meantime, boil water for pasta and put on to cook, about 11 minutes. Reserve some of the pasta water before you strain it. Strain the pasta, add to the sausage and pepper mixture and add some pasta water to blend it all together. Finish with some chopped parsley.


Enjoy!

Elise

Have I gone insane?

Sorry I haven't had time to post more than a few pictures this week, but I've been using all my spare time to start planning for the 150 person holiday party I've agreed to catered on December 11th. Yes, you heard correctly, 150 people, and me cooking (with the help of a few culinary minions from school). I've never catered anything in my life, but why not, right? The job came out of the dinner party that I hosted for my parents last weekend, one of the couples who attended has an annual Christmas open house party and she asked me if myself and a few friends from school would want to cater. How could I turn that down? Even though it's definitely a lot of stress, it's been fun so far and my friends and I are having fun planning out the menu and all the details that will make the night a success. Chef Pascal has also agreed to help me, mostly with the menu and figuring out the costs of everything. We're going to do 9 to 10 different passed hors d'ouevres and 6 or 7 different items to put out on a buffet table, as well as 5 different dessert items for people to snack on all night. I'm not sure how I'll manage all of the prep work involved while I'm in New York every day from 6:30 am to 5 pm...my freezer will be fully utilized (and possibly my mother). It can be done though. But I might be a little crazy for agreeing to do it. So in the next few weeks if you're wondering where I've gone, I'll be buried under a pile of mini pulled pork sandwiches and quiches, figuring out how I can squeeze 500 hors d'ouevres into my family's refrigerator.

On another note, I started level 4 on monday after a stressless midterm on Friday. I actually picked the last number out of the hat, so I was the last person to plate my two dishes, barramundi with sauce americaine and apple tart. Everyone picked numbers out of a hat at the beginning of class that corresponded with when they would have to present their two dishes to the judges that were waiting down the hall. Half the class made beef consomme and pork chops with green peppercorn sauce while the other half made barramundi and apple tart. Both of my dishes came out pretty well and the day went by without any major catastrophes. We all passed, fortunately. But the sad part about moving up to Level 4 is that our class is split into three different groups: Buffet, Production and Family Meal. Each group has 6 to 7 classmates in it and each focuses on a different thing. Buffet has one week to put together what is basically a catered event, picking a theme, a menu and all the recipes and executing everything on the last day of the rotation. Production is just stock-making and breaking down fish and large cuts of meat for the use of the restaurant at the school. Family meal is the large production-type cooking where you cook lunch for the 300 staff members and students at the FCI. For my first rotation I have buffet. We chose to do a more modern take on Thanksgiving, doing traditional ingredients but in a different way. Some of our dishes will be wild rice stuffing arancini, sweet potato gnocchi, turkey breast cooked at low temperature to keep in all its moistness and then glazed with a garlic-honey sauce, braised turkey legs in a sweet potato, bacon braising liquid and apple cider doughnuts filled with a salty caramel sauce. Hopefully it all comes together on Monday when we have to pull all of our work together into something presentable. In addition to all the recipes, we also have to work on making the presentation aspects of the buffet, with the help of Chef Pascal. We made a tree made out of this weird bread dough and then finished it with a blowtorch (that was my job :) I'm such a pyro). It's not edible but it looks like a real tree...sort of. Then we've also been carving vegetables for the display (turning radishes and beets into flowers and things like that), and making molds and stuffing them with dried salt as a stand for certain plates. The display stuff is a little old school and not really my style, but it's sort of fun to learn and see how you can turn a watermelon into a pretty flower. Tomorrow is our last day of prepping before the big event on Monday, wish us luck!

<3 Elise

Photos from the James Beard Gala

All courtesy of Chef Lisa's husband, the photog for the night:

Francois Payard, Alain Ducasse, Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Alain Ducasse

The CNN Camera shooting Chef Pascal, Chef Lisa and Chef Herve

The Charcuterie Plates ready to go out

Plating some saucisson

Jane doesn't like being photographed while chopping tomatoes

Chef Lisa, Jonathan and I plating the andouille

Me, Jane and Chef Pascal

Dinner Party

The Table

Menu printed up by my slave for the night, also known as my brother, Eric

Truffle Arancini, ready to go for a swim in the fryer

Frying the arancini


Finished arancini, golden and crispy

Roasted Blood Orange and Frisee Salad with Hazelnuts and Feta

Homemade Butternut Squash Tortellini with Chicken Sage Consomme

Pan-Seared Halibut with Sauteed Shiitakes, Mashed Potatoes and Herb Butter

Pumpkin Panna Cotta with Nutmeg Creme Chantilly and Pumpkin Seed Brittle

A Week in Chef Heaven

So I'm pretty sure that even though this is the least amount of sleep I've gotten in a week since my college days, it has hands down been the best week ever, solely because it has been packed to the brim with near encounters with almost all of the best chefs in the world. Tonight I volunteered with Chef Pascal at the James Beard Foundation Gala Dinner and Auction at the Four Seasons Restaurant and it was one of those experiences where I really had to pinch myself to be sure I was actually there. As previously posted, Chef Pascal and our class have been busy making a typical French Charcuterie course for the James Beard Gala, whose theme this year was classical French cooking. For the dinner, where guests paid up to $10,000 a table, some of the most famous French chefs each cooked a course. Here's the whole menu because I know you're all dying to know (prepare for truffle overload):

Joel Robuchon:
Shaved White Truffles and Potatoes with Foie Gras Carpaccio

Guy Savoy:
Artichoke Soup with Black Truffle and Layered Brioche with Mushrooms and Truffles

Pascal Beric (My chef!)
Saucisson Sec, Lonzo, Smoked Garlic Sausage, Fresh Ham, Country Paté, and Smoked Andouille de Campagne (the sausage we made from the pig rectum!) all served with house made pickled vegetables, mustard and French bread

Alain Ducasse:
Braised Caramelized Eggplant with Salvatore Brooklyn Smoked Ricotta and Porcini Fall Vegetable Gratin Boulangere

Jean-Georges Vongerichten:
Grilled Rack of Lamb with Smoked Chile Glaze, King Oyster Mushrooms and Broccoli Rabe

Francois Payard:
Brown-Butter Roasted Pear with Maple Syrup, Vanilla Bean Ice Cream and Salted Pecans

Hungry yet? If the food didn't make you excited, did the rock star list of chefs make you a teeny bit excited? Well it made me very excited. CNN cameras were in the huge kitchen at the Four Seasons doing interviews and taping as all the chefs chatted with each other in French, everyone else standing around awestruck that they were lucky enough to share the same air as a chef like Joel Roubochon. There were four students from my class, Jane, Jonathan, Shannon and myself who were all lucky enough to get to go to the event with Chef Pascal and Chef Lisa, as well as two other chefs, Chef Herve and Chef Annette. Another classmate, Emily, is an intern at the Four Seasons so she was there, but she was helping with the hors d'ouevres for the Four Seasons. Since all of our charcuterie had been prepared beforehand, all we really had to do was arrange the plates and get everything organized for our course, which wasn't until 8:30. But there was enough to do that we were kept busy and entertained from 4 until about 7:30. The VIP cocktail hour took place in the kitchen for some reason, so we had people staring and taking pictures as we were trying to plate the charcuterie, which was a little strange. And one by one the famous chefs started showing up with their gangs of chefs, everytime another one would walk in, we'd all to to point at him discreetly, and stare without being too obvious. I'll get some picture of the event tomorrow and try to put them up, but if you happen to be watching CNN and see any coverage of the event, look for me in the background!

Chefs Francois Payard, Guy Savoy, Alain Ducasse and Jean-George Vongerichten

Tomorrow maybe I'll have the chance to get in a decent night's sleep before my midterm on Friday! Can you believe on Friday I'll be halfway through the program?? Why does it have to go by so quickly!

The Eater Awards

The Eater Awards

Chefs I Idolize:
Dan Barber
Michael White
Eric Ripert
Joe Bastianich (not really a chef but I like him anyway)

Chefs I worked with/saw last night:
Dan Barber
Michael White
Eric Ripert
Joe Bastianich

Words cannot adequately describe my night last night, but I will try, for you all. So I volunteered a couple weeks ago for this event called the Eater Awards, which is a new event that Eater.com (a food and restaurant blog/news website), held this year. They give away some of your standard restaurant awards....Restaurant of the Year, Chef of the Year, etc, but then they also give out some really hilarious and creative awards like Shitshow of the Year for a restaurant that didn't live up to all it's hype and sucks in every way possible, or an award poking fun at Chef Marcus Samuellson for the way he overexploits himself in the media, leaving his restaurant and food by the wayside. So this event didn't start until 8 pm, five hours after school ends at 3, so I was wondering out loud in class about what I would occupy all that time with when my friend Shannon ran over and told me that I have to go help her at Blue Hill, this restaurant that I've been dying to try for months and is one of the better restaurants in Manhattan at the moment. They were doing this event called Menuless Mondays and were feeding 170 people when they typically only do 150 at the most. So I was persuaded by Shannon to go to Blue Hill with her, my first time ever being in a restaurant kitchen and I go to Blue Hill? Really? Did that really happen?

Needless to say I was pretty much scared shitless...(sorry, no other way to say it.) And to top it all off, not only was my first time in a restaurant kitchen going to be in one of the best restaurants in NYC, but the well-known chef, Dan Barber, would be there as well! The concept of Blue Hill is really interesting and the chef has gotten a lot of praise for what he's done there. They are two Blue Hills, one is in NYC, the restaurant, and the other is Blue Hill Stone Barns at a farm in the Hudson Valley. They source almost all of the food that they serve at the restaurant from their own farm. Very cool. I knew I wouldn't be doing much of anything in the kitchen, definitely nothing important, but it was still really nerve-racking to be in that kitchen, which was the size of the workstations at school that we've been sharing with four people, but fit 15 people, all moving in different directions. My first task was to clean 100 radishes and strip them of their ugly leaves. Next, I cleaned frisee, keeping only the white and yellow parts of it and separating it into little fluffs of lettuce. After that, I spent approximately 45 minutes stripping the stems from this lettuce called ruby streak, which is a dark purple/red color and sort of looks like baby arugula, but with more pronounced tips. It stained the edges of my fingertips bright purple and took the longest time. Some of my other important tasks included dicing basil, which due to my dull knife, destroyed a small bowlful of what was once pretty basil. They needed it in perfect squares, no imperfections, so the chef on garde manger finally gave me his knife so I could chop it properly. I think it's time I move on from the knives the school gives us...they really kind of suck. I had to awkwardly sneak out of the kitchen (impossible due to the kitchen being about the size of my bathroom) at 8 pm in the middle of service so that I could get to the Eater Awards on time. The chef de cuisine even asked me to come back when I left, so I guess I didn't mess anything up that badly. I did almost fall down the extremely narrow and steep staircase to the "locker room" on the way out though. And by "locker room" I mean a cramped hallway in the basement of the restaurant, with maybe four lockers. All in all, it went pretty well, although I'm not sure I'm really cut out for the kind of stress that being in a restaurant kitchen causes. I felt like I didn't breathe the whole time for fear or doing something wrong.

At the Eater Awards, I met up with my friend Lisa, who was also volunteering for the event. When we arrived they gave us our volunteer t-shirts that read, "My other restaurant is a Shitshow." Love it. Unfortunately it's a large so you won't see me rocking it as anything other than a dress. The guy who was coordinating the volunteers and planning the whole event told us that the chefs didn't really need our help so we could just enjoy the party, eat the food and have a drink if we felt like it. Best volunteer job I've ever had. So we basically walked the room, eating the small plates from Momofuku (pulled pork buns...sooo yummy!), Convivio (Pig head terrine, not as yummy), John Dory Oyster Bar, and more. We also grabbed a glass of champagne, (why not?) and chatted with one of our chefs from Level 1 whose wife works at Eater so he was there enjoying the party as well. In between all the snacking, chatting and a little bit of drinking, we spotted Joe Bastianich (Owns restaurants like Babbo, Del Posto, Esca with his mom Lidia Bastianich and partner, Mario Batali), Eric Ripert (chef at Le Bernardin) and Michael White (Chef of Marea, Alto, Convivio and Osteria Morini) in the crowd. Eric Ripert unfortunately did not stay for long and I didn't have a chance to attempt to redeem myself from the embarrassing comments my brother made to him as we dined at Le Bernardin this summer (not that I really would have ever mentioned that to him anyway just in case he does remember it), but I still saw him (and may have followed him around). Here's a picture of myself and two other volunteers waiting outside the korilla Korean taco truck in the freezing cold!

http://ny.eater.com/archives/2010/11/eater_awards_2010_gala_celebration_at_public_in_nolita.php#eater-awards-53

Tonight I'm volunteering at another event with Gail Simmons, one of the judges on Top Chef and tomorrow I'm helping Chef Pascal at the James Beard Foundation Gala event at the Four Seasons Restaurant. I'm going to be super tired by the end of the week, but who needs sleep when you can see famous chefs everyday?

Choux in the Face

For all of you who are still out there reading, even though my lack of posting has probably left you dying for more culinary tales...hello. I'm sorry. This week/last week has gotten the best of me and I haven't had one moment (ok maybe instead of napping on the train I could have posted) to sit down and write! But in all honestly, you haven't been missing much. Level 3 is really not very exciting in terms of the dishes that we make because we really make the same thing every single day, but just rotate through who makes it. The last two weeks of level 3, instead of being on our own in a group of four making one dish like we were in the first two weeks, now we are with a partner making two dishes everyday. We usually finish up by 1:15 everyday and then after a short break we've been helping Chef Pascal with the charcuterie work that he's doing for a big James Beard Foundation event next week. The more we've gotten to know Chef Pascal, the more we've come to love him, almost as much as we all loved and now miss Chef Rogers. And although I'd been warned that he likes to do it, today he got me with one his signature tricks. As we were making our third attempt (the first one burned, the second I put the flour in at the wrong step) at choux dough for profiteroles, he came over to make sure we were doing everything right. As he stirred it he lifted up the spoon, smelled it and said, "Geez, what did you guys put in this, it smells funny, smell it," and stuck the spoon in my face. I took a sniff and all of a sudden I had a noseful of slimy, sticky choux dough. "CHEF!" I yelled. He and my partner Sam both found it pretty amusing. But I let him know that I'll be seeking revenge in the near future. I contemplated throwing a piece of crushed garlic at him later in the afternoon, but figured that I need to get him back the way he got me. Some kind of sauce in the face. I'll let you know how it goes.

But all quirks aside, he's a very enjoyable chef instructor to have and definitely one of the favorites at school. I stayed after school with a few other students to help him with the extra charcutuerie work that he's been doing for the James Beard event that is coming up next Wednesday. We lined about 40 terrine molds with caul fat (the fat from the lining of a cow's stomach and intestines...not actually as gross as you would think, it kinda just looks like a spiderweb) and then filled the molds with a pork and chicken liver pate. We cooked a little bit of it to try and it was actually very delicious...and I don't really like pate. Also, in case you were wondering what has become of the pig rectum we were cleaning last week...it became andouille sausage, a traditional French sausage made from pig rectum/pig intestines. It's supposed to be very good. And the people who are going to be eating it at the James Beard Party next week are paying a whooole lot of money to eat that. I hope they like it. This weekend me and a few other students are helping Chef Pascal with a party on Saturday night, and hopefully I'll have some time to relax and cook a few things. I'm thinking something with butternut squash...I have to milk whatever's left at the farmer's market while I still can!