Thrift Store Undies

Got a little bored with pantry items the other day and tried a little plating experiment with what we whipped up on the fly. It's certainly no masterpiece of molecular gastronomy, but I think Rori would agree that the meal was decent if nothing else.

Also to be noted: I'd take pictures of what we're doing in class, but they tend to look down on cameras in the kitchen. Besides, we're just working on mother sauces and salads right now and that doesn't work very well in the area of "interesting subject matter."

Chicken:
brush with lemon juice, sprinkle both sides with Oregano
Grill for about 15min/side
add salt and pepper to taste

Couscous:
In shallow pot, combine about 2-2.5c water and 1Tbsp oil or butter (I prefer butter)
-->bring to boil
pour in couscous, stir thoroughly until all water is absorbed.
Take couscous off heat, add it any seasonings you may desire.
For plating: take any small container (e.g. 4" tupperware if handy) coat lightly with oil/butter and pack couscous in. You may also put cheese or other toppings in the container before the couscous if desired.
Place plate upside-down and on-top of container, flip over, pat container, and couscous should fall out in a molded form.

3 Bean Salad:
1 can navy beans, drained/rinsed
1 can kidney beans, drained/rinsed
1 can pinto beans, drained/rinsed
juice of 2 lemons
1 tsp scallions, finely sliced
1 tsp parsley, finely chopped
1/3c E.V.O.O
[sugar may be added to taste]
Place all 3 kinds of beans in large mixing bowl and toss with remaining ingredients. Season, to taste, with salt and pepper

Also, here are some foodblogs to check out if you're bored:
Unbreaded
Endless Simmer
Gluten Free Globe
The Wonders of Molecular Gastronomy

Posted by ETL at 4:24 PM | 0 comments  

Labels: Fat Kids and Culinary Arts

Classic, F**king classic.

If you haven't heard yet, Sarah "Epic Failin' " Palin did an interview with Alaska television station KTUU (read: publicity stunt in hopes of setting up for 2012) and, since she couldn't display a Mission Accomplished banner, she went a little more topical in giving a Gubernatorial pardon to a turkey.

What happens next, however, is what's particularly humorous. While being interviewed and blathering on about her normal stumping points (Big gov't is bad, I have a son in Iraq, blah blah blah) the camera man pans juuuuuust a tad to the right to reveal.... a turkey.... being slaughtered.

Posted by ETL at 8:53 AM | 0 comments  

A chef at school went on a diatribe in ServSafe class, questioning our seriousness as culinarians. As she said, "A lot of you coming through my class say you want to be executive chefs and managers, but it baffles me why you won't even take the time to READ literature about the industry." She subsequently went on to recommend things like the El Bulli Cookbook and Kitchen Confidential... even Roasting in Hell's Kitchen.

And I sat and thought about it for a few minutes, because--honestly--my mind certainly wasn't focusing on internal temperatures for cooking ratites or the 4 proper ways of thawing food; and when all was said and done, I came to the following conclusion: "Hey, that bat-shit crazy manhattan widow has a point."

So, after class, (partially because I'm a brown noser but mainly because I like to read). I asked her if I could borrow the French Laundry Cookbook,

a memoir written by Thomas Keller, one of the most innovative chefs in America today (his restaurants are often rated as the top 5 in America) and recommended by one of the best young avant-guard chefs, Gerard Craft.

As I began reading, I stumbled upon a passage that struck a chord with me and still resonates:
Shortly before I moved away from NY, some friends took me out to our favorite restaurant in Chinatown, and, as always, we went to Baskin Robbins afterward. I'd been nervous about a food an wine event; I guess it had been in teh back of my mind for quite some time up to that point. But, when I ordered and ice-cream cone, the boy behind the counter put the cone in a little holder and said, "here ya go."

The moment he said it, I thought, "There it is!" We're going to take our lstandard tuiles and we're going to make cones with them and we're going to fill them with salmon tartare. You can do it with meat-julienne of prosciutto with melon. Truthfully, the cone is just a vehicle.

Because it was a canape that people really began to associate with us, I decided that everyone who eats at the restaurant should begin the meal with this cornet. People always smile when they get it too; it makes them happy. But I wouldn't have come up with it if I hadn't been sad. I had been handed an ice-cream cone a hundred times before and it never resulted in anything. I had to be sad to see it.

Despite this passage being quite a metaphor for the way Keller cooks: repitition until perfection melded with the unexpected twisted into the orthodoxly appreciable. It also, however, has a universal truth that most chefs--in my opinion--appreciate. In our industry, we throw around words like drive, and passion, and submission. And, while all those adjectives and emotions have an established and rightful place in the kitchen. Perhaps we should all strive, like Keller, to allow all of our emotions to affect our palette, our decisions, and our creative juices.

Posted by ETL at 5:58 PM | 0 comments  

Labels: Fat Kids and Culinary Arts

This passage raises several thousand questions. Just off the top of my head:

What did Saul (the king at the time) want with 100 foreskins? Was he going to make a scarf?

Did David think this was a strange request?

If this was secretly a plan to have David killed, why didn't he require he bring back, say, 100 bear foreskins?

Did David just wander into Philistia and kill the first 200 men he saw? Did they think this was odd? Or, with all the other shit that went down back then, did they just shrug it off?

How do you forcefully circumcise 200 men without violating the "Don't grab the junk" commandment ?

Whose job was it to count the foreskins after David came back? Do they make a pair of tongs long enough for that task?

We're guessing we'll never know. It doesn't matter, because at its heart, this story is about love. For the hand of Micah, David went further than any man would have gone. Way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way further.

Ladies, when a man finally proposes to you, ask him one simple question: "How many dongs would you mutilate for me?" If you demand a hundred and he doesn't blink, he's a keeper. But, if he's David, who was sent after a hundred and then came back with twice that many just for the hell of it, well, you've got a love for the ages.

Posted by ETL at 2:46 PM | 0 comments  

Labels: Real Life trumps Made up Life

*clicking on picture takes you to full story*

EDIT: credit goes out to Smail for posting this on his blog 1st. Sorry Mike, didn't mean to plagiarize. It would appear great minds think alike.

Posted by ETL at 4:59 PM | 1 comments  

Labels: Real Life trumps Made up Life

Other things that piss Eric off:

#1) * People who claim that the absence of something still counts as the presence of something.
For example: Being an atheist is a religious belief.

Ok, maybe technically this can be construed as true. However, a standard definition of "religion" states that,
A religion is a set of tenets and practices, often centered upon specific supernatural and moral reality, the cosmos, and human nature, and often codified as prayer, ritual, or religious law. Religion also encompasses ancestral or cultural traditions, writings, history, and mythology, as well as personal faith and religious experience. The term "religion" refers to both the personal practices related to communal faith and to group rituals and communication stemming from shared conviction.

In this case, atheism is not a religious belief because it doesn't have ANY tenets that I know of, nor is it grounded in any supernatural or moral ideology. Furthermore, the only religious experience most people who are atheists have is a bad one with fundamentalists which leads them, thusly, to shared convictions consisting simply of not believing in something.

#2.) Breading Vegetables
Today, for my kitchen practical, I had to make pan-seared Eggplant Parmesan. Before you can drop the Eggplant in the hot oil, however, you must cut it into 1/4" slices and then bread the bitch. Now, breading is not difficult, in that it only requires 3-5 steps (usually), it's just the principal of the thing. No, scooping flour isn't hard, nor is dredging the eggplant slices. Making an eggwash and toasting and mincing bread for bread crumbs isn't that hard either.

It's simply the fact that, you have to season EVERYTHING in the breading process: the flour gets salt and pepper (and nutmeg depending on your taste), the egg wash gets milk or water, and the bread crumbs get parsley. For shit's sake, if a vegetable is SO bland that it needs seasoned to THAT extent, why don't we just make some breaded tofu??

In any case, I made some pretty kickass Eggplant and only missed 2pts on the practical.

#3.) All the hype over the "Twilight" movie
Are we in such an emo driven, post-Harry potter funk that we have to go for this drivel? Oooh, a really pale guy who knows how to treat women!! Um, pretty sure I saw that movie when it was called "Powder."

And while we're on the subject, what's so difficult about being dark and romantic? I can be dark and romantic.... I'll just turn the lights off when I have sex.

Posted by ETL at 3:31 PM | 0 comments  

Labels: Pet Peeves

Posted by ETL at 7:30 PM | 0 comments  

Labels: Bi-partisanship is not as sexual as it sounds, I have an opinion about everything

Eric's attempt to serialize everything that pisses him off starts with the following:

#1.) People who, when trying to spell how they elongate a syllable... type the wrong letter repeatedly.
For example: anddddd instead of aaaaaaaand

Seriously assholes, sound it out to yourself and realize what letter to repeat.

*Edit* : this also includes people who type redundant letters in abbreviations; like LOLOL. No Shit stupid, we don't need to knos that you're laughing out loud, OUT LOUD. You already told us that

Posted by ETL at 5:29 PM | 1 comments  

Labels: Pet Peeves

Wal-Mart, in their never ending quest for outright douchebaggery of America, started to play Christmas music on November 1st... because, honestly, what goes better with Pre-Thanksgiving cavities than Nat Kin Cole crooning about a white yuletide?

Sure, some of you may be rolliong your eyes and dismissing me as a grinch, but that's not entirely accurate. I like Christmas music as much as the next guy. My itunes list includes 4 or 5 Christmas CDs and a smattering of other assorted goodness ranging from Josh Grobin's Angels We Have Heard on High to Carol of the Bells done by The Bird and The bee. My contention is simply that we need to observe the natural progression of holidays (all of them except the Mexican and Jewish influenced ones anyway). Halloween, THEN Thanksgiving, THEN Christmas. I mean, it's not like Wally World can't make just as much money off of Thanksgiving as they can off of Halloween considering all the fixings available for munching: Turkey, Ham, Tofu (blech), Cranberry Sauce, Stuffing, Pie, etc etc., ad nauseum. Anyway, I digress.

In reality, I doubt the Walton family has any plans to stop playing Christmas music any time soon. But, this may be due more to lack of options than anything else. I mean, how many mainstream/adult-contemporary Thanksgiving songs can you think of? For that matter, how many liturgical hymns can you think of that deal with Thanksgiving?

By doing a little digging I came up with the 16 most popular songs pertaining to Thanksgiving; they are:

Posted by ETL at 3:15 PM | 0 comments  

Labels: Get Rich Quick Schemes

One of the first papers I had to write in Culinary school was a short explanation of my culinary heroes: Who they were and why I respected/admired them so much. While a lot of my peers named grandparents and chefs with whom they had worked in their lifetimes, I felt as if I was at a large disadvantage. Sure, there are chefs with whom I empathize. For example, Food Network's Tyler Florence was a latchkey child who improvised on the food shelter provisions afforded to his single parent family every month. However, it rather pains me to cite a Food Network celebrity as a culinary hero because my general opinion is that FoodTV, while providing a good catalyst to get people interested in food, ultimately does a great disservice to the restaurant world because people simply want to emulate the chefs they see rather than building on the cuisine provided by the aforementioned artists.

So I thought long and hard and came up with a top three. In no particular order, I highly respect Thomas Keller for his authorship, his mentoring of amazing chefs like Grant Achatz (of Alinea fame in Chicago) and Duff Goldman (i.e. "That Ace of Cakes Guy"), and his ingenuity in creating dishes that are tasteful/original yet still accessible (as opposed to someone like Ferran Adrian). I also like Masa Takayama, because I want to have that level of renown in my career. Masa is a perfectionist through and through, and it's through his unequivocal dedication to his art that he has produced Masa... the most expensive restaurant in NYC, and the 2nd best sushi restaurant in the WORLD. Keller and Takayama are rather reclusive in their trade though, preferring to let their food talk for them. What I needed as a coup de grace for my paper was someone who lets his food AND his mouth do the talking for him. And if you take those requirements into account, then there's really only one chef who preperly fits the bill: Anthony Bourdain. I mean, c'mon... you have to respect a man who #1) Writes a scathing book about the culinary underbelly upon becoming famous, and #2) jests that the worst thing he's ever eaten (including unwashed warthog rectum, beheaded and breathing king cobra, and seal's retina) is a Chicken McNugget. Bourdain is even so nice as to reinfoce my beliefs about the "sell out" nature of Food Network. In a guest blogging stint on ruhlman.com, Bourdain even went as far as to verbalize his disdain for certain celebri-chefs. Listed below are some of my favorite diatribes:

MARIO!
Oh, Mario! Oh great one! They shut down Molto Mario--only the smartest and best of the stand-up cooking shows. Is there any more egregiously under-used, criminally mishandled, dismissively treated chef on television? Relegated to the circus of Iron Chef America, where--like a great, toothless lion, fouling his cage, he hangs on--and on--a major draw (and often the only reason to watch the show). How I would like to see him unchained, free to make the television shows he’s capable of, the Real Mario--in all his Rabelasian brilliance. How I would love to hear the snapping bones of his cruel FN ringmasters, crunching between his mighty jaws! Let us see the cloven hooves beneath those cheery clogs! Let Mario be Mario!

THAT ACE OF CAKES GUY: Hey…He’s got talent! And..he seems to be a trained chef! And he’s really making food--and selling it in a real business! I think…I like it! If I have one reservation, it’s that I have no idea if the stuff actually TASTES good. It LOOKS really creative and quirky--and I’m interested but…I mean...it’s like construction going on over there from what we’re told and shown. One suspects that the producers don’t want to waste valuable time talking about anything so technical as food--on “Food” Network. I mean...what’s in those cakes, beneath the icing and marzipan and fondant? That said, it’s the only “kicky, new, cutting edge, in-your-face” hopeful they’ve managed to trot out of any quality in memory. Hope it lasts. Wait till they try and put the poor bastard on a pony--or do a “Tailgate Special” with the usual suspects. Or a “Thanksgiving Special” where he has to sit down with the bobbleheads and pretend to like it. On balance, it’s still probably the best new project they’ve come up with in a long, long time.

RACHAEL: Complain all you want. It’s like railing against the pounding surf. She only grows stronger and more powerful. Her ear-shattering tones louder and louder. We KNOW she can’t cook. She shrewdly tells us so. So...what is she selling us? Really? She’s selling us satisfaction, the smug reassurance that mediocrity is quite enough. She’s a friendly, familiar face who appears regularly on our screens to tell us that “Even your dumb, lazy ass can cook this!” Wallowing in your own crapulence on your Cheeto-littered couch you watch her and think, “Hell…I could do that. I ain’t gonna…but I could--if I wanted! Now where’s my damn jug a Diet Pepsi?” Where the saintly Julia Child sought to raise expectations, to enlighten us, make us better--teach us--and in fact, did, Rachael uses her strange and terrible powers to narcotize her public with her hypnotic mantra of Yummo and Evoo and Sammys. “You’re doing just fine. You don’t even have to chop an onion--you can buy it already chopped. Aspire to nothing…Just sit there. Have another Triscuit…Sleep….sleep….”

SANDRA LEE: Pure evil. This frightening Hell Spawn of Kathie Lee and Betty Crocker seems on a mission to kill her fans, one meal at a time. She Must Be Stopped. Her death-dealing can-opening ways will cut a swath of destruction through the world if not contained. I would likely be arrested if I suggested on television that any children watching should promptly go to a wooded area with a gun and harm themselves. What’s the difference between that and Sandra suggesting we fill our mouths with Ritz Crackers, jam a can of Cheez Wiz in after and press hard? None that I can see. This is simply irresponsible programming. Its only possible use might be as a psychological warfare strategy against the resurgent Taliban--or dangerous insurgent groups. A large-racked blonde repeatedly urging Afghans and angry Iraqis to stuff themseles with fatty, processed American foods might be just the weapon we need to win the war on terror.

Posted by ETL at 7:59 PM | 3 comments  

Labels: Fat Kids and Culinary Arts, I have an opinion about everything