Keeping the home fires burning

“Do you still cook at home, or do you get sick of it?”

I hear this frequently when I tell people I’m now working at a restaurant about 70 hours a week. I guess it’s like the old saw about the ice cream clerk despising ice cream because he’s around it all the time. For the record, I’d never, ever get sick of ice cream.

And I’m not sick of cooking at home. Granted, I have less time to do it, but it’s still incredibly satisfying to whip up a new meal for wifey and have her critique it. Or to put together a three-course menu for some friends or family.

Last weekend I had the inlaws over for their first meal at my Jersey City table. I think it was pretty good. They’re Italian, so I kept with the Roman theme. For cocktails I made homemade bellinis, courtesy of the Venicians, and served that age-old antipasto of thinly sliced cucumber, cantoloupe balls and prosciutto with a little fresh basil oil.

Then I moved onto a grilled calamari salad with haricot verts (okay, I’ll cut the bullshit; green beans), asparagus strips, fried capers and a white balsamic citronette.

Next came an attempt to reconstruct an item from the restaurant’s menu: an acorn squash soup. I steeped a lobster in boiling water to cook the meat, and sautéed the shells briefly to begin a lobster stock. The stock cooked for a few hours on low heat ‘till it was crazy flavorful. Then I strained it and added to a puree of acorn squash and a little cream. The golden delicious liquid was then poured over sautéed porcini mushrooms, acorn squash cubes, and thinly sliced lobster tail to make the soup.

The entrée was pretty simple: sautéed lemon sole with green-onion-and-ginger oil, and an eggplant coulis. Then store-bought Italian butter cookies (got lazy, as I often do, when it comes to dessert).

By the end of the meal, I realized I had killed about half of one of my now-precious days off cooking, but it was worth it. Unlike some chefs out there, I’m not one of these guys who thinks about food and cooking all the time, but I do like to think about it outside of work. As a cook, you don’t really have to bring work home with you, but it’s nice to practice in your lair and keep the home fires burning.

Do the right thing: eat less fish

It’s such a hassle to do the right thing. You may say you’re going to be a strict locavore, for example, and eat food that is grown only within a 30-mile radius from your home; chances are you’re going to slip and eventually eat something that was shipped from elsewhere in the United States or abroad.

When it comes to fish, my favorite protein, doing the right thing can be especially difficult. Consider the tuna, which is now overfished (but may soon receive some protection). It was apparently considered a “garbage fish” among the Japanese for sushi purposes until very recently. Now, however, tuna is sold for tens of thousands of dollars at Hunt’s Point and the Tsukiji fish markets.

Consider, also, salmon. To eat wild salmon from anywhere except Alaska is an ecological no-no. But locavores and other hippies say that farmed salmon is also a no-no because it is fed high levels of corn. Such fish are often white, and then “tinted” pink with food coloring to make it more appealing to Joe Consumer.

Many fish restaurants need to included endangered fish species to attract customers, though some, like Le Bernardin, do the right thing and keep threatened fish like monkfish and blue fin tuna off their menus. Other restaurants may be doing the right thing unintentionally by switching crappy fish for endangered species that are in high demand, or so says this researcher. Think the Komodo Dragon scam the Marlon Brando flick, “The Freshman."

One great resource to figure out which fish are okay to eat and which aren’t is the Environmental Defense Fund’s Oceans Alive site, which tracks fish populations. Check it out, and try to pass on Chilean sea bass next time in favor of some Artic char next time you have a chance.

Dinner with the parental units

This weekend the folks came over and I got to cooking a quick-and-dirty four-courser, consisting of an amuse bouche of watermelon scallop ceviche, a frozen watermelon vodka cocktail, oyster mushroom and fennel salad, poached halibut with onion cream sauce and orange-chili infused oil, and a strawberry-rhubarb crumble (as well as some bread that my folks brought, which looked like it had been purchased at Schnitzer’s).

The meal was pretty good, although it also taught me a little about adaptation. The “crumble” was really just a screwed up pie. I’ve never been much of a baker, and I dread taking the pastry module in school. I just don’t care very much about dessert…and I’m just as happy with a cupcake from Entenmann’s as I am with an elegant lava cake.

As it happens, I put too much lard in the damned crust, and overnight it turned too crumbly. So I crumbled it instead of attempting to roll out what amounted to a blob of giant flakes. Tasted good, but didn’t have that same awesome tiled look that a good ol’ fashioned pie should.

But the rest of the meal turned out pretty good. Here’s the recipe for that ceviche, which was cripped and mutated from several sources. I’m a huge fan of ceviches, ever having some great fish in Costa Rica several years ago.

Scallop Watermelon Ceviche
1 blood orange (or juicer orange), peeled and cut into segments
1/2 cup orange juice
1/4 cup lime juice
2/3 small dice seeded watermelon
1/2 teaspoon finely grated peeled fresh ginger
1 1/2 tablespoons finely diced red onion
2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh jalepeno
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 lb sea scallops, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
1 1/2 tablespoons chopped fresh mint
1 teaspoon cilantro

Dice up the watermelon and orange. Stir together with the orange juice, lime juice, ginger, onion, jalapeño, and salt in a large bowl.

Bring a small saucepan full of salted water to a boil, then reduce to a simmer (the water should be barely rippling). Add the scallops and poach for about a minute or until the pieces just begin to become white, about 1 or 1 ½ minutes. Put the scallops into an ice bath to shock them and stop them from cooking. Drain the scallops and pat dry, then add to the ceviche mixture and season with extra salt. Chill covered for at least an hour and serve in Chinese soup spoons.

A night at the (food) Oscars

Last night wifey and I got to attend the big food event of the year, the James Beard Foundation awards, at the Lincoln Center. Wifey got a reduced ticket because she’s married to a culinary student, and I got free admission for doing what I do best: pushing around carts of food on freight elevators.

I volunteered to help chefs preparing food at the event to load in their wares. It was stupid work, but I got to ride the ‘vator with the likes of Top Chef alumni Michelle Bernstein and Jeff McInnis (pardon the blatant starfucking, here).

The awards were boring, mostly because myself, wifey and fellow student slave Bruno were hungry for the morsels waiting outside the auditorium. The chefs were actually told to wait from 6 p.m. until the awards ended at 9 p.m. to begin serving. Not fun, especially when I was working all day without lunch. Bruno was also despondent that wd-50 chef Wylie Dufresne did not win best chef in New York City, though he was later exuberant that Jean-Georges won best restaurant.

However, the food was great, with only a few duds, and the liquor was flowing nicely. Among the standouts in my mind:
-- Cured bone marrow on mustard croutons with parsley and ramps (can’t go wrong with “butter from God,” though they were lukewarm when served and a tad salty)
-- Oyster and champagne stew
-- Beet brownies with Veldhuizen Bosque blue cheese, honeycomb and Swedish-style Texas pecans
-- Warm coconut-cardamom rice pudding with rhubarb and kumquats

The topper of the night for me was meeting Eric Ripert, of Le Bernardin, the outstanding fish restaurant where I’m angling to work. Bruno’s wife muscled through the crowd and told Ripert, who was already cornered by a semi-circle of onlookers, that there was somebody who wanted to meet him. I sheepishly walked over and introduced myself.

It would have been perfect, except that I kept repeating “I love fish. I love fish,” and mistakenly told him that my wife used to work on the fish market at Fulton Street. So now I’m coming across like the culinary version of the retarded weatherman from Anchorman and my wife is a burly fishmonger. Somehow, Ripert found this acceptable enough to dole out his last business card and invite me to get in touch regarding an externship. Either that or he was terrified I might snap at any moment and was placating me.

All in all, a great night and well worth the few hours of manual labor. Security was tight on picture-taking, so I could snag only a few shots of the set-up before the awards began.

Cooking is boring. Why not just eat raw food?

Don't like to cook? Then don't. There are plenty of raw foods you can enjoy, and sushi is the least adventurous of them. Poisson cru, steak tartar, beef carpaccio, etc., etc.

But what about raw chicken, or duck, or pork? Sound gross and unsafe? Well, from the little I've read (lazy tonight) but the lots I've heard from my professor, Chef M, rare burger and lamb can be just as unsafe.

This is how I understand steers are killed. A bolt (think Anton Chigurh) is shot into the steer's head, and then it is moved via conveyor belt to be sawed in half. However, sometimes the steer turns his head, and is cut not-so-perfectly-in-half, opening up his digestive tract and spraying the walls and meat with filth. If the steer was infected with E. Coli or something nastier, it could possibly infect the meat of it and all other steers coming down the line. Inspectors apparently are rare. Even the bolt-killing process has been linked to the spread of BSE, or mad cow disease, in Britain.

The process for chicken isn't much better, but for some reason people are terrified of an undercooked game bird but rush to eat basically raw steak, or worse, an undercooked burger. In either case, if the animal is raw, you probably want to get the best meat possible to limit possibility of disease: small farm, free-range, etc. A burger is made from ground chuck from possibly thousands of steers, where the threat of disease is much higher.

I find slightly undercooked chicken delicious, and raw chicken is actually a delicacy in other countries, like Japan. But because of the preference for beef in the USA and the recent focus on salmonella, raw poultry is verboten. Ok, here's an old article from The New Yorker about chicken sashimi sold at a NYC restaurant, so it's not unheard of in the states, but still pretty rare (no pun intended).

Post-script: For raw food without the squeamish factor, curing is the way to go. Since wifey and I love to eat bagels and lox on Sundays--a tradition I've adopted from her family--and because the lox at my supermarket are foul and expensive, I've decided to try to make my own, using a recipe from class.

Typically, gravlax is made with salt, sugar and dill. However, we used some interesting alternatives, including cheap tequila and cilantro and eschewing the dill. I pilfered my Chef M's recipe and tried it at home. Below is a photo of it after the salt rub is applied. Hopefully in a few days it will turn out as good as the stuff at school. That green stuff is the cilantro, not mold.

Making the case for the little-known filleting knife

Cooks like to show off their scars and burns as if they are rehearsing the scene between Quint and Hooper from Jaws. As a chef, it's inevitable that a nasty knife wound will occur, but gruesome wounds seem to garner a little respect, as long as it doesn't hamper your ability to keep working. I still pride myself on a cut I made a few months after getting married in 2006: slicing through my thumb nail like it was butter with a brand-new santoku, a wedding gift from a friend. Afterwards, my wife refused to touch the "cursed" blade, for fear it would turn on her next.

A good chef can minimize these wounds, especially with the right equipment. For the minimalist and the frugal, the chef's knife can pretty accomplish any slicing task, much like a good golfer can play a nice 18 holes with nothing more than a putter and a driver and maybe a 9-iron (a paring knife and bread knife are pretty useful, too).

However, when it comes to butchering once-living beings--in particular, fish--I've found that one other tool is indispensible: the filleting knife. Because it's flexible, it can bend to cut along the rib cage of both flat and round fish fairly well. I find it almost impossible to carve fillets out of a flounder or other flat fish without a filleting knife; as an experiment, I tried using my boning knife, and ended up with scraps. I also watched as an assistant manager at my local grocer tried to eviscerate a flat fish for me. He also used what looked like a rigid boning knife, and ended up giving me three-fourths of a fish, destroying one whole side of the bottom fillet. Strangely, I received no discount for the mutilated remains.

By using a flexible knife, you can bend it upwards towards yourself as you scrape along the ribcage, pulling the fillet away from the backbone. I've also found it pretty useful for cutting up chickens. Meat, you probably need something sturdier. And if you're properly able to fillet a whole fish, you can carve yourself some nice fillets while making some great fish stock (only takes an hour to cook, as opposed to chicken and veal, which can take all day).

And let's be honest, it's really cool to lay out a bunch of knives on a cutting board next to your halibut, preparing to play carve up that big-mouthed bastard.