Truffle Mutt

Blueberry Flam?

No you heard me right - flam.

This was supposed to be my entry to the BC Blueberry contest last year, but I procrastinated and missed the deadline.  It was a luxurious take on a Mexican flan made with cream cheese, Marscarpone and white chocolate with a blueberry caramel.  

Jason kept referring to it as flam, which was awesome all by itself.  But then, I gave the leftovers to my lactose intolerant brother (he asked for it) and he ate it all in one sitting, at work.  :)  I am not sure that he'll ever forget this flan.  I know I won't! 

Pancakes anyone?

 
It's freaking cold out, Jason's gone off to somewhere much nicer and most possibly warmer and I have a full-on case of the winter blah's. 

I don't feel like leaving the house, going to the store, shoveling the walk one more time or waking up in the dismal darkness.  Isn't there a name for this kind of thing, seasonal attitude dysfunction or something?  Yuck.  It also means that I'm forcing myself to survive off the givings of my freezer and that's been a bit of a hit and miss.  The pantry is also getting bare, at least by my standards.  

Scraping the bottom, for tonight's menu a package of ground pork, 1/2 an onion and a jar of kimchi.  And you think this is going downhill don't you?  Not so.  Not so at all.  I adapted this recipe from Saveur, added a few pinches of salt, pepper, a couple of cloves of minced garlic and about 1 tbsp of paprika and voila!  I didn't have any rice flour (see above for reference to bare pantry), so I used AP flour and reduced the water by a bit.     

In school we made a similar kind of Japanese green cabbage pancake topped with a squirt of mayo, a drizzle of okonomiyaki sauce and mountain of bonito flakes.  Taking the lead from that dish I served these crispy fried kimchi patties up Japanese street vendor style with a mayo and oyster sauce. 

Any ideas for buttermilk, oranges and tomato sauce?  Maybe it's time to find that grocery delivery pamphlet.

Want a fry with that?

 
My morning coffee consists of a trip to Sunterra for a Starbucks grande dark with a shot of 1/2 & 1/2 and occasionally a touch of sugar. The entire experience sets me back exactly $2.05.

This morning was slightly different…

At first it started out just like every other morning trip to Starbucks, same coffee, same financial toll, same dose of low fat heavy cream. Then as we were walking back to the office I noticed a number of (what I thought were) paramedics standing at the top of the escalators in the midst of some commotion. They were actively warding people off with a fairly casual "nothing to see here" (which in hindsight could have been highly insulting to a particular party involved), or "please step away".

Of course, when you see escalators and paramedics, you think, or at least I think, seriously gruesome injury, severed limb, lots of blood. And then I see some guy in a suit trying desperately to get a shot with his cell phone and I am thinking how sick is that, you really want to catch someone's moment of horror in your digital memory? Seriously. That's messed up.

Then in the middle of my mental tirade, I glance over and see…

A naked man.

Well, that's not entirely true he had on what appeared to be, a reasonably intact shirt. His pants on the other hand, were either missing, or were a whole new level of sheer.

And in the midst of my mental tirade, my heart came to a complete stop. Wow! Now that's something completely different.

Today's coffee cost me a more than the usual $2.05. I also have in my possession a small mental picture, thankfully less graphic than a cell phone camera, that's all mine to keep.

Good morning ma'am here's your Grande Dark with room for cream, do you want my fry with that?

(The picture which I added later, was obviously at the beginning of his journey, before security managed to partially dress him.)

Black Box Friday

 

Friday.  Black Box Friday. 

The key building block to final exams and a day that will forever be remembered as 9000 seconds of chaos that would make a 5 week bus tour through the nine circles of hell look like a tropical vacation.  And I might even have had enough airmiles to make it.

But, let me take a step back and look at the silver lining.  You only learn by making mistakes, right?  Generally, I would prefer to have fewer of them and maybe not all in the same 2 hour period, but it made for a  HIGHLY educational day! 

I got to learn just how short 150 minutes can feel, as well as, what it's like to write a task list that starts going sideways 20 minutes into prep.  I also know at exactly what point said task list  becomes a constant, fear invoking, reminder of just how bad your day is really going.  I found out it's possible to make 100 trips to both the North wall and the fridge, for ingredients that I managed to forget on each of my last 99 visits, which clearly quantified for me how much time 100 laps around the kitchen can eat into 9000 precious seconds. 

I learned that doing a brunoise of semi-hot roasted beet is like trying to shave cubes of jello using a vegetable peeler, that quinoa will not cook in 20 minutes if you allow all the moisture to evaporate from the pot, and as an extension of that lesson, food in the absence of moisture, with the continued application of heat, has a tendency to burn...  Hmm, that came right out of left field.  And what about that an improperly heated oven will not produce a golden and crispy skin on quail, and don't expect creamy potato gratin to hold its shape if un-moulded immediately after coming out of the oven.

Oh no, wait, there's more - with a no less than 45 minutes to go, an overwhelming large number of loose ends and 3 unsuccessful attempts to cut one piece of parchment paper with shaky hands, I realized exactly what reaching rock bottom felt like.

(hey - who turned out the lights and where is that strange white light coming from anyway?) 

Miserable.

And I know you're not supposed to swear in a kitchen, but holy HELL, if there was ever a time in my life that it would have been more appropriate...

No, I stopped for a second, took a breath for the first time in 2 hours, and decided I didn't really want to keep digging.  Which, coincidentally, I couldn't have done anyway, because along with my desire to live, I'd lost my tasting spoon too.  Awesome. 

I considered my options.

1. Quit while I was behind - attractive at the time, but not totally my style.
2. Use sharp objects in my possession to inflict bodily harm - not entirely keen on pain and plus they'd probably be able to save me anyway.
3. Take a minute, rally the meager few functioning neurons and start again - okay, I count 13 survivors, let's give it a go.

So, what happened the end.  Well, I don't remember all of it, early onset memory supression has saved me from some things, but I do clearly remember surviving.  I remember plating something that wouldn't get me passed a first interview at McDonald's, and then returning to my station to scrape what was left of my ego from the bottom of a blackened pot. 

And believe me, I wish I could tell you it stopped there.  But, upon further reflection, yet another moment of shining brilliance, popped to the surface.

I was eating breakfast, pondering the reason for my disappointing tahini sauce, when it dawned on me that I didn't ACTUALLY put tahini in it.  Wow!  No seriously, wow.  Small wonder that it tasted a bit off. 

It would appear that even fewer neurons survived than I first expected.

The one solace I have for this day, is that I was not dumb enough to take a picture.  Oh no wait.  The chef's took one for me. 

Shit. 

Brilliant!  A photographic record.  That's got to be worth about 10,000 words.

Plus, 958 silent curses, 573 thoughts of "OMG! I going to be here until 3am", 382 misshapen knife cuts, 218 beads of sweat, 134 trips to the North wall, 75 thoughts of "WTF was I thinking", followed by 27 "I hope the chef didn't just see me do that!", and finally, 1 tasting spoon, down for the count... 

And, if I ever get my hands on that picture, I am framing it .  An elegantly framed picture of an albino looking, flabby skinned quail, served with a collapsing circle of tasteless quinoa pilaf, a structurally unsound mound of (but at least tasty) potato gratin, brightened with turns of overcooked squash and a wonderful sauce, that after 2 hours of nursing to perfection I managed to burn during the last 90 seconds of reheating...  And I am putting it in my kitchen - a fitting epitaph for my ego.   

(I will take this moment to interject a touch of reality here, since I'm being overly dramatic, Chef Tony was far more forgiving and less critical than I have been.  At least on paper, my performance could be seen as passable.)

On the up side, and with one more cliche to add to the merry mix, if laughter truly is the best medicine, I expect to make a fully recovery by Monday.  Which is good, because we have to do it all again on Monday - only far better!

Asian Recap

What to recap to you about Asia week?  I could tell you about the dim sum that we made, the red braised pork, the chile tofu or the Indian buffet, but I'd rather just show you the pictures and skip straight to the Wok Around China Town where I made a total ass out of myself.  Yeah let's do that.  Here goes...

Steamed bbq pork buns - super yum!

Bok choi with red braised shitake mushrooms.

 

Chile tofu.  A dish that introduced me to fava bean paste, a substance that could burn holes in sheet metal.  I think there was a typo on the bottle, it should have read lava bean paste.  It's super good though, right up until your taste buds are scorched off. 

And crispy fried whitebait.  A-amazing.

Italy Week - The Rest

I am behind with this post!  I'll try and catch you up.

This picture is of our Italy menu development project.  Pasta stuffed with ricotta and spinach in a roasted pepper and tomato coulee.  Josh and I were kitchen buddies this week and it was a pretty fun week.  Sure, we got our arses handed to us on restaurant day - the chefs way to bring us back to earth after exams, but much fun was had too.   

This was our main of roasted game hen with fennel, parsnip gratin, sausage tournedo and sun-dried tomato artisan pasta. 

The gratin was a combination of sliced parsnip and fennel layered with parmesan cheese, cream and Pernod.  We served the roasted breast of the game hen with a mushroom infused reduction and used the thigh meat for a sausage stuffing, with roasted fennel seed and pine nuts, raisins, pancetta and bread crumbs, wrapped in kale. 

Lastly, and certainly the most humorous, was Josh's foccacia cracker.  I'm not sure what happened during the bread making process here, but the end result resembled something very similar to year old gingerbread.  If I hadn't seen it come together in the kitchen, I'd believe it came out of a time capsule - from the 80's.  We almost required a diamond cutter to get through it and you could hear people crunching on it from halfway across the kitchens.  Much laughter was had and possibly a couple of cracked teeth.  Ahh - the best part of the week!  

Italy Week - Day 1

A picture of French bread on the first day of Italy week - I know, I know.  But I don't have a picture to show you, despite actually getting it together enough to take my camera to school.  So, you get the French bread I made last weekend, or I could show you an equally un-Italian Tart Tatin...

Oh what the heck, you can have that picture too!  And now that I am fresh out of filler pictures to blog about I will have to remember to use my camera tomorrow!

Today's menu was oven roasted tomato and garlic soup, hand made pasta - including my second attempt at making Orrechiette, pesto sauce, classic tomato sauce and biscotti.

Hands down my favorite thing of the day was the tomato sauce.  Garlic, onion, tomato paste and the best quality tomatoes - totally brilliant.  But, you can't skimp on the tomatoes here, you have to find the sweetest, ripest canned tomatoes possible, which I guarantee you won't find at any old supermarket.  You are looking for a can of tomatoes with no added anything...  Tomatoes, tomato juice and maybe, maybe basil.  That's it!  No salt, no citric acid, no nothing. 

I learned today that if a tomato is picked at its ripest there is enough sugar to preserve it in the can.  So, it's good advice to avoid added salt and citric acid, because something wasn't quite right when those little buddies went into the can.  Other than the tomatoes you are relying on the caramelization of the onion, garlic and tomato paste for added sweetness.  And don't you dare go and buy Heinz tomato paste after you just bought the best Italian canned tomatoes you could find!  Buy high end there too, or better yet, puree sun-dried tomatoes. 

If there's something tomato sauce can teach us all it's that cooking simple is a HUGE challange.  Five ingredients come together to create perfection - if you don't skimp it's amazing!

 

Check out that steak!

Sexy enough that I got my camera out for the first time since I started school in Vancouver!  Amazing colour, beautiful white marbling in an intricate web.  You can forget diamonds, the way to my heart is right here before your eyes...

I can't believe that I have been so silent - school has been non-stop!  Last week we already went through midterms!  Holy crap - time is flying.  I thought I would have tons of time do all this blogging, eat at tons of different restaurants and be able to get outside and enjoy the beautiful extended fall.  Yeah, I don't have to tell you that hasn't happened.  It's been cook, study, cook, read, cook and then on occasion, if I can fit it into the schedule, sleep.

School itself has been 100% worth it though.  There's just sooo much to learn.  Every day we experience making so many things, often 5-6 separate dishes, with different sides and sauces.  It's non-stop cooking and learning.

In the upcoming weeks we are going to begin to explore different ethnic cuisines, including Italian, Indian and Asian.  I can't wait.  We spent two days the week before last, covering Mediterranean food and it was awesome.  We made fresh ricotta, Greek yogurt, marinated octopus salad, Manti, tabbouleh, hummus and so much more....  And it's not just about the cooking, the history and cultural that we explore is fascinating - there is just so much to learn.

Hopefully I will have the chance to fill you in later this week.  Tomorrow we are off to Italy!

Garlic

I mean HOLY freaking garlic.

On a recent foray to the Farmer's Market I managed to procure 20 or so heads of very fresh garlic for the bargain price of $6 bucks!  What a score!  It was my lucky day, because it turns out someone forgot to repackage the garlic into the proper sized bundles - oops.

The biggest problem was deciding what exactly to do with all of it?  More specifically, what exactly to do with it when I have a husband who doesn't like garlic?  Okay, 100 clove chicken would take care of it, but it's off the list and garlic studded pork roast is a big no-no around here too, so how about garlic confit?

Following the idea from this recipe I covered about 10 heads of garlic with olive oil, a few sprigs of thyme, a few bay leaves, peppercorns and salt and baked it in the oven for a couple of hours until it was a deep golden brown.  The smell was amazing and as an added bonus it totally vampire proofed my house - for a few hours anyway. 

When garlic is roasted, or confited it loses all of it's bite and is transformed into sweet mellow-i-ness with a buttery soft texture.  The olive oil from this recipe is intensely flavored as well and is a great dipping oil.  Use the garlic for garlic bread, pasta sauces or baked with a wheel of brie.  

However you use it, just make sure you do so reasonably quickly, because garlic and oil can mean botulism.  You know, that same wonder toxin that's been transformed into the anti-wrinkle wonder drug Botox?  The up side to death by garlic - you'll be sporting the face of a 20 year old at the pearly gates.  :)

Crab Cakes

Wanna be a better cook without quitting your job, leaving home for four months and heading off to cooking school in Vancouver?  Well okay then, you should head over to Rouxbe and sign up for their on-line cooking school.  Pronto!

The site is a scrumptious collection of detailed video recipes and lessons that come complete with on-line quizzes.  The recipes have yet to disappoint and I've learned tons of kitchen stuff you just can't find in books, like how to sharpen knives and recognize a properly heated pan.  It's an invaluable resource and the instructors on the site are from NWCAV so it's serious business - borrowing a few words from Alton Brown it's a veritable pantheon of culinary "expertise".

And once you sign up, I have to recommend proceeding directly to the crab cakes.  I switched up the recipe a bit by adding a touch of orange oil, Sambal Oelek and roasted sesame oil and they were nothing short of heaven.  Happy cooking school for everyone!