Culinary Boot Camp

Whenever I tell people that I have a food blog, the follow up question is usually, “oh, what do you like to cook?” And for as many times as I’ve gotten that question, I still don’t have a good answer.  I usually stammer something out–sometimes I say the thing I cooked last, sometimes I admit that I really don’t know how to cook, but I can read, so I just follow recipes–but truth be told, I don’t actually like to cook anything in particular.  I don’t have a go-to recipe (I rarely make anything more than once) and I’m more the type of person to read about something and want to make it rather than having the ingredients at hand and deciding what to create from there.  And then there’s the whole Type A personality that has already been discussed , which makes baking much more soothing to my already [slightly] frantic mind.

Not being one to ease into things gradually, I decided to remedy my lack of cooking fundamentals by taking an intensive culinary course at Kendall College.  We should pause here to discuss the fact that anything related to boot camp, drills or authority in general is not something that usually appeals to me (although I did consider joining the JAG corps after law school until I learned that even lawyers in the Army have to go to basic training).  My report card from band camp one summer said, “Heather has a distinct problem with authority.” I wanted to frame it; my family was mortified (and query why 12 year old kids need report cards at camp?!?).  Anyhoo.  I was a little nervous that we were going to be forced to do push ups if we couldn’t dice an onion in less than 30 seconds, but I thought that it was the best way to get a working knowledge of the basics so I could [hopefully] be left to my own devices in the kitchen.

I’m going to tell you to sign up immediately for this class. Don’t wait to finish reading this post–I’ll still be here when you get back.  We started the first of two days (with fabulous Chef/Instructor Heidi) learning about different types of knives and how to hold them to make the most of our chopping efforts.  We started with chives and worked our way up to jalepenos (with time for onions, shallots, carrots, potatoes and leeks).  I consider that part a success since I still have all ten fingers.  From there we moved on to learning how to cut up a whole chicken (which is seriously cost effective and not the least bit icky like I imagined. Note: icky is a technical kitchen term).  The carcass, legs and thighs, along with most of our chopped veggies, went into huge pots to make our chicken stock, which would become the base for our cream of broccoli soup and minestone.  Day 1 ended with making creme brulee and me basically crawling home after standing for 6 hours.

Day 2 started with a salt, spice and herb lesson (most valuable: kosher salt can be used for cooking and baking. Who knew? Sea salt is a finisher; regular table salt can overpower the other flavors.  Also, you can dry fresh herbs in the oven to have on hand or chop them up and roll them in to butter for a yummy bread, pasta or fish topping. Oh! And freshly grated cinnamon smells like Red Hots and nothing like the kind found in the jars.  That last one is a personal observation).   We moved on to braised pork shoulder that had marinated in a happy wine bath overnight and then we seared and put in a 300 degree oven for 5 hours.  We got to eat our roasted pork loin with rosemary and wrapped in pancetta for lunch, followed by our creme brulee from the previous day.  We also made beef stir-fry, chicken piccata and tiramisu.

But the thing that made me happiest was the duck breast with a balsamic cherry sauce.  Duck is one of the things I love most in the world, and I had no idea that it was something that I could make at home.  And now?? Now I feel as though I could have duck at every meal (and I would if I could).  We seared the duck breast for about 10 minutes and then put it in the oven to finish cooking.  I missed out on the making of the sauce (we worked in teams of 4 and I was busy making the potatoes cooked in duck fat–yes you read that right), but trust me when I tell you it could make your eyes roll back in your head.  I don’t know that I’ve had a more perfect bite of food that I’ve actually had a hand in making than the duck, cherry, potato combo.  You’ll note there are no pictures of it, because I was too busy eating.  Um, promise to take some next time I make it.  Which will be tonight…and tomorrow night…and the night after….

Seared Duck Breast with Balsamic Cherry Sauce (courtesy of Kendall College)

Cinnamon Rolls

 

I’m a total morning person. If I have work to do, I’d much rather go to bed at 10pm and wake up at 4am than stay up late.  Obviously I was a lot of fun in college.  I think I was one of the few people who actually left parties to go to bed (plus my grandfather always said nothing good happens after midnight.  Now, we all know “good” things can happen after midnight, but when you think back on it the next morning, it’s unlikely to fall into any category that constitutes good for a grandfather.  I digress…).  This saved me from gaining the notorious Freshman Fifteen, because I was tucked in well before the late night pizzas were delivered.  Senior year, I instituted the 11:30pm rule in our house which meant that on a school night, no one was allowed to wake me up unless the house was on fire, I was on fire or someone had died.  Don’t you wish you’d lived with me?  The 11:30 rule has become the 10:30 rule since I now live in a CST timezone.  I’m really not kidding about this; I’ve actually had friends ask if they can break the 10:30 rule to call me (I usually say yes…).

I have no idea where I was going with this (I actually wrote that paragraph last night and then, guess what? I got sleepy, so I’m finishing it this morning and have no idea what I was going to say next.  True story.).  At any rate, I truly believe that breakfast is the most important meal of the day for many reasons, but it’s rare that I have anything more than cereal.  I really want to be one of those people who wakes up and squeezes orange juice to go with my freshly made waffles and crisp bacon, but for all of my morning person-ness, this is likely never to happen.  Why would I do that when there are perfectly good brunch spots within walking distance? I’m all for reinventing the wheel recipe-wise, but not if it’s going to stand in the way of bacon, you know?

So I was all over making these cinnamon rolls because I was craving them and it was too cold and rainy to go outside just for baked goods, especially when I had a delicious recipe from The Chopping Block and all of the ingredients.  But, you know what? I should have braved the elements because these are so ridiculously time consuming that I didn’t even want them half way through.  Seriously. It took me an hour to make the dough, what with the cooling times and mixing and figuring out how many ounces are in 3-3/4 cups of flour (that last part has more to do with my math skills than the recipe).  At any rate, I decided to just let the dough rise overnight, because it was close to lunch time by the time I finished making it and I couldn’t be bothered.  Putting them together was another lengthy process and all I could think was thank goodness there was no one waiting for these because they would likely have given up on me and gone out to get the canned version that bakes in 10 minutes.

That said, they are as ridiculously tasty as they are ridiculously time consuming.  The dough is sweet and chewy and I created a little icing based on the bourbon bread pudding version that is lick your fingers worthy.  So, if you are a total morning person who wants to spend some quiet time kneading dough while everyone else sleeps, make these this weekend.  Otherwise, I’ll catch you at brunch.  I’ll be the girl in the back cozying up to a plate of bacon…

Cinnamon Rolls (courtesy of The Chopping Block)

Shrimp Scampi and Slow Roasted Beef Tenderloin

Last week a few friends and I decided to take a cooking class at the Chopping Block, because one friend had gotten a gift certificate that she swore she was just using as a coaster and the rest of us really had nothing better to do on a random Monday night in February.  I’ve taken classes there before, but this was the first time that I’ve ever gone with friends and I’m fairly certain that we, along with our two bottles of wine, snarky comments and complete irreverence, won’t be allowed back any time soon.  Oh, we were good students and paid attention (kind of), but it’s never a good sign when the head instructor names your group the Rascals 15 minutes into class and the other students suddenly become very busy with zesting their lemons when we tried to be friendly (at least I think we tried. Maybe not…).

I blame the fact that all of us are complete Type A personalities, the class was on a Monday evening after a weekend of various ups and downs for all of us, we were having a heated—and not so subtle—debate on the hotness of the two instructors (cleverly named Mean Hot Chef and Nice Hot Chef), and the fact that the class was called “Seal the Deal,” in anticipation of Valentine’s Day, on why we probably aren’t going to be named Teacher’s Pets any time soon.  I mean, we followed instructions for the most part (except that whole adding salt before we were supposed to when it came to the red wine reduction sauce.  Luckily Mean Hot Chef caught us in time) and we didn’t set ourselves or anything on fire, and our final dish looked like everyone else’s.  But, I can kind of see how the wine drinking and the picture taking (I’m the guilty party on this one) and the endless questioning (“How long do you grill the radicchio?” “I really don’t like giving specific grilling times, since each grill is different.” “Oh. Ok, that makes sense. But if you had to give a specific time, what would it be?” [Insert sigh and eye roll here]) could turn a peaceful class into the kind of thing that makes instructors wonder what they did in a past life to deserve this fresh hell. 

Our menu, which was shrimp scampi (side note here: we learned that Scampi means shrimp, so basically the dish is called shrimp shrimp and that made us ridiculously happy.  It doesn’t take much.), grilled radicchio with balsamic glaze, slow roasted beef tenderloin with herb roasted potatoes and red wine reduction and a flourless chocolate cake with bourbon caramel sauce, was actually pretty easy but looked very impressive, and took, from start to finish 2 hours (that includes us playing around and posing for pictures with sharp knives.  Dear lord, what would our mothers say?!). 

I wish I could tell you some tricks that we learned along the way, but I fully admit that this class was more about spending time with my friends than actually learning to cook.  But in the end, isn’t that what it’s all about?  I mean, the point of learning to cook is so you’ll be able to share a meal with people you love, right?  Well, that and hanging out with hot chefs.  That last part can take you pretty far…

Shrimp Shrimp and Beef Tenderloin with Red Wine Reduction (courtesy of The Chopping Block)

Soup Dumplings (Shanghai Dumplings)

Many many months ago, Michelle and I got it into our heads that we wanted to make soup dumplings.  I’d read a recipe for them, but had never actually tasted them (sensing a theme here?) and Michelle had eaten them, but couldn’t find a good recipe.  We had all of these visions of how we would do a mini-cooking demonstration in her huge kitchen and post it here and become famous for our soup dumplings and end up on Good Morning America and Top Chef (ok, maybe that last part was more my vision than hers, but whatever).  Between the time we decided to try this (sometime last October) and the time we actually did it (sometime in April), I actually did get to try some dumplings, and even though they were prepackaged ones, they were tasty enough to get me hooked.  In the time since Michelle and I created our own version and now (let’s forget that two seasons have come and gone and that we’re well into a third), neither of us have tried the recipe again.  But we totally want you to, because it was yummy and fairly easy and totally impressive (and it wasn’t the bottle and a half of wine we drank while cooking that made us think that). 

We ended up using two recipes, one from Saveur and one from some random website I found when I googled “soup dumpling recipe.”  We like to believe that we are fairly good cooks (or in my case, a fairly good recipe follower), but we were stopped cold by the Saveur recipe, mainly because it made little sense to us, especially the first step of making gelatin out of pork skin.  What now?  Luckily, the second recipe said we could use gelatin packets, which we did.  The pork belly turned out to be the easiest of all of this, as Whole Foods had some on hand (call first) and I bet any big grocery store carries it (I was nervous about finding it, because it always seems so exclusive on menus, but there it was hanging out next to the pork loin).  Michelle found all of the other ingredients at a local Asian market and her grocery store and we decided to use pre-packaged wonton wrappers (they worked only ok.  They tore easily and we had to double wrap some of the dumplings, so we’d make our own next time [or how about you make some and tell us how it worked?]).

The other part of the recipe that we really didn’t get was where the soup part of the “soup dumplings” came in.  We knew that something would have to melt or dissolve and become a liquid, but we really couldn’t figure out what it was.  Michelle had the grand idea of freezing some soup first in a tiny star shaped ice cube tray (no particular reason for the stars, other than they were cute).   It wasn’t until we read the directions from the second recipe that we understood that it was the gelatin that would dissolve and give us our delicious soupiness (and maybe you all saw that one coming, but we–with 5 degrees between us–were completely bewildered).  We ended up doing two (ok, about 16) batches of dumplings, some with the frozen soup cubes and some with the gelatin.  The soup cubes were a lot faster, but the gelatin ones held together better.

If you’ve clicked on the Saveur link above (you can go ahead and do it now, I’ll wait), you’ve seen that the recipe has a lot of steps and as much as I’m committed to this whole blogging thing, I really don’t think you need me to retype it here.  But! I will give you our tweaks to each step in the recipe, so that you can run out, get the ingredients and impress your family or latest crush tonight…

1.  We are all for finding shortcuts to recipes to make the time between cooking and eating a little shorter.  We highly recommend using 2 packets of unflavored gelatin dissolved in 1-1/2 tablespoons of water and 1 tablespoon of soy sauce rather than all this crazy talk about boiling  and leaching pork skin. 

2.  We never really figured out why you needed to blanch the cabbage leaves, but we also didn’t figure out an alternative, so go ahead and do it.  We also didn’t have a bamboo steamer, so we used a colander (or the steam basket from a double pot) set over boiling water.

3.  This step is easy.  Go for it!

4.  This is the step where you break out the wine.  Really?  If you’re one of the people who just happens to have a meat grinder sitting in your kitchen, have me over; otherwise a food processor will do.

5.  We totally skipped this step and used premade wonton wrappers.  I think it would be worth trying to make your own wrappers, but make sure there is more wine somewhere.

6.  I highly recommend watching the little video that Saveur provides, because you think you know how to fold a dumpling (I mean, don’t we all think that?) until you read these directions and you realize that either you are illiterate or they make no sense.  We watched the video 3 days before we tried this, and ended up folding them any which way, but you aim high and do it right, ok?

7.  Don’t fall for the temptation of splitting one open to see if they are cooked, because all the soup will come out.  Not that we did that or anything.  Trust the timing directions here.  Totally worth the wait…

What’s Next?

We’ve discussed the fact that Heather doesn’t really know what to cook or bake on any given day.   And Michelle is super busy getting a PhD ([from Heather]: because she’s a rockstar like that!), so cooking has kind of taken a backseat to statistics.  Add to that the fact that buying the ingredients, actually making the dish, taking a gazillion photos of it and then writing about it takes time, and you can see why days, weeks, months pass before anything new and tasty is posted here. 

So!  We’re asking for your help (and knowing what nice and lovely people you are out there in food blog land, we know you won’t let us down [hint hint]).  Is there a recipe out there that you’ve been wanting to try, but don’t have the time to test?  Or one that you’ve tried that didn’t quite work and you want to know if it’s you or the recipe (trust us, it’s the recipe–you’re a fabulous cook!).  Or! Is there something you’ve tasted and really really want to duplicate, but can’t find a recipe for?  Send them to us and we’ll work on it and post our thoughts, tweaks and pictures (and totally give you the credit for how well it turned out).  You can leave it in the comments or email us at pestlemortar@sbcglobal.net. 

Of course, keep in mind that neither of us are independently wealthy, so let’s keep the recipes involving shaved truffles and foie gras to minimum.  And if there’s some exotic ingredient not readily available at our local grocery store, give us a hint as to where to get it.  Finally, it should come as no shock that neither of us are professional cooks or bakers, so if it involves plucking our own chickens or making mayonnaise from scratch, pretty much go ahead and figure we aren’t going to do it.   Otherwise, we are totally up for some challenges!

Think of us as your personal chefs and taste testers.  What can we make for you?

End of Summer Salad (not that summer actually ever started…)

Part of the reason—besides my procrastination—that I update so infrequently is that I really don’t know how to cook that many things.  Honestly, I have about six desserts that I make really well and about three dinner dishes that I feel confident about.  Nine specialties does not a blog make.  I have about 15 cookbooks, 100 back issues of Bon Appétit with all of my “must try one day” recipes tagged and six months worth of Food & Wine that started to magically appear in my mailbox and just as magically disappeared one day.  All of this to say that when I need to, I can follow a recipe pretty well, but god forbid I should be forced to cook a month’s worth of original meals on my own.  I am completely jealous of people who can look at a raw chicken and come up with seven different ways to prepare it without breaking out into a sweat. 

In an effort to get more comfortable in the kitchen, I try to take classes whenever I can. I don’t know that I’ve ever made one thing from any of the classes (aside from the couscous recipe below) ever again (sensing a pattern here?).  My cabinets are filled with all of the utensils I’ve sworn I’d use after the class—the mats and chopsticks from my sushi making class are still in the bag mocking me each time I open the drawer—and, like the road to hell, my kitchen is paved with the best of intentions.

Last winter I took a Moroccan cooking class at The Chopping Block with the hope that I could at least learn to prepare one entire meal that I could serve to people one day.  I don’t know who those people are or why they wouldn’t want to just eat out, but that was my plan.  On the menu that day was fennel spiced chickpea flatbread, Moroccan braised chicken with spices and apricots,  a date, saffron and mint couscous salad and an orange and saffron crème brulée.  I was paired with a mother and daughter who had some obvious tension between them.  The mother felt she knew everything there was to know about cooking and the daughter couldn’t have cared less about the class or learning how to dice an onion.   I tend to side with mothers in these little tiffs, mainly because I can only imagine what my own mother has had to put up with over the years, but after the mom tried to school me on pouring cream into a mixer and then tried to grab a knife out of my hand while I was “incorrectly” chopping dates (is there such a thing?) I understood why the daughter rolled her eyes every 25 seconds.  She and I shared a brief moment of schadenfreude when the mom poured an entire ramekin of saffron into our chicken (when we were supposed to use four strands).  The nice instructor’s head almost popped off, considering saffron can run about $10 a gram and Mommy Dearest had just poured about $100 into our pan of chicken breasts.

At any rate, the meal was actually pretty simple, and looks impressive enough to serve when those mystery people come over.  It’s a little much for a random Tuesday, though, which is why I’ve never tried it at home.  The only part of the meal I’ve duplicated is the couscous, which is the perfect thing to take to a picnic or make a batch of and have for lunch during the week.  What I like most about it is that once you get the basics in, anything you like can be added like tomatoes, tuna, or olives. I’ve also done it with orzo instead of couscous, which turned out just as well (add a little olive oil while it’s cooling). 

So if you’re lucky enough to live somewhere warm enough for a picnic this Labor Day, here’s your side dish.  Invite me over when you decide to make the chicken…

 

Baking 101: Weighing Ingredients and a little Pound Cake

A couple of summers ago, I took a bread making class in Paris and in the first lesson learned how important it is to weigh the ingredients, especially the flour.   Since I have an aversion to anything remotely diet related, buying a food scale has been right up there with sucking down low carb shakes and gnawing my way through meal replacement bars.  To be perfectly honest, I worried that having a scale in my kitchen would tempt me to weigh everything I ate, which would eventually lead me to be that person at the family picnic pulling out premeasured packages of carrots and raisins.  But I believed my beloved French chef when he explained that if you didn’t weigh the ingredients you would come out with inconsistent results, so I bought a scale and–this is hard for me to say–it has changed my [baking] life.

I’m going to skip the part where I spent a Saturday evening measuring out flour and sugar and chocolate chips to see if what I would normally consider a cup (using that tried and true method of scooping out flour using a measuring cup and tamping it down until it fit) actually weighed what a cup should weigh.  All you need to know is that no, it does not.  What’s worse, I was actually using almost twice what I needed with my method.  Of course this meant that if I was adding almost 2 cups of flour to a recipe that called for 1, and not upping the amounts of everything else (especially the liquids), things were not going to be all goodness and joy as the recipe would want me to believe.  Also, what might work one time may not work another, because I may–in my pre-weighing days–use a 1-1/2 cups one time and 2-1/4 cups the next time (which is part of the reason why in most non-American cookbooks you’ll see measurements in grams, so ingredients can be easily weighed and measured).  Oh, the frustration over lost cakes and hard breads of my past! [insert fist shake]

After a lot of trial and error, and a lot of reading of cookbooks, I now know that a cup of flour is actually 4-5 ounces (which still annoys me. Is it 4? Or is it 5? Seriously?!).  According to Mark Bittman in How to Cook Everything, a cup of liquid is truly 8 ounces, but a solid like flour is not.  It is a lot of work to remember this and translate it into 1/2 and 3/4 cups after years of just scooping and going at it.  But! The results are worth it.  I made a pound cake for Easter that I’d done before with ok, but slightly dense, results.  This time, it was light and fluffy and moist and all-around yummy. 

Pound Cake

Two days later and it hasn’t dried out or turned crumbly.  So yeah, I refuse to have a people scale in my house, but am all about the food scale.  But I promise never to show up at your party with premeasured bags of raisins….