Before we began fabricating our fish and preparing our mise-en-place for today’s dishes, we reviewed braising, stewing, steaming and simmering techniques and discussed the properties of water in solid, liquid and gaseous phases.  You may know that at sea level, the boiling point of water is 212 degrees, and that as elevation increases, the boiling point decreases.  What this means is that meat cooks at lower temps when braised at a high elevation.  So what I want to know is, do you get a more toothsome braise as a result?  Can I test this in a fake-high elevation chamber set up next to a regular kitchen, with two identical cuts prepared in the same fashion?  Surely NASA has such a chamber. 

Today we covered steaming and shallow poaching, and worked with fish.  One of the dishes we prepared was striped bass rolled into little coils, stuffed with sauteed leek and simmered in Sauternes and shallots.  The rolling procedure looks so lovely in out textbook that I figured it to be a difficult maneuver, but it is actually fairly simple:

Lay out your fillets with the side that would have skin, up

Lay your stuffing over the fillets and roll from tail end to head end

Roll the fish roll in a strip of parchment paper to keep it tightly coiled when you submerge halfway in liquid for shallow poaching

When you take the little guys out of the liquid you can pinch the paper right off the coiled fish, and top with a sauce

I have made a lot of progress in working with fish, I have to say.  I still massacre the skinning process, but I was really economical in getting the meat off the skeleton.  Chef E. told us of how in her first job, after she filleted a fish, her chef came over, took the usable meat she had left on the skeleton off and weighed it, priced it at market rate for that fish (in this sad case, it was tuna), and deducted the dollar value for the wasted fish from her paycheck.  Needless to say, she got better quickly.  That Chef E. is one tough cookie.

I ate very well as a kid, my mom is an excellent cook and a wizard at stretching a limited food dollars, but when times were especially tight in the ’70s the answer was dry peanut butter toast or a gloppy lentil stew, and as a consequence, I am sort of resistant to both of these bare-bones budget basics.  I never see a lentil recipe and think “Oh, that sounds delicious!” and when I see something like salmon with lentils on a bistro menu I wince, even knowing that they are fancy dupuy lentils caressingly prepared.

In fact the very sight of lentils in bins at the food coop elicits a little bit of scorn, the exact same kind of scorn (nostalgic and affectionate but very self-superior) that macrame and daishikis on white dudes brings out in me.

Today we continued wet cooking methods, making a Korean short rib braise, a Moroccan chicken tagine, and an oxtail stew, all tasty, but the real standout was the lentil stew, pictured above.  No hippie fare, and made exotic to my taste by the sweet-tart pomegranate molasses, this was wonderful not only because it helped me to revise my opinion of lentil stew, but because it gave me a break from eating meat.  I know, embarrassment of riches, I should be so lucky to get sick of eating meat, but I challenge you to eat animal protein for lunch and dinner for weeks and not feel a little tuckered out.  If you take my challenge and then want to mix it up with this excellent stew, the recipe is here.

Today we progressed from braising to stewing, which means we added more liquid and finished cooking on the stovetop.

We made Coq au Vin (pics and notes below), a thinnish, dark, herbes-y Provencal lamb stew, fluffy-and-creamy blanquette de veau (a veal stew which is a pleasant nap for your mouth even though blanquette means “white one” and not “blanket”) and Ratatouille.  The Ratatouille was unremarkable in ingredients but exceptionally tasty due to my teammate’s excellent job dicing all of our vegetabes into teeny tiny uniform peices, allowing them to melt together.  Made me think that a grated ratatouille might be good. 

Chef E. praised the Ratatouille and encouraged us to crack and egg into it and allow it to poach in the juices.  I would have taken a photo of this adorable and delicious ovo-vegetarian dish except that it was so damn tasty MK unhinged her jaw and devoured the whole plate before I could get my camera.  I will be recreating with leftover ‘touille this evening.

About the Coq au Vin:  I’m crazy about this dish.  It manages to be comforting and sophisticated at the same time.  It has mushrooms in it.  The chicken stays tender.  It goes well with booze and starch.  Three cheers.  Today’s was so much better than the stuff I’ve made in the past, and I am sure of the threefold reasons.

1. I got to use a badass Le Creuset casserole which happened to be in my preferred color, “flame”, a very lucky and skill-enhancing color indeed 

   

2. I kept on top of the 185 degree thing, didn’t let it get to a full boil (relevant for stewing as well as braising)
3. I rendered my lardons in lard, or, my bacon in bacon fat.

That’s right, people, the white you see in the upper right of that photo is LARD.  I cooked fat in fat.  Then I cooked everything else in the fat film left after I took the fat out of the pan for use in a roux to thicken the sauce at the end.  The recipe classically calls for bacon, but I’ve never given it this much care before. Or this much extra fat.  It was good. 

No class today due to a school event, and absolutely no desire to go out and pay for food, so rather than write about lunch I’m posting about volunteering.

My best friend’s parents instilled in me a strong ethos of service from childhood on, and I’ve always strived to make volunteer activities a part of my life in part so that I have an honest answer when Papa asks me, meaningfully, after I’ve nattered on about work, “Yes, but what are you doing?” 

Some years I’ve done better than others, sometimes I’ve used fundraising around athletic endeavors as my contribution, and often I’ve tried to structure my volunteer time so that it compliments my career objectives (service is still service, even when not totally altruistic).

Right now I’m spending time each week at God’s Love We Deliver, an organization that has nothing to do with organized religion and everything to do with love - in this case, love as expressed through the provision of nutritious meals to individuals who need them.

Started in the ’80s as a grassroots response to the AIDS crisis, today GLWD prepares and delivers thousands of meals each week to a client group that is unable to provide or prepare food for itself due to any life-threatening illness.  It is a remarkable and well-endowed organization, huge in scope (their delivery area is all of New York City and parts of New Jersey, and they have a 1,300+ client base), run like a tight ship but still tremendously responsive to individual needs; one of the main objectives is to ensurethat each client receives a delivery of food within 24 hours of first contact.

My contribution is to prep food for cooking, thereby getting some knife skill-practice and building up my hand callouses while doing something for someone other than myself, whose needs are so much more pressing than mine.  What are you doing? 

Endive is delicious in a salad, as its own crispy snack, as a fancy finger-food vehicle for the end bits of smoked salmon, and if there were any doubt about the sense of suggesting that farmers diversify and plant more, a  heavenly braise of endive wrapped in bacon should settle the matter.

Braised Endive

Wash and trim 8 pieces of endive, then wrap each in a slice of bacon.  Heat a large saucepan and sweat 1/2 an onion (diced) and a whole carrot (sliced) in 4 Tbsp butter for 5 minutes.  Add 10 ounces of veal stock (chicken stock will do in a pinch) and simmer for 5 minutes.  Lay the endive in the pan and top with S&P.  Cover the pan with parchment paper (if you have some; the dish will work without this step), bring to a boil, cover the pan with a lid and place in a 375 degree oven until the endive is tender (around 30 minutes).  Remove the endive and drain.  If the bacon is flabby, run it under a broiler for a minute.  If you are feeling showy, strain the braising liquid and reduce to a sauce.  Eat as a side dish with a simple roast, or just have it on a piece of crusty bread as I did for lunch.

We had a good rhythm down and the classroom was relatively peaceful this morning.  In addition to endive and fennel braises, we prepared red snapper, beef cheeks and Osso Buco.  Osso Buco means “bone mouth” and refers to the ample marrow available for sucking or spooning out of the end product of this dish.  Back in the day, marrow was popular enough to call for its own utensil:

Bring marrow back.  See how pretty it is, peeking out of the bone holes?  I’ll be having this for dinner tonight.

Braising is a fairly simple cooking technique: brown your meat and aromatic vegetables, cover both halfway with some flavorful liquid like stock or wine (or both), bring to a boil, put the whole production in the oven and simmer until cooked to a fork-tender state - not falling off the bone, but not clinging too tightly to the bone, either.

What was new to me in preparing braises today was the notion that there is a specific simmering temperature that optimizes the end product. At 185 degrees, the collagen and connective tissue in the meat will break down, but the proteins responsible for meat’s red color will not.  If left to braise at 185 degrees for long enough, you get a melting piece of meat that has gone through a period of contraction - during which gelatin is wrung out of the meat fibers and into the braising liquid, leaving it rich and flavorful - and into a state of relaxation, leaving you with tender meat that still shows some rosy glow when cut into, as well as a great sauce base. 

So 185 is the precise number for simmering.  Lower than 185 and you don’t get the melt.  Much higher than 185 degrees and you lose the appetizing look of reddish meat.  Yet again, food magic comes down to simple chemistry, and yet again I wish I had a really good instant read thermometer, as my dinky school-issued one is in constant need of calibration.

We braised red cabbage (eh), leeks (should have tasted better, I would have altered the braising liquids if left to my own devices, or dressed them in a vinaigrette afterwards), lamb shanks (when I was in Wales a few years ago I had lamb shanks that tasted of salt air, moss and butter and oozed sweet marrow onto the accompanying carrots, and since have held this cut of lamb in the highest esteem; this wasn’t as transporting, but it lived up to the cut’s potential), chicken thighs with mushrooms (oh, chicken thighs, oh mushrooms, what an earthy, happy couple you make), and monkfish with olives, preserved lemons and Moroccan spices. 

After class I walked home through the greenmarket, went for a run and then devoured the leftover monkfish for lunch with a hunk of bread, sat cross-legged on my apartment floor, windows open, categorizing what I learned today, re-reading recipes and writing out tomorow’s recipes. “Will I ever be this happy again?”,  I ask myself every day, and know I can’t possibly be, and love school even more because I know it. 

We had our first (only?) dropout today.  She was a very nice woman who felt completely stressed out by everything we we do in class.  The irony is that she has been a professional nurse for 20-odd years, and as important as I think good cooking is, it isn’t life-or-death. 

But there you go.  One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor. 

Squab, pigeon, dove - whatever you call the birds of the family Columbidae, their out-sized breasts make gamy good eating.  Even the nastiness of the pigeons on New York City streets, their incessant air shaft cooing and musty smell (if “flea-ridden” had a smell, it would be the smell of city pigeons)…even these associations do not turn me off eating the non-urban variety.

I wish I could take credit for the beauty above, but it was prepared for me at Aux Lyonnais in Paris last fall.  Today I made one of my own, seen below with some cauliflower which I marinated in a garlic-curry infusion and roasted.  No less elegant in preparation (we made a porcini-truffle butter and barded the little guys before pan searing and roasting them) I clearly have some work to do on tarting up my food so it looks Paul Bocuse beautiful.

We also prepared a veal tenderloin in an oyster mushroom pan sauce - messy, but creamilicious maximus!

All of this was after our first quiz of this module.  I think I did fine, but the relief of it being over, it being the end of a long week, and the complexity of the recipes we were preparing resulted in a truly spasmodic morning of cooking.  OK was my partner, so good times and jokes abounded (although sadly, no tales of seeing Rue McLanahan, whom OK was supposed to see live last night although instead he studied for the quiz), but working with him only added to my general goofiness.  Our food came out tasting very nicely and I don’t think we were the only ones who were overwhelmed (the whole class seemed a little extra klutzy today)… but I was glad to take off my apron and gladder still that my chore today was not dishes.

Roasting.  Primitive stuff, but so satisfying, and a simple, well-roasted chicken is a tribute worthy of Prometheus.  I’ve always had a deft touch with roasting, although I took it to a new level today when we barded (rubbed fat - in this case, butter - all over) our poultry and applied a persillade-breadcrumb crust to our rack of lamb. 

(I say “we” and “our” - today’s cooking partner was the very agreeable B., a guy with good ideas and pleasant curiosity, who is proud of his Filipino heritage and whom I was excited to tell about Tuesday’s meal, posted below.)

We frenched a rack of lamb during butchering, and it was a tedious mess of scraping and pulling at the membrane that covers the rib bones.  Today Chef E. taught us a great trick that makes short work of the excess fat, sinew and membrane, and gives you a good latissimus dorsi work out to boot.

First remove the excess fat from your rack.  Then mark either end of the width right below the meat, and cut between the marks, running your knife over the bones and through the tissues.  Take extra care to puncture the tissue between the ribs.

Take a piece of string and push its center point up between the first two ribs.  The picture below shows this step further on into the rack (C. is the best butcher in our class and she was nice enough to let me document her work!)  The loop is in C’s left hand and the tails of the string in her right hand.

  Next, tuck the tails through the loop and pull it into a tight knot. 

Once the knot is on there securely, stabilize the meat with one hand and PULL!!! down and back with your dominant hand.  It is a bit of a struggle (utilizing a piece of string long enough for me to wind around my fist a few times for extra leverage was effective) and you may need to cut through some tendony bits of surprising tensile strength, but once you get the hang, the whole mess comes off in one move.  Phew! 

Tuesday night I went to Cendrillon for a Filipino meal that managed to be at once homey and sophisticated.  I had first heard about this restaurant on Good Food, the excellent weekly KCRW show hosted by one of my food heroes, Evan Kleiman.  She had one of the owners on to talk about Filipino cooking and after hearing about the vinegar, chiles, multi-culti influences and love that define this cuisine, I was eager to give it a try.  The standout was a tangy, crisp salad topped with beef that had been marinated in a citrus fruit called kalimansa (similar to lime, but with a more floral flavor) and air-dried to create a jerky.  The chef-owner came over to chat with us and made some superb wine recommendations.  It isn’t cheap, but it was excellent and a really pleasant environment.

After dinner we had a nightcap at the lobby bar of the Bowery Hotel.  I have mixed - maybe just negative? -feelings about my neighborhood becoming the new boutique hotel enclave, and the exterior of this building is hideously ugly, but I do love a hotel bar…Its design is heavily influenced by Bar Marmont (fireplace, persian rugs, dark wood, furniture providing comfort and an air of faded regality), and made unique from its influence through the liberal use of taxidermy, Gotham-centric murals, and books.  (I like taxidermy a lot, am sitting below some pheasants as I write, and am made uncomfortable by its appropriation by Freemans and its ilk - is it ironic?  sincere?  I hate it when something I like becomes a trend.)  I wish it had opened in the fall as it is a good cold weather location both through decor and proximity to my apartment.  In all, a civilized place to park it for a gimlet, and a well-made gimlet to boot although inevitably crowds of a-holes will swarm the joint, so I’m glad I got to check it out while it is still building steam.

Rich in vitamins and fiber, the stem of the prickly pear is as tasty as it is nutritious.  It is common in Mexican cooking, where it is referred to as “nopales“.  I have always been intimidated by them, but turning one into a salad was suprpisingly easy.

First, remove the sharp, needly spines by gently scraping your knife against them.

Grill for a few minutes each side, until the cactus is soft and weepy (it has a slimy - “mucilaginous” -  texture like aloe or cooked okra).

Slice into strips.

Toss with a sliced, roasted poblano pepper, some diced tomato, half an onion sliced, a few tablespoons minced cilantro, a tablespoon or two of lime juice and S&P to taste, and serve with a grilled pork chop.

Then pack it up and give it to a hungry, pork-loving friend.