Chef E. is very supportive of us finding our own recipes for this mod and I am thrilled to report that I have convinced my class to substitute Michael Ruhlman’s headcheese recipe from Charcuterie for whatever blah recipe for a blah terrine that we were originally assigned. 

A mere week from now I will be simmering a whole pig’s head!

I’ve decided to spend my Sunday afternoons over the next few weeks experimenting with gazpacho, specifically, to follow recipes in search of the best possible formula.  I have long improvised with tasty results, but like any tomato lover, I want to make the very best of the brief window of time that they are available.  My hope is that by the end of the summer I can make on with the tomatoes from my fire escape.

My love affair with gazpacho has its roots in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.  I have no idea if this film stands the test of time, and really it doesn’t matter.  The image of Carmen Maura channeling her frustration and some pharmaceuticals into a blender full of whirring tomatoes intended for her ne’er-do-well lover cemented my notions about elegantly tough broads and food.  And as with drinking coffee and dismissing The Plague as lesser Existentialism, eating gazpacho became a way for 16 year old me to feel worldly.

This week I made a basic, classic Andalusian gazpacho.  The recipe is easier to execute than making bloody mary mix and quite tasty:  unctuous without being too oily, rich and complex beyond its brief list of ingredients.  Although it has no dairy, it has the mouthfeel of a light cream of tomato soup.  Very tomatoey, and very ungilded, Andalusians prefer their gazpacho without a whole mess of crunchy bits floating within, but with a simple scattering of peppers on top.  And no cucumbers, please.

The recipe for Classic Andalusian Gazpacho is here.

Today’s Great Man was Thomas Keller, and his Great Food was indeed great.  I gave myself over to the spirit of the activity and cut everything with as much precision as I could muster, plucked individual fronds from the frisee head’s tender heart, cooed lovingly to my tomatoes as I prepared them for confiture.  I tapped into the part of my personality that has to have things just so, the part that would rather start fresh than continue in mediocrity. 

As a result, my salad of haricot verts, tomato tartare and chive oil was an elevation of its elements, and Chef E. gave it full approval.  The haricot - each measuring exactly 1″ - are dressed in a softly whipped cream lacedwith red wine vinegar.  The tartare consisted of slowly baked tomatoes tossed with minutely minced herbs and olive oil.  The chive oil was triple strained.  I was even able to execute the tomato powder, which according to the Chef has eluded other classes.  It really wasn’t difficult, just required obsessive blotting and checking on my tray of drying tomato pulp.

Keller’s philosophy around presenting food to diners is to use the law of diminishing returns to his advantage.  He wants to put just enough in front of you to whet, but never satiate, your appetite.  The food on your plate should be gone before you feel as though you have had enough.  To paraphrase and personalize his belief, after mowing a 7 acre lawn on a hot July day, that first beer tastes like heaven.  The second beer is just another beer.

Now, I enjoy that second beer, and I enjoy a messy plate of homey food, too.  But there is something sexy about restraint, and the elegant sufficiency of a perfect bite has its place in the rich tapestry of eating experiences.

I trailed this evening at Prune.

Prune is sort of a magical place. 

I could tell you about the bang-up meal I had there around my birthday this year, the kind of meal where the kitchen and waitstaff seem to conspire with you to give you an effervescently lovely time.

I could elaborate on the force of the woman who owns it, or the charm of the tight and tidy line kitchen, or the largely female comraderie of the prep kitchen, or the healthy communication between front and back of house, or the smoky, sweet stewed pork shoulder with salsa verde, or the lovingly thumbed through books on the cookbook shelf.

What is harder for me to articulate is how it made me feel to spend a day there.  It has something to do with knowing that I can make a meaningful life in this industry, and that Prune would be a good step in that direction, that I’ll get from it what I give and walk away with the right skills, whether that means I go on to work the line for an arbitrary amount of time or be a journeywoman who collects wisdom about how to care for and cure meat, or apply for grants to do work study with cheesemakers, or manage a good NYC kitchen well, or start up the Old Stove Tavern in a New England college town, or all of these things.

Prune, in all its humble and charismatic deliciousness, feels like the right direction.  I think I am going to spend my externship there.

At work a couple of weeks ago my gifted chef friend JC made a dish of grilled watermelon and pork belly.  He was bored, I was hungry, we had both ingredients in the kitchen.  My socks were knocked off.  When I staggered into the kitchen swooning, he fessed up that he had poached the recipe from Fatty Crab.

Had the original last night.  Fatty Crab has been on the list of places to dine for a while, as I love me some dried fish and chilis, but knowing that the sublime melon-and-pork combo had its home there sent it skyrocketing to position one.

Each bite comingling sweet, smoky, fatty and juicy, punctuated by astringent scallion and tangy pickle, was almost as good as making out.

Also ordered some grilled fatty duck, and the spicy rice, curried chicken, poached egg and sambal combo called nasi lemak (which is my fave dish at Nyonya, a more humble Malaysian joint in Chinatown).  Both of these were tasty and I look forward to leftover nasi, but by the point they arrived I was completely distracted by the deliciousness already in front of me. 

When I’m feeling more flush I’ll be back for the chili crab and may upgrade from PBR to an off-dry Reisling.  Most certainly worth another visit. 

We kicked off  the set of “Great Men and the Great Food They Make” classes today with Mario Batali recipes.  After a droll lecture in which we learned that once upon a time in the not too distant past Batali was just a guy opening a restaurant around the corner, we went on to make a few of his greatest hits.

My assignment was to make a fennel-dusted sweetbread dish with a quince gastrique (sauce of vinegar and sugar) and agrodolce onions, shallots and scallions.

It was great not only to get right back into making real food after the sojourn through desserts, but especially to make sweetbreads that were more in keeping with how I think they should be served.  In the past we’ve braised sweetbreads, and used them to stuff quail.  Both of those dishes were gloopy.  Batali’s recipe resultedin crisp and, as far as offal goes, light meat, and the fennel and the texture resulted in it tasting and feeling like the creamiest sausage in the land.  The best part was that my classmates, heretofore avowed sweetbread haters, actually thought they were edible.

We finished up with pastry yesterday morning with a practical exam (pipe “happy birthday (name)” in chocolate, roll out a pie crust) and I received the good news that Chef E. will be stepping in to instruct our final module, in which we cover “Great Food of Great Men” and garde manger.

This is great for so many reasons - she is a charming combination of tough and quick to laugh, she is interested in food science, she is curious at the same time that she has a wealth of knowledge.  Mostly though, I am excited because she brings to the classroom not only a zeal for teaching but a true, undiminished love for food.

I mean, I know it is a car-type of thing used to race around a track, but it isn’t a stock car and I don’t think it is a drag racer.  It was sitting in the back of Cooper Union’s engineering building.

I hate not knowing names for things that I know are named.  I get this feeling whenever I’m tromping around a quarry or construction site or browsing a medical supply store.  It is the opposite of the most wonderful feeling I get when I see a bird or a plant that I’ve never encountered before but have exactly the correct name.

I picked up a pint of sour cherries at the market today and stopped in at Astor to buy a bottle of maraschino liquor in order to execute Melissa Clark’s recipe for homemade maraschino cherries.  It was quick and easy, and when the cherries are properly steeped in the fragrant Italian booze, we’re going to have Manhattan Night at the restaurant, hopefully in coincidence with a viewing of the new print of Manhattan at the Film Forum.

With leftovers of the “distinctively funky” maraschino liquor, I’ll be making the “Seventh Heaven” from the always helpful Cocktail Chronicles.

Seventh Heaven

• 1 3/4 ounce gin
• 1/4 ounce fresh grapefruit juice
• 1/2 ounce maraschino liqueur
• fresh mint sprig

Shake with cracked ice and strain through a fine-mesh strainer into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a mint leaf.

Today we practiced plating desserts, going through days worth of refrigerated mousses and cakes and sauces and creams.  For 3 hours we glopped things together on plates and then fobbed them off on other classes or crammed them in our own greedy mouths.  Afterwards we cleaned out the fridge, packed up any leftovers, and reviewed for Monday’s final pastry exam.

Dessert makes many people happy.  I don’t get it, but I know it is true - my best friend lights up at the idea of a sweet at the end of a meal, and a good dining experience for her is incomplete without it.  If and when I own my own restaurant, I will have to serve dessert as so many people enjoy it. I learned a thing or two in this mod that will help me in this endeavor.  But I’ll keep it much simpler than what we did in class today.

My chef approved everything I made, and the most hideous, wrong, embarassing plate I created, done as an internal “you wouldn’t dare” dare, was the most celebrated choice of all.  If this was put in front of me in a restaurant I would leave in a huff.  But the class dug it.  Get it?  White Chocolate Mouse?  Corny.

This is how you write “Happy Birthday” in chocolate in Korean.  Thanks to Charles for spelling it out.