CafeChatNoir

Thanksgiving is just around the corner!!!

I think it’s pretty much my favorite holiday, and I’ll admit, I like it a lot better when I’m single.  No travel, no pretending to like green bean casserole or that sweet potatoes with melted marshmallows on top are not an affront to nature.  No getting sucked into someone else’s family dramas.  Did I mention NO TRAVEL?

I get to make up a whole mess of food, eat way more in one day than any healthy person should, and watch a bunch of football.  It’s the ultimate selfish I-get-to-do-it-MY-WAY holiday. :)

And I’m thankful that I’m smart enough to appreciate it.

And now I have to go find a turkey.

So, I actually got up early enough AND thought about it and headed over to the Farmer’s Market in Burke. (Usually I think about it in the afternoon and they close up at noon, so…) It’s really pretty small and parking is a touch of a challenge, but a nice way to spend a half hour.

Just wandered around, only picked up some chive cheddar cheese from Fields of Grace farms. Fair amount of nice produce, but all I could do was look and think, “Oooh, it all looks good.” but couldn’t come up with any particular thing to make with any of it. (I am a horrible cook that way – I would fail on Iron Chef.) But, this next week I’ll have to ponder things that need fresh green onions, radishes, mixed greens, fresh dill (OMG it smelled SO good) or new potatoes.

Couple places had good prices on strawberries, too, but I need a whole quart of strawberries like I need a hole in the head.

But, the best was the discovery of two potential local meat suppliers! ** Smith Family Farms does Angus Beef, Grass-Fed Chicken & Free Range Pork. Cibola Farms also does Free Range Pork and Buffalo. More expensive than the market, but I’ll have to give them a whirl sometime – they may very well be that much better, and I’d rather support small local farmers over the grocery store any day of the week. I’m definitely interested in how the pork is over what I can get from the grocery store.

** This is a big deal cause I got word that the slaughterhouse/butcher I had gone to before is no longer doing their own slaughtering, but bringing in frozen items.  Bummer.

I’ve actually responded to an email chain letter.

But this one I could get on board with – an *easy* recipe exchange. Send 1 recipe, add your name, take of the top person and toss out to friends who can cook. (Mazikeen, and AUTiger23 I tagged you among others.)

Anyone else that wants in on it, drop me a comment or email.

Stumbled on this today – looks like a great challenge for anyone – should get some good ideas taking this tack.

Eat Local Challenge

Sunday morning we were back at the Left Bank with Kevin Wirt, the Inn’s Pastry Chef. He made us fresh buttermilk biscuits and banana bread. Awesome breakfast. I’m not big on banana bread (I think I am the only person on the planet who is that way), but when it is straight out of the oven, it’s not bad at all.

I’d say we spent at least an hour picking his brains on methods, equipment, ingredients, food, and anything else we could think of. He was just super about it all. Also gave us recipes for all of these goodies:

– Banana Nut Bread
– Pumpkin Bread
– Cranberry Orange Scones
– Coconut Scones
– Cinnamon Walnut Scones
– Buttermilk Biscuits
– Cinnamon Raisin Biscuits
– NC Sweet Potato & Country Ham Biscuits

For lunch I headed down to Coastal Provisions for a great ham & swiss sandwich and some rosemary roasted potatoes and had a great little lunch on the beach.

Dinner was over at the Lifesaving Station restaurant and it was fantastic. Had the shrimp, corn & crab chowder which was just wonderful. Went with the special, which I have to figure out how to make on my own – pan seared silky snapper, served over thin sliced roasted potatoes and squash in a chardonnay sauce, with tabasco butter on top. It was just perfect. The butter gave it just a bit of a kick without being at all overwhelming and it just hit the spot. The sauce is fairly similar to one I make already, this was just a little thicker, and I think had more butter than I usually have in mine. Definitely have to give it a shot at some point.

All in all, it was a fantastic weekend, and I’m now resisting the urge to rip out my electric cooktop and finally replace it w/a gas range. :)

So Saturday morning I got up and headed over to the kitchen at the Left Bank restaurant. If you ever have the chance to muck around in a commercial/pro kitchen – do it. Gas ranges! Convection ovens! Prep bowls and spatulas as far as the eye can see! Tasting spoons! (I no longer feel like a freak for the fact that I routinely go through half a dozen spoons in the course of cooking something.) Seriously, I was in heaven the minute I walked in.

Chef Christine put the menu together based on what’s in season (or coming into season very soon) and we had an absolutely fantastic lunch as a result. The two main items were rockfish and soft-shelled crabs. She pulls the crabs out and they’re in a metal dish and iced down. She takes off the ice and is talking about something when someone says, “Um, are the crabs…moving?” Yup – still alive! Which makes perfect sense, but it was just wasn’t something anyone expected.

The kitchen was pretty decent sized, but there were 12 of us and the Chef, so we were a little cramped to start with, but quickly got to the point where we were working around each other very well. It was easy to be able to keep an eye out and see what was going on in other parts of the kitchen, so even if you were working on one thing, it was not a problem to see how something else was being made at the same time. Oh, and good for grabbing spoons and tasting things as we went along, too.

Basically everyone paired off and grabbed a recipe and went to town. Jo (my partner) and I started with cleaning the crabs – no one else really wanted to do it, I think because of the “still kicking” part – I got over the entire “meeting my lunch before I eat it” problem in about a minute… Pull the tab, clean the gills, cut off the face, next!

Once we got done w/cleaning the crabs, we passed them off to another pair for dredging and sauteing as they were already doing the sauce for them as well. We discovered that no one had taken on dessert yet, so that would be all us. It was a variation on strawberry shortcake – a orange-strawberry compote on orange poppyseed biscuits.

The chef had gone ahead and made the biscuits beforehand for time’s sake, which was very helpful. :) I looked at the recipe and realized this definitely couldn’t be a “prep as you go” thing given the cooking times and the order and timing of everything going in. Off to the racks in the back for prep bowls! I am a total mice in place* kinda gal anyway so the whole prep & staging before actual cooking comes naturally to me, and I honestly think it makes it easier when you actually start cooking anyway. I will say that I think it is definitely more difficult to try and prepare the same dish with another person vs. doing it on your own – especially if you’ve only met the person 15 minutes beforehand and have no idea what their kitchen work style is like. Fortunately it worked fine and no saucepans were thrown at each other in the course of making dessert.

Something I realized after the fact was that while I was having an absolute blast, I was also in complete “work mode” – we had to feed 12 people dessert, we had a great recipe, excellent ingredients and absolutely no reason whatsoever that this shouldn’t kick ass and dammit, it would. Totally in the zone. Chop, zest, juice, stop and think and look around and make sure the answer isn’t right in front of me before bothering Chef with a question, get everything staged in the order to be used, make sure I’m thinking a couple steps ahead so as not to forget anything, and most important, don’t do anything that would make Chef think I am a complete fuckup. Mind you, this was in no way any kind of a boot camp class or anything like that, but I still was in work mode anyway…and was loving it.

So, Jo got going on cutting up a ton of strawberries, while I fought with the oranges. (And won.) Chef did show me a much faster way to section them, which was a godsend, because while I do know how to do it, I just don’t have the mad skillz to do it quickly. Well, I didn’t before this weekend. Then it was cook, add something, stir, cook, make sure it’s not burning, stir, cook, add something, cook, done! Off to the racks in the back again to find the right container to put it in an ice bath, since there was no way it was going to cool down fast enough on it’s own. While we were waiting for it to get to a useable temperature, it was time for the whipped cream. Snag the mixer, cream, sugar and vanilla. Or, not… Check the prep table where Christine had put out the ingredients we’d be using, checked under the table, looked around the rest of the kitchen – no dice. Snagged Christine and asked where it was hidden – I was SO sure it was probably right in front of me the whole time, but turns out it hadn’t come over from the other kitchen. So, we skipped the vanilla in the whipped cream with no adverse effects, and I took care of that while Jo did the garnishes for it. After what seemed like forever trying to get the cream to soft peak stage, we finally got to put everything together. Have to say, it looked awesome when we got it all together.

By some awesome miracle (well, thanks to the excellent direction of Chef Christine), everything came out wonderfully and at the same time. We had enough food for a small army and it was all spectacular:

– Herb crusted rockfish. Awesome.
– Soft shelled crabs dredged in cornmeal and sauteed and served on a roasted corn sauce that was just to die for.
– Oven dried tomatoes – again, what a difference very fresh tomatoes make.
– Bacon cabbage slaw – the recipe we have can be made w/ white wine vinegar or champagne – we went w/the white wine vinegar. I think I’d go w/the champagne when I make it, because it was a touch vinegary to my taste, but still really tasty.
– Cream of asparagus soup – another super dish.
– Chilled asparagus salad with strawberry vinagrette and vanilla strawberries – can you tell asparagus and strawberries are in season? Also, just fantastic.
– Orange-Strawberry shortcake. Given that I had the recipe, cooked the stuff and put it all together, I knew exactly what it was supposed to taste like, and it tasted exactly the way it should, but it was still kind of overly sweet to me. But, everyone else devoured it, so it’s all good.

While we had our lunch, the sommelier, Lynette Sumner, gave us 4 different wines and went over pairing wine with food. This gal seriously knows her stuff – and if she wasn’t so incredibly nice, she’d be very intimidating. After about 5 minutes, I realized the most intelligent thing I could say about wine was, “I like red wine!”

Everything was just spectacular and everyone had a terrific time. I ended up getting a sandwich from Tommy’s Market for dinner, cause there was absolutely no way on earth I could finish another full meal after lunch.

So this weekend, I spent some time up at the Sanderling Inn for their “Cooking School Weekend” that their executive chef, Christine Zambito, put on. A very long time ago, the restaurant at Sanderling was the first place I really saw just how much impact changing chefs can have on a restaurant when they’re left to their own devices and allowed to do what they do best, so I found it oddly appropriate that my first ever formal cooking class would in the same place.

Friday night I arrived and they had a nice little reception upstairs at The Lifesaving Station restaurant. I figured it was just going to be a little meet & greet kind of thing, but no, it was better! Wine and hors d’oeuvres – and then Christine showed us how to make all the goodies we’d gotten to eat AND had recipes for all of them to take home. All of these were absolutely wonderful and easy as all get out to make, but look and taste fairly impressive. What we had:

- Sanderling Crab Dip – this is what they serve in the restaurant. This recipe is particularly good as far as I’m concerned because there is none of this adding artichokes or any other silliness – just lots of crab goodness.

- Roasted Red Pepper Hummus served on Belgian Endive – insanely easy and absolutely blows away anything I’ve ever bought prepared, ever. The presentation on the Belgian Endive looks great, and adds a great crispness to it.

- Smoked Salmon Canapés – Just your basic smoked salmon w/jazzed up cream cheese in pinwheels. Half on crackers, and the other half on cuke slices. I was really surprised at how good the ones on the cukes were – it wasn’t a combination I would have thought of (one of my biggest weaknesses w/food), but I really liked it.

- Bruschetta w/the following toppings:
– Black Olive Tapenade – I’ve had this before and could kind of take it or leave it, but this was out of this world. Not sure if it’s the dry cured olives, the fact that it was fresh or what, but I could have eaten this with a spoon.
– Diced tomatoes with Garlic & Herbs – All I can say is this shows how much of a HUGE difference really nice, fresh, not-ripened-on-a-truck tomatoes make. SO good.
– Herbed goat cheese – this is in my list of recipes, but I’m pretty sure this either wasn’t in with what we ate, or I somehow missed it, but it looks good and I’ll be giving that a go at some point as well.

So, we got ourselves all good and noshed up to get things kicked off. Headed over to the Swan Bar in the restaurant and discovered that they have lost the recipe for Keoki coffee that I left them the last time I had drinks there (14 years ago…), so they now have that again, and I’ve got a new friend in the bartender, Jason.

So, given it’s a bit of a dreary day, I decided veggie-beef soup would be good. Found two recipes* and while neither one was exactly what I wanted, I figured it was a good enough base to work with. Though I am eating the results right now, let’s just say it’s not quite there just yet. The afternoon went a bit like this:

Mince, mince, chop, peel, dice, MEDIC!! (Garlic, onion, carrots, potatoes.) The new santoku knife is now officially broken in, as evidenced by the band-aid on my left hand.

Slice, slice, slice. Why can’t I ever find beef in a pound package when I actually only need a pound But then again, can you have too much beef in beef soup? The new chef’s knife is awesome.

Toss the beef in a bit of pan searing flour, brown it with the onions & garlic. OMG, smells heavenly.

Add water, beef stock, some worchestershire and red wine and everything else. Add oregano, basil, thyme, pepper, bay leaf, couple grinds of sea salt, parsley. Quick taste, ACK, TOO MUCH PARSLEY – emergency skimming ensues.

Bring to boil. Let simmer. Stir and taste repeatedly. Something not quite right, can’t put my finger on it. Not bad, just not quite right. Too beef stock-y maybe? Who knows.

45 minutes passes. Bring back to boil, Add 8 oz mini shell pasta, let go for about 10 minutes.

Discover there isn’t enough liquid once the pasta is cooked. Cussing ensues as I search the kitchen for anything besides water. 1 can chicken stock! Add that, stir and I think I have taken care of the “too beef stock-y” issue. However, it’s kinda washed out the spices. Damn!

Overall, it’s not bad, but still a work in progress. I did write down everything I did as I went along. Next time, another can of chicken stock, probably skip the water altogether, toss in some peas, maybe lose the parsley.

Thing is, with spring here, the chances of my making this again before Halloween are pretty slim. Hopefully I’ll remember to find my notes next time around.

* – http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Spicy-Vegetable-Beef-Soup/Detail.aspx and http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Vegetable-Beef-Soup-2/Detail.aspx

“Cake’s nothing but a delivery system for icing.”

Well, amazingly enough the pancakes came out pretty darn well despite the fact that I literally cannot remember the last time I made them. (Thank god for bisquick and buttermilk.) However, I do need to locate a better pan for it next time around, cause flipping them was a little on the sketchy side and there were a few that ended up in the trash. The paprika bacon was wonderful, no surprise there.

I do believe I’ll have a Mardi Gras Guinness before the night is over, if nothing else to drown my sorrows if the Caps don’t win this evening. (3-2 Montreal, 10:15 left in the 2nd period.)

By sheer luck I stumbled on a link for the Cuba Libre Restaurant & Rum Bar via del.icio.us, clicked on it because it sounded intriguing and discovered it’s in Philly, less than a mile from where I’ll be staying next month. Oh hells yes, I’ve made a reservation for when I’m up there. Really looking forward to this trip.  Which also reminds me that I have GOT to figure out where on earth I put my camera.