culinaryme: a cookbook

It's been three months of hard work - writing down recipes, grouping recipes by shared ingredients, grocery shopping, measuring, cooking, plating, photographing, editing, with repeated steps sometimes.

And finally, after a text formatting nightmare with the ebook, I have finally completed my cookbook. It is available in hardcover, softcover and in ebook format. I have copies of each, so I can honestly say that everything turned out well. The photos are pretty, the text is clear, and a friend paid me a great compliment by saying simply that she could see herself making a lot of the recipes in the book.

The sections are named after the different sections/classes I took at school - Cafeteria, PCR, Latin Quarter (which I renamed Asian Quarter to feature some of the things I ate growing up), Advanced Baking & Pastry, and Garde Manger. Some of the recipes have already been posted on the blog, but they were selected for being the best of what I've made.

This link has a preview of the book, so you can see what some of the pages look like.

I know that for a cookbook, it's a little bit pricey, but that's because the books you order are printed individually and not as part of a bulk order. If I ordered a thousand copies and sold them, it'd be cheaper and I could probably stand to profit, but then I'd have a physical inventory to contend with. So I choosing not to profit and just to offer them at Blurb prices.

To cushion the blow, I'm offering anyone who buys a book the option of getting the ebook for free! Just let me know that you've purchased one by dropping me a comment.

Thank you for having followed me in my culinary school journey, the book is really dedicated to you all.

As for next steps... I am moving (back) to New York for a full-time job. It's not cooking related, but hunger related, so you know I will still be involved in food. If I cook anything of note, I will still include it here. But for now, good bye and good luck!

cooking matters

For the past six weeks I've been volunteering with an organization called Three Squares - so named for their belief that everyone should have three square meals a day.

A cornerstone of the work they do is teaching Cooking Matters classes in community centers all over the Bay Area. They have classes for children, teens, adults, and some are even in Spanish!



I volunteered to be the Chef Instructor for one of their teen classes. The goal was to teach healthy cooking and eating. And I have to admit, I learned quite a few things myself, including some healthy delicious recipes that are now part of my repertoire. They include the baked flaked chicken pictured above (paired with baked kale) as well as turkey burgers (like these) and pita pizzas (like these).

It was challenging teaching to teens with busy schedules - a lot of the students didn't attend regularly or had to leave early. Many of them had trouble sitting still and letting others talk without interruption. But when it came to cooking they generally became very focused. Hands-on learning was a big hit, and luckily for me that was the portion I taught.



In one of the classes I taught the teens how to make brown rice & veggie sushi. Two of the students had never even tasted sushi before. They each made their own roll and ate it with dipping sauce (soy sauce + vinegar), and all seemed to like it. It was very gratifying for me to have introduced them to something new.

Of course, I would encourage you to volunteer!

graduation

I can't believe the past two years have gone by so quickly. The culinary department graduation ceremony took place last weekend and I had been chosen by my peers as a speaker. I wanted to share my speech, so here is the full text.

Good morning friends, family, teachers, classmates, chefs, administrators. It is an honor to speak before you today.

So the only reason I was able to finish this speech was because I was starving. I’ve known for a good two months that I needed to write this, but it wasn’t until a couple of days ago, where I made myself sit at my desk and literally did not allow myself to eat until this speech was finished that it actually got written.

Starving reminds me of the past two years here – especially in the beginning, when I had just moved here from New York. I had almost run out of savings, was taking class in eight-hour blocks. It wasn’t uncommon for me to skip meals. And it was always ironic to me, going to culinary school – cooking food for goodness sake, and starving at the same time.

But I didn’t mind – that much. Before I came here I was starving in a different sort of way. I was mentally, creatively starved. Working in a square box of a room, staring at a computer screen and filling out forms all day. I’m sure many of you career-changers came here to leave that kind of life, and I’m sure most of you are here because you want to avoid that kind of life.

But beyond that, I wanted to work with my hands. Actually make things that another human being could touch and be fed by. And here, I got to do that. Every day we would make food, that was sold in the cafeteria or the Latin Quarter (now Café Med) or the Pierre Coste (PCR) Dining Room and people ate it (for whatever reason, probably because they too were starving).

Anyway, in those past two years I have learned so much. Not just about how to make food, or how to work with people, but about how to work hard. For me it meant working, usually two part-time jobs, so I could actually feed myself while going to school. I’ve watched so many of my peers work full-time jobs, only to squeeze in a couple of hours of shut-eye before waking up at the crack of dawn and tackling a full day of school just to go to work and do it all over again.

And it wasn’t just the schedule that was hard but the work itself. When they say blood sweat and tears, let me tell you, I didn’t know I could sweat so much. I had to learn to be okay with it. Some days, it seemed like all we did was sweat. Flipping omelettes with the broiler, frying mounds of potatoes on the flat-top, baking loaves upon loaves of bread in the rack oven, stirring soup with a paddle the size of an oar in the steam kettle, packing the convection oven with ten pound roasts, trying to keep track of all the tickets in PCR, taking down the endless cafeteria lines that were always a blur of people, faces, steam, food on plate after plate after plate.

Besides sweating, culinary school was also a place where I got to work out some of the regrets I had in life. Like with scholarships for example. When I went to college before for my bachelors, it was straight out of high school and I didn’t apply to any scholarships because I was afraid I wasn’t good enough, that I couldn’t possibly be chosen so why bother trying. But when I came here and was starving and working two jobs and barely making ends meet and on top of it all, sweating every day, my “fear” didn’t really matter any more. I had nothing to lose, and I applied to every single scholarship I could get my hands on, and I ended up being accepted to a few. Enough to allow me to attend Chef Mark’s summer in Oaxaca program, which was amazing. But the most gratifying thing was being able to cross that regret off my list.

Another thing I got over? My inability to start a blog. When I used to work for the Red Cross, I would often think to myself: “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if I wrote about my disaster relief experience? I’m sure people would be curious to know how the operations actually work and where the money actually gets spent.” But for the life of me, I could never start. There was never enough time, or I was always too tired, or the things that I wanted to say were said already. But when I came to culinary school, I knew it was another one of those intensive life-altering things that I wasn’t going to do again, and I didn’t want it to go by undocumented. So I did it, I started a blog and kept it up through these two years. Maybe when regrets pile high enough they avalanche and... I started a blog, Ms. Reinhertz starts a blog, everybody starts a blog! Just kidding. Point is, when regret piles up and avalanches, something happens.

So when people tell you to live life without regrets, maybe they’re being idealistic, overly simplistic. Because I’ve found that regret is a powerful motivator. And when people tell you not to sweat the small stuff, or “don’t sweat it”, whatever “it” is, maybe that’s not so right either. Because sweating is literally your effort visualized. And when you’re motivated, and putting in all the effort, that’s when things change. Life changes. You change.

So to you I say: sweat it, and yes, sometimes, regret it. Starve, for this thing, and the next. Go out there and make this world yours – I've worked with you guys, I believe it.

Congratulations to all of you. It’s been a honor.

portion control

Maybe because of Food & Fitness class and in general being ever more conscious of what I eat, I have been changing what/how I eat. Not dieting or avoiding foods, but by 1) eating smaller meals and 2) eating more often. This and lots of dance/exercise means fast metabolism and healthier being.

I think portion control and exercise is a much less stressful way to go than dieting. And portion control doesn't have to involve much of saying no - part of it is switching things around and tricking your eyes.

An example here is how I eat lunch at my internship, where everything is plentiful and self-serve. I take a plate and fill it with salad, then I take a bowl and fill that with starch and meat. It's a reversal from how things usually go, where the plate is starch and meat, and the bowl would be salad. (Which reminds me of the video we watched in Food & Fitness - it talked about Americans planning entrees around meat with starch and vegetables as sides instead of the other way around.)



Also, once I'm full I don't eat any more. Which is hard because I was brought up to eat everything in front of me, to never waste food. So I try to gauge my hunger level and only get enough food that I can finish. (I no longer feel bad about throwing away junk food though. In my mind since it's devoid of nutrients, it's not waste.)

So if you're contemplating healthy changes in diet or lifestyle, I would recommend portion control, and exercise. You don't have to say no to yourself to look good and feel better!

kimchi + nori + rice

I've probably mentioned somewhere that I've starved a lot in culinary school. Part of it is putting in a lot of hours in the kitchen without breaks, tasting food here and there but never actually eating. Part of it is having to support myself as a student and not having money for groceries. So time and money are big factors, which is why I often resort to cheap, easily assembled meals like pasta or frozen dumplings.

This meal I learned to make offhand. I kind of stumbled into realizing that it could be a meal. It was the spring of my senior year at college, in the agonizing weeks before thesis deadline. I was in a classmate's dorm, trying to take advantage of the change of place to not procrastinate. It wasn't working very well. I had followed my classmate into the kitchen and there she scooped some freshly cooked rice into a bowl, accompanied by kimchi (Korean pickled cabbage) and nori (salted dried seaweed).

I'd grown up thinking kimchi and nori were accompaniments to a meal, so by no means a full meal, even with rice. Little did I know that four years later I would consider it a subsistence meal, much like some students would consider instant ramen.

I just about finished this whole jar of kimchi in about two weeks. Of course I really should learn how to make my own kimchi. (As a side note, the best kimchi I ever had was in this vegetarian/vegan restaurant in Brooklyn. My friends and I went there religiously for it, until one day the kimchi no longer tasted the same and the owner said it was because they had started to make it in house, so it would be fully vegan. Which means that the taste probably had something to do with fish sauce, or shrimp paste.)

Several factors are important in the kimchi + nori + rice trifecta. The rice has to be freshly steamed and piping hot. The nori has to be the Korean kind, which is salted and slick with oil, unlike the Japanese kind, which is dry and more papery. The saltiness of the nori offsets the sour spiciness of the kimchi, and the papery crunch makes a great contrast to the steamy rice. I added the sesame seeds as an extra toasty garnish.



As an added bonus for the blog I decided to make kimchi sushi rolls. The nori absorbs the moisture from the rice and gets all soft, but other than that it works.



The sushi is great just because it's bite-sized, but the rice bowl is more satisfying as a meal.



So this was my subsistence dinner. Completed with some green tea. Very Asian, but very satisfying and simple.



I always find it nice to expend a little extra effort to make a meal look pretty. Even if one is dining alone and so very poor, it still makes a difference.

staging

In the culinary world, there's a kind of intern/volunteer hybrid known as a stage (rhymes with entourage). It's often the foot in the door, but basically what happens is you arrange for a day/week where you work for free. Sometimes you get the menial repetitive tasks (like picking herbs!) but most of the time you learn a lot and get a feel for the operation.

Having no formal experience in restaurants or bakeries (besides the hostessing gig last year), I decided to also use my free time this summer to stage. Since I didn't know many people who work in bakeries, I wrote a cover letter + resume and approached a slew of bakeries. Some were too busy, or never got back to me, but in the end I was able to stage with two bakeries, one or two days a week.

Both of these were small places, mostly breakfast pastries, but I was able to build on the skills I'd learned in culinary school. Mixing doughs, piping, pate a choux, puff pastry, etc. I want to do as much as I can before the semester starts and my schedule is once again inundated with school and work.

I was even able to stage for a day at a fine dining restaurant. Even though fine dining seems to be the pinnacle achievement in the culinary world, I never fancied myself in that type of environment. Too adrenaline-fueled and too exacting, I thought. But it was a different story once I got on the line. I found the pressure exciting and the detail work very appealing. I naturally like to work fast, and clean, and pretty.

To apply that back to baking/pastry, I think I would love to work for a bakery that assembly-lines cakes/desserts like no other. Maybe I will find some of that in my internship this coming semester, working in a hotel pastry department!

a year in

I recently read a blog post about prioritizing positive energy in one's life. I concurred wholeheartedly because that's what led me on this whole life path. I was at an energy-sucking job, so to take my life back I decided to invest completely in an activity that had a proven record of focusing and exciting me (cooking).

Sadly, this third semester hasn't involved much of that. As my degree will be in Culinary Arts & Hospitality Management, this semester is focused on the hospitality side of things, which for now means that I am serving people in the cafeteria. More specifically, I am ladling out the soups I used to make as a second semester student.

Gone are the tight-fitting white commis caps and checkered pants. They were never very fashionable, not like the baseball caps and black pants I now outfit myself in every day, but funny how I long to be wearing them again, and again straining myself to carry hotel pans and stockpots and sweating next to the steam kettle.

It's not that I'm not cooking at all. I'm taking two advanced classes - Advanced Baking & Pastry, and Garde Manger (cold foods). So far in Garde Manger we've only been watching Chef do demos, which is nice and all - but it wasn't until I ducked out of class to sheet some puff pastry dough for Advanced Baking did I feel some of that - the intense task absorption that to me is an oasis of calm.

I have to find more of that, or else I'm going to lose it. Purpose, life. What I spent the last year holding on to.

being off the grid

I have to admit, I spent much of the summer breaking from culinary school and this blog, but in my defense I've been pretty busy. Aside from the ongoing hostessing gig I've also been interning with Off the Grid, the local food truck collective.

While most of my job relates to behind-the-scenes machinations - event planning, vendor coordination and the like - I sometimes get out to the markets and taste the food I read and write about! Last month we held a special spicy theme night called "Hot Food / Cold Nights" and I did a tasting and a write-up here.

If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, I urge you to sign up for the newsletter or look at the facebook event postings (both of which I've been writing) and come out to one of the almost-daily markets to sample some mobile but local food.

And for any curry lovers, I planned the "Don't Worry, Eat Curry!" theme night taking place this Saturday - details here.

Happy eating everyone!

***

And here's the curry night event recap.

a slow recovery

So I've abstained a bit from blogging because of the whole exhaustion thing, but now that finals week is coming to a close, I'm feeling more relaxed (and more like a normal person), so I foresee some blogging in the near future.

Coming up are posts on:
- the plated desserts station
- the bread station (the most intense but arguably the most enjoyable of them all)

And maybe some posts on:
- what I make at home, now that I have some time
- food-related volunteering and/or internships I'll be taking on this summer

I would love suggestions on what kind of posts you would like to see. Also feel free to ask questions or request recipes, I'm pretty open!

crisis of faith

It's nearing the end of semester and honestly, I can't wait.

I haven't posted in a bit because I've been struggling just to get enough sleep - so much school (and so early) and work and homework and other lifework have made it so that I have had little room to breathe.

There was one particular bad day where I was so exhausted I sliced the tip of my left thumb while cutting bread, and then I was helping prepare for a school fundraiser by hand-shredding some cheese and my thumb was hurting and the cheese wasn't shredding at all, and I stood there for half and hour with only about a handful of cheese shredded, and I just started crying at the futility of everything.

It's times like these that I feel very deeply the nonrenewability of energy and the unsustainability of pushing oneself to the brink of exhaustion.

Also I have come to know just how valuable it is to have people around you who are going through the same thing, who you can trust to work with and feel safe in joking with, because however intangible that is, its effects in combatting exhaustion are unparalleled.

And I know because I've lost that.

Really, in culinary school I was seeking what I missed about AmeriCorps - the really intense hands-on work with people who are similarly passionate. And I thought I found it. But I'm doubting that now. And it's hard to come to terms with why then, exactly, I undertook the life-altering move to do this.

I've learned a lot, yes, but I'm not sure if I should continue on.

front, back, or... outside of the house?

It's almost been two weeks since I switched from savory to pastry and I have yet to put up a pastry post because I've been so busy.

I recently took a hostessing job at a popular, upscale kind of place, and it took took 7 out of my 10 spring break days, long continuous hours of being up on my feet, seating people, setting and resetting silverware, bussing tables, rearranging seats, fetching menus, wiping counters, taking calls, making reservations, checking statuses, quoting wait times, etc. etc. etc.

It's an interaction type of job, where people flow past you, an endless stream one hour and a trickle the next, but you're lucky if you can steal a moment to yourself. It's strange because in culinary school we're well-acquainted with the intensity of the "back of the house", in the kitchen where everything is time-sensitive and the interchange of ingredients and hands and heat oil and fire occur simultaneously and in a perilous blur. You can burn out easily working in such conditions, in the restaurant business, but I've found the "front of the house" no different, so far.

In the restaurant where I work, the front of the house is defined by a near constant + necessary vigilance in maintaining oneself presentable and courteous to all, whereas the back of the house is busy but there is music and conversation and food and camaraderie! And perhaps best of all, no interactions with customers ever.

Don't get me wrong, I do love connecting with people, and I do want a people-centered job, but the type of interaction matters completely. At my last job it was hard too, alternating between self-directed office tasks (mental freedom!) and brief but charged interchanges with (or should I say, disturbances from) the formerly homeless tenants I served. But looking back I would prefer that, if only just to be able to sit.

Ideally I would like a job where I am afforded mental freedom, stretches of productive time to myself, but also focused periods of meaningful exchange with people. So I know what I want, but I don't know where to find it. Story of my life, maybe. I just have to keep looking - front, back, inside, around, everywhere.

i left my heart in NYC

I woke up this morning to this in my RSS feed, a time-lapse video of New York City. It's not particularly epic or mind-blowing (and too much Times Square I think), but it nevertheless awakened the gut-wrenching nostalgia for that once-familiar place and those once-had feelings of belonging and self-affirmation.

I think I figured out the difference between New York and everywhere else - that in New York it is an accomplishment simply to be living there. And the mark of an exciting, high-powered and fabulous life is simply to be taking good advantage of the events and activities the city has to offer. One can simply absorb, or consume, and be amazing by exposure.

I moved here because I wanted to produce, because I found the cost of production (both financial and otherwise) too high and dauntingly prohibitive there. I felt like the barriers to entry are such that you had to either be addicted to producing or living in a community of producers for it to happen.

I needed the kind of no-fault, non-competitive environment that CCSF was offering in order to overcome all of these real/imagined obstacles. But producing things, though a highly glamorize-able ideal, is decidedly unglamorous (and unfabulous, and low-powered, and unexciting) most of the time. It's a lot of hard work and repetition (physical labor) just to get the skills and knowledge with which to be creative, which is, in the end, what it's all about.

So, pretty pictures or not, I'm really learning very slow and ever-immersed in a manual drudgery that seems to be leading nowhere (as being sick and having time to reflect has led me to conclude). It's a hard thing to realize, having left a job and moved across the country to do this, my paltry savings running down as we speak. I certainly miss those New York City days of power-walking from one place to the next, high on potential and the ever-swirling storm of activity, proud and engaged.

But my hands are working now, and I'm feeding people, and I have an easier time convincing myself that life is adding up. In case it isn't though, I have more pretty pictures for distraction's sake.

service station

Originally I thought I would have two weeks in service station to ruminate on life and culinary school miscellania, but after a mere week and change I have rotated to salad station, where the challenge of making something that looks good and tastes good is besieging me once again.

Sadly, what is really besieging me at the moment is some sort of upper respiratory tract infection that has been plaguing me on and off for the past two months. I really wouldn't recommend doing ten thousand things back to back and pushing your body to limits made possible only through the constant use of antibiotics, but some lessons I just refuse to learn.

And so, saddled with over a hundred dollars worth of urgent care bills and the daunting prospect of being rejected by student health yet again, I am taking my first day off from school tomorrow. Wish me luck in returning to the land of the living.

worn down

Bernie talked about blisters from the near-constant hand-washing we do, and I concurred with the cracked and rough patches on my own hands. (Which, after today, were joined by miniscule burns from the industrial griddle and hot oil.)
***
One of the people in our class quit the program today (as did a rumored several people from the pastry side).
***
Waking up early and dealing with difficult personalities does wear on you.

everything new and crazy

Culinary school has begun, but before I delve into that I just wanted to recap the craziness that has been the new year.

My first week was spent being sick, leftover from December and all the stress that came with packing my life up and moving. After sleeping through days and drinking tea on repeat, I finally caved to antibiotics, which was just as well since I had an sinus/ear infection. Luckily I got better to go room-hunting in San Francisco for a day, and was able to find a room right by campus.

Spent a week in Hawaii, most of which was spent visiting my best friend on the Big Island. Made sure to indulge in some local Hawaiian cuisine, which is meat and starch heavy, something which I think is shared by many physical labor-intensive countries (Latin American rice/beans/pork/plantains, African corn/cassava/dough/fried stuff, etc.).


This is the kind of food that would be at a lu'au, even though I didn't get to attend one.


Loco Moco: a traditional plate usually consisting of hamburger patty and fried egg served over rice and drenched in gravy (though this had the addition of mushrooms and onions).


A fast food fried chicken and spaghetti combo.

It's interesting that Hawaii's food is composed of many different cuisines: Japanese, Thai, Filipino, Korean (kalbi in the first picture of this post), Chinese (won ton noodles are even offered on fast food menus), etc.

You can see the influences in the desserts as well:


Shaved ice: usually topped with crack seeds, pickled plums and the like (Japanese/Chinese).


Mochi ice cream (Japanese).


Sweetbreads (Filipino).

But what I really wanted to talk about, besides the exploration of Hawaiian cuisine, is the discovery of novel cooking methods, like the way they toast hot dogs in Hawaii. They have these nail-like irons that they stick the uncut buns on, which toasts the inside of the bread and gives it a toasty crispness that you wouldn't expect with hot dogs.


I can just imagine using that for other purposes, like maybe a creme brulee puff with the crispy top actually inside. Crazy, I know.

But anyway, after a week in Hawaii I flew back, immediately moved in to that room I found, and started classes the next day at 6:30 in the morning. I still haven't recovered, and probably won't for a bit since I have class 40 hours a week, but I'll try to post again soon.

specialties

When I tell somebody I'm going to culinary school, a popular question is: "What will you be specializing in?"

The program itself doesn't have formal specialties, except that you can take a less culinary and more hospitality/management track. I am definitely more culinary (or more arts?) so I won't be going for that. I plan on learning as much as I can about any/all cooking methods and styles and types so I have more knowledge for experimenting's sake.

I'm interested in a little of everything, as anyone who has seen me in my undergraduate career can attest to. There I went all over the liberal arts and chose a major based on how easily I could complete it (based on prior coursework), so I could continue dabbling for the rest of my time in school. And though I don't regret my decision in the least, at times it does feel like specialization is the key to an actual career, or respect, or any number of those adult-ly things. (I have a sneaking suspicion though, that life is too short to spend on adult-ly things. Maybe.)

If you had to push me to specify an interest, I would have to say fusion. Playfully fusing things that have previously been thought unfit for combination. I think I once declared somewhere that it's possible to have any three ingredients go together. It's all in the preparation (and texture too probably). Perhaps someone will prove me wrong on this. Like immediately. In the comments.

I'm also interested in sauces, that supposed afterthought to a dish that can be its saving grace. Because if you think about it, mediocre things of all kinds have been made palatable by a kickass sauce. (Which reminds me, that salisbury steak my team burned at Red Cross Disaster Kitchen Training would've very well been inedible had it not been for the gravy.)

So there you have it, fusion and sauce. I'll be fusing and saucing it up, no doubt.

cook, write, dance

Two years ago September I sat in an acres-wide concrete bunker of a hurricane shelter, thinking to myself. It was cabin fever of a sort, since the previous chaos of serving three thousand plus clients had been replaced by... nothing but space. They were going home, to whatever Louisiana parish they'd been bussed from, but we were still on deployment, and I had the overnight shift.

With my headphones plugged away to music, I thought about what moved me, besides the on-again off-again that was disaster relief. Writing, I knew, ever since I started my own website almost a decade ago. Dance, also, having dabbled in college. Cooking too, as I was discovering.

These things made me happy, and as hobbies they helped define me, giving me an identity separate and unsubsumed by the humanitarian world. I continued dabbling, on-again off-again as it were. But more and more I wondered why these things that moved me, that made me happy, that I was passionate about - why couldn't these be my full-time pursuits?

Money, always money. But thankfully I discovered City College of San Francisco and its Culinary Arts Program. Plugging away at a non-profit allowed me to save enough for tuition, so now I can finally go. And cook. And write about it. And take dance classes, since CCSF offers those, and many other subjects besides.

So I am blessed. And I can do nothing but make these next two years my best yet.