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.

fun with tartlets

Aside from cakes and pies/tarts we also made tartlets pretty much everyday because they were easy. First butter the tartlet molds, then cut rounds of pie dough to fit the molds, then blind-bake them, then fill them and bake them again (or sometimes just fill them). We often did fruit tartlets, but one day I was low on ideas when Chef walked by and said to fill them with frangipane (which sounded a lot like marzipan). So I combed through the pastry bible looking for f-words and found it.



It's quite striking how the scooped frangipane looks like almond ice cream.

After being baked and topped with some pastry cream, strawberries, and almonds (later also dusted with powdered sugar), they looked quite pretty.

"Cooking has alchemy and theatre, the joy of creation; the sensual pleasure of touching and sniffing glorious foodstuffs; the pleasure of pleasing others."

- Crescent Dragonwagon

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.

bygone specials

This past week I have switched from breakfast station to service station (where we serve food to students/faculty/guests in the cafeteria). To commemorate my time in breakfast I'm going to post a couple of the specials I made:


This was a smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel, artful arrangement courtesy of Chef Morse and replicated by yours truly.


These were called toad-in-a-hole (also known as egg-in-a-basket), where an egg was cracked into the middle of a french toast and fried until the whites had set.


These were the ingredients for a spinach torta (recipe here) that I was real excited about but came out terribly because it was underseasoned inside and burnt on top. The idea is great though - a layer of baguette slices on bottom, spinach/red pepper/sausage/cheese piled on, then an egg + cream mixture poured throughout, all baked to yield a creamy quiche-y dish (similar to a strata, except in that cubes of bread are mixed in as opposed to slices on the bottom).


This was an open-faced bacon and egg sandwich (recipe here) I arranged myself. I never got to taste it though :(


This idea was a spin-off of hot dog on a stick, which is coincidentally Julius's employer.

To see specials created by my classmates as well as culinary school photos that have not been posted to this blog, please visit my flickr or see the new sidebar to the left!

croque monsieur

The very first breakfast special I ever made was the croque monsieur, or a glorified ham and cheese sandwich. The literal French translation means "crunch mister", which makes no sense. However, there is a variation on the dish called croque madame, which, as you might guess, means "crunch missus". It is the monsieur version of the sandwich with the addition of an egg on top. (Get it? Females have eggs!)

Despite the French and their weird naming of things, I think the real travesty is how Americans butcher the pronunciation to the point where the correct pronunciation in America is now the butchered version. Case in point: croque monsieur is supposed to be pronounced "croque missyear", but instead it's pronounced "croak monsur". Le sigh.

The preparation for this dish was rather involved, as it required that I make bechamel sauce, which first involves making roux from flour and clarified butter. So I had to melt butter down and skim the milk solids off the surface. Once the roux was made I added scalded milk to it, and then simmered the sauce with an onion (with a bay leaf pinned to it by some cloves), some nutmeg and salt and pepper. After simmering for about an hour the mixture was strained, then kept warm until use.

For the actual sandwiches I toasted some bread (with the crusts cut off), brushed the bottom slices with dijon mustard and piled on thinly-sliced ham and swiss cheese, then added the top slice, drenched the tops with the bechamel sauce, then piled more swiss (and parmesan) on top of that.


The sandwiches were baked until bubbly, then put in the broiler to get the slightly brown and crispy-spotted crust.

For garnish, Chef told me to use cantaloupe and strawberries. The cantaloupes were fanned - which is a common garnish technique. Basically you take a piece of fruit or vegetable (in this case, a wedge of cantaloupe), and cut it into thin not-sliced-through-all-the-way slices. Then you lay the piece on its side and push the slices successively across so they fan out. Yay aesthetics!